19 ms·

New Skype Update Is Horrible

499 points by Kaibeezy 9y ago

niggerfaggotgot 9y ago
When I minimize skype, it puts my status as offline. My friends haven't figured this out yet, so they are all labeled ass offline when they really aren't. Fucking stupid.
hatemicrosoft 9y ago
I HATE MICROSOFT, HOPE THE COMPANY COLLAPSES. Everything they touch turns to shit. They have totally destroyed skype like they did with messenger. Totally made Skype complicated and user unfriendly. I really hate you Microsoft.
rodtalbot 9y ago
New Skype makes it frustratingly difficult to make calls to my contacts' phones. Way too hard! Older version was eminently easier and friendly. Didn't MS learn anything from its disasterois Windows 8 experience!?
rodtalbot 9y ago
With the latest version of Skype (iPhone) it is frustratingly difficult to make phone calls using my credit to my contacts' phones. What does MS make it so hard!? Did MS learn nothing from its disastrous W8!?
Kaibeezy 9y ago
I just got forced to update on iOS. OMFGJMOAP, it is a horror. I use it to make calls from Europe to the US and elsewhere, and it has worked great for that, but now it's all about chit-chat and colorfulness, bleh. What's a good option?
m3kw9 9y ago
Still can't make a (edit-added SKYPE.) call from contacts app in iOS. What's so hard about that?
- caryhartline 9y ago
  Do you mean a Skype call? Because you absolutely can make a phone call or FaceTime video/audio call from contacts.
nyolfen 9y ago
it's almost impressive how skype manages to become unidirectionally worse and worse over time
komali2 9y ago
Has skype ever been good? For as long as I can remember it was a necessary evil until we finally managed to replace it with Hangouts and the like.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  ...Has Hangouts ever been good? Like, I totally get complaining about Skype. The P2P stuff caused it to be kinda wonky. But your choice for "better" is Hangouts? Between the five or six alternative Google chat offerings, the attempts to merge it with the dialer and SMS apps, the cutting out of the online/offline statuses. Google Talk was great though, back in the day.
  - nemothekid 9y ago
    It's really hard to find a decent, no frills video conferencing tool. FaceTime comes the closest to this, but unfortunately it can only be used on Apple products. I'm continually frustrated by the fact Chrome constantly breaks in Hangouts.
  - jchw 9y ago
    Hangouts has worked well for me on Chromium on Linux. We use it for meetings and while I'll admit it amazes me there's not really anything better, it does the trick. If anything, I hope Google continues to improve it.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
    Five or six Google chat offerings? There's one more now, Hangouts video chat is becoming "meet". https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/9/14864552/google-hangouts-chat-update-announced-slack-group-messaging-video https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/9/14864552/google-hangouts-c... https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/google-quietly-launches-meet-an-enterprise-friendly-version-of-hangouts/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/google-quietly-launches-me...
    - komali2 9y ago
      Well there's Allo, or Duo, I can't remember which, then Hangouts, and I guess "meet."
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
So, I'm only on Windows (desktop and mobile), and funny enough, Windows is the platform that hasn't gotten the update yet. But everyone from the Android and iOS camps is constantly complaining about this. :/ I feel lucky I haven't gotten the update yet, and have a feeling I'll need to find a new messaging client of choice soon.
CSDude 9y ago
I have witnessed Skype to go from almost perfect video & chat communicator to absolute crap over almost 10 years, and I feel very sad that it has come to rip off Snapchat. There is no alternative like the old Skype now in the desktop.
- tsukaisute 9y ago
  WeChat, while excellent on iOS, is also a lifesaver on the desktop given that they provide true native apps for Mac and Windows (no Electron!) Video/voice calls, file sharing, group chat, stickers, everything is there, but the performance alone makes this more usable over other chat apps today. It seems that over the years, their PM team is more confident (capable?) in keeping a good balance between core chat usability and all the "extras", perhaps because they are not playing catch-up in the market.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Does WeChat offer any thing over LINE? I ended up uninstalling WeChat because it was using up 20% of my daily battery despite only opening up the app once every couple weeks.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - jwong_ 9y ago
      If you know anyone from China, it has everyone there on it. Otherwise, I don't know of any huge differences. Maybe more free stickers?
  - jwong_ 9y ago
    How do you get this fabled native WeChat desktop application? As far as I can tell, it's an Electron app. It sucks up tons of resources on my computers.
    - tsukaisute 9y ago
rynop 9y ago
You could totally remove "New" and "Update" from that sentence and it would still be a very true statement. * Full disclosure: my co. was acquired and forced to use office suite.
- necessity 9y ago
  What are better alternatives in terms of call quality? Hangouts is pretty bad and WhatsApp is awful in my experience. Despite the bloat and the UI Skype is still the only good experience I had.
