Skype is the worst business tool that I use day to day and it continues to get buggier with each new release. I now have permanent ghost notification icons and I had delete Skype on my iPhone so my desktop app could receive calls reliably.
Skype really went down the toilet when Microsoft bought them. At one point (~5 years ago) they were the best video chat and VOIP product by a long shot. Text chat and user search were clunky, but at least the notifications were reliable. It was a great tool for working with a remote team spanning multiple continents.
Now, the voice quality is still pretty good compared to a landline call, but the calls tend to drop, video quality has gone to crap, and the call/text notifications are broken. (I just got a notification on my phone about a text from yesterday, and it never showed up on my computer. WTF!??)
Search is still horrible. I can only assume that is is sequentially searching back through every line of chat with no index and hanging everything in the process.
Then when it does find something the common use case is never going to be scrolling back through 3 years of chat to get back to current messages, should just show say 100 lines of context and load more on demand.
I have no idea what they actually do on this product text chat wise, but it has always been average and isn't getting any better.
Skype on multiple devices has been in ruins for years. I'm not sure why, but being 'active' on two different products causes absolute meltdowns. Calls you can't answer, no sound or no video, the second device ringing endlessly after the first picks up, and anything else I can think of.
I feel it has gotten better recently, I've used Skype as a phone replacement ( with an actual skype number and in conjunction with google voice for sms) for a few years now, and currently run it on two laptops and two phones and haven't had issues for several months (I did have problems when I used it with android a while back, but have not since I no longer use it on that platform).
Interesting. I'll have to look into whether it's improved, or has Android specific bugs. Most of my multi-device experiences have included android, and that's reliably been the worst situation.
For reference my devices with skype installed are my personal phone with win 10, my development phone with ios, and win 10 / osx laptops. I also have a (5.1) android for development, but no skype on there.
I use the app version on win 10(anniversary) not the desktop. Don't know if that makes a difference but works fine for me. Even talking across the great firewall of china works fine surprisingly.
Even text messaging on multiple devices is a disaster. If I have Skype running on a PC and an iPhone, the phone app will almost never receive new messages.
I was astounded when Skype showed up in KDE Telepathy in last months release. So yeah, backwards compatibility with the insecure backdoored hell that is Skype is great going forward.
Headwinds indeed.