  - fazilakhtar 9y ago
    Slack team chat
    - berdario 9y ago
      It fails to work with Firefox
  - spooneybarger 9y ago
    zoom
    - MichaelApproved 9y ago
      Best part about Zoom and similar programs is that you don't have to deal with the horrible Skype search feature for everyone in the call before starting it. Why can't people find me by my username? Who knows. Why don't I see people online even though I know they are already, forcing both of us to message each other before we can start a call? Who knows. With Zoom and other conference programs, callers just join the call (after they've downloaded the program which admittedly is an initial pain point).
      - __float 9y ago
        Zoom has a web client these days that I find rather decent.
Meekro 9y ago
What could I switch to (on both Mac and PC) that would give me better video chat functionality? Edit: Just to clarify, here's what I'm looking for: 1. Free plan; available everywhere in the world (I have family outside the US). 2. Both Mac and PC clients that are actually good. 3. Video chat quality (including noise filtering and such) that matches or exceeds what Skype can do. 4. IM-like client that supports text, voice, and video chat. This disqualifies business-type solutions that are geared around groups pre-scheduling meetings. I just want to see who's online and send them an IM or video chat request.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Signal, Join.me, FaceTime, et cetera. I no longer accept invitations to communicate via Skype.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    appear.in has worked fine with me too.
    - lqdc13 9y ago
      Yup. Great for home but doesn't work on some networks because it's WebRTC.
  - Meekro 9y ago
    FaceTime is Mac only. Join.me seems geared towards business users and pre-arranged meetings -- I want something more like an IM client where I can see who's online and ask to video chat with them. Also, join.me doesn't seem to have a free plan (only a free trial.) Signal actually looks great, but their Mac/PC client has been in beta since 2015 and isn't linked from the homepage -- I had to dig it up on their blog. Also, video chat has been in beta since March 2017. It's not clear if their beta non-phone client supports the beta video chat. Still, I'm digging their encryption. I don't mean to shit over your suggestions, I really am looking for something better. But so far, nothing seems like a clear winner.
sagivo 9y ago
You had only one job...
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Companies should have to print that out on banners and hang them up all over the office in order to be allowed to publish software. If only product managers could simply resist that urge to de-focus, cram features and endlessly re-design, and instead just continue to do That One Job really well....
  - barbs 9y ago
    I agree, but unfortunately it's less obvious how much value you're adding as a product manager if the software you're working on doesn't visibly change.
derefr 9y ago
Question: does Skype for Business (nee Lync) mirror these same UX changes as Skype makes them, or does it do its own thing? Because I'm guessing this is just Microsoft further differentiating their product categories: today's Skype is for consumers (ala Facebook Messenger), so it gets "cute" features at the expense of the ability to use it for productivity; while Skype for Business continues to be about efficient collaboration and productivity (ala Slack) at the expense of "fun." The real thing that's upsetting people, I think, is that before Skype for Business existed, Skype was for both use-cases, so a lot of people used "Skype" to get things done and were satisfied with it, and it has since evolved into a product that's not for them. The product that serves those people's needs now is Skype for Business, not Skype.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Skype for Business (a.k.a. Lync), AFAICT, still has absolutely nothing in common whatsoever with Skype. Except for the name.
- kyriakos 9y ago
  Skype for business in my experience has a much worse call quality even though the ui is somewhat more business oriented
- starik36 9y ago
  Not on the iPhone (which needs a good bug fixing rev) so far. The desktop version is not auto-updating, so I couldn't tell you.
- julianz 9y ago
  The Business one still looks like MSN Messenger of old, give or take. Unfortunately it has a host of it's own small, annoying bugs. The first chat message of the day routinely appears above yesterday's messages so you don't see it. Emailed "missed conversations" have timestamps that are 8 hours out so you wonder why someone was talking to you in the middle of the night and it turns out it was 10 minutes ago. All of these seem to have been reported to Microsoft, who have ignored or wilfully misunderstood them.
jokoon 9y ago
The worst part is that google hangout doest seem to work well anymore, the plugin crashes, etc.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  Not sure about you, but the call quality has gone to shit the last 2 years. At least it seems like it to me.
jeltz 9y ago
So it is not just us Linux users which will be hit by a horrible Skype upgrade? I run the by now ancient 4.3.0.37 (they never bothered to port Skype 5.0 an later to Linux) which they will kill off by the end of the month in a favor for their half-assed beta client which is still missing many of the features which Skype 4.3 had.
- Jach 9y ago
  I gave up with the native clients earlier this year when I could no longer get any to run and log me in. I now use https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype Yeah it's Electron web-shit and it doesn't work with video calls (but there are enough low-friction alternatives now like Hangouts I can insist on should a skype friend really want to video chat) but at least it's no worse than their browser interface and won't just stop working. And I don't have to worry about the potential of some RCE in their really old native binary. I really just want them to de-unify MSN Messenger (those contacts who don't get on Matrix or anything else are the only reason I still use skype) and let me use Pidgin/Emesene again but that's way up there in the pipe dream clouds of never happening.
  - jeltz 9y ago
    There is a plugin which adds Skype support to Pidgin which I have yet to try. https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...
    - Jach 9y ago
      I tried it once and it didn't work, didn't realize they had a flow chart though. Maybe I'll try it again in the future. But the other potential issue is that I login with my old MSN credentials (in the native app there used to be a separate 'login with Microsoft account' screen) so that might screw things up too.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      I use Pidgin to chat with other people at my work who are on Skype For Business (Lync). Works decently.
projectramo 9y ago
Maybe mine is a lonely voice but I like Skype because: 1. It works. Every other video chat platform I have tried is simply unreliable and crashes. (Skype does so but with far less frequency). 2. Facetime is more reliable, true, but it is the only one and does not allow for group chat. (I have thrown down the gauntlet, and I realize I risk major downvoting for making such a controversial statement, but I cannot sit in silence anymore).
- djrogers 9y ago
  There’s nothing controversial about what you’ve said - nobody would be P.O.’d if a useless app updated to a horrible UI. The reason everyone is so angry is that they don’t like/can’t use the new app for the things Skype is good at.
- derefr 9y ago
  For video chat, sure. I think video chat itself is a bit over-rated, though; for most use-cases, a combination of frequent audio chat and less-frequent face-to-face conversation works just as well, and audio chat is a very-well-solved problem at the enterprise level (that solution being: set up a PBX server local to your central office; create a conference-call room in it. Bonus: make your employees SIP accounts; get them all to install soft-phone apps; now the conference line is "local" to all of them, so jitter is zero and everyone will hear everyone else in high-bitrate digital fidelity.) Because that "solution" exists for N:M conversations, N:M video-streaming infrastructure just doesn't get very heavily invested in by any major parties. Instead, what you do see is heavy investment in 1:N video-streaming, ala Livestream/Twitch. If only one person needs to be visible at a time, and everyone else can survive with existing in a text chat-box adjacent to the video stream, you can do fine as well. But, like you said, for N:M streaming with "conference call" semantics, Skype is one of the only good solutions.
- drdaeman 9y ago
  It works, except for when it breaks. Which happens every 1-2 months. Group messages fail to send or don't show up, notifications either don't happen or unread messages get stuck, calls seem to fail to connect at random. Last time - I think it was just a pair of weeks ago (I'm bad with remembering exact times), even the web version haven't worked (usually, it still does).
muppetman 9y ago
Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground. How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand. If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible. Nothing will happen though. We're all upset, but Microsoft isn't going to roll back an upgrade/decision of this magnitude.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  Microsoft wants to be Oracle instead of Oracle (as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iznogoud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iznogoud used to put it), and will not be deterred.
- blibble 9y ago
  skype for business is by far the worst piece of software I've used in the past 5 years things randomly don't work (e.g. video in groups, picture whiteboards in groups), there's an inability to turn off highlights in group messages, and my machine locks up when a voice call comes in (because the skype client is using 4gb of RAM and windows has swapped it out) only the MS group chat software comes close to being that awful, that feels like an intern's first C# app
  - karrotwaltz 9y ago
    The worst part about "Skype for business" is that it replaced Lync, which was much better IMO. It was simple but effective, and I don't remember having any kind of problem with it
    - me_again 9y ago
      Skype for Business IS Lync, mildly rebranded. The executable is even called lync.exe...
      - 9y ago
mosselman 9y ago
They also keep breaking APIs left and right: my dedicated skype phone (DECT + Skype) keeps losing features and now I can't even call people from the mobile app that have a slightly older Skype version running. The UI is nonsense: you can't quickly hang up and you have to click several buttons to reach a core feature, the number pad. What good alternatives are there that also allow me to call landlines?
- mustacheemperor 9y ago
  The Skype api exists in a kind of semi-deprecated limbo. MS tried to kill it abruptly a while back and were talked into keeping limited support over time. It's completely undocumented now though. They're actively discouraging developers from the platform.
api 9y ago
Video chat and IP telephony apps seem like some kind of software lemon market. There's some kind of perverse incentive operating here. Even ones that start out nice inevitably degrade over time. FaceTime used to be nice if you were all Apple, but when they removed P2P it went to crap. The performance got terrible. Lately I've been using appear.in, which works if you have a webrtc browser or you use the app. It works decently well.
- sgt 9y ago
  I don't know. FaceTime is my go to choice for video calls, and I use it almost daily. I wouldn't say the performance is terrible, and it doesn't spin up my MBP's fans like Google Hangouts does in the browser.
  - api 9y ago
    Hangouts is another one that's gotten awful.
amelius 9y ago
Reminds me of this Silicon Valley tv-series sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU
elmar 9y ago
and now that PiperChat’s as been acquired by Hooly it will probably suffer the same fate as Skype. http://www.piedpiper.com/farewell-piperchat/ http://www.piedpiper.com/farewell-piperchat/
- martin-adams 9y ago
  That better not be a spoiler!!!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- sctb 9y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691295 and marked it off-topic.
curiousgal 9y ago
>If the Skype desktop is made anywhere near as bad, I'm officially going to switch to Discord. Aha, not a Linux user I see.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  ? Discord works wonderfully well on Linux
  - jchw 9y ago
    I think they mean, because Skype Desktop on Linux is already unbelievably horrible. And always has been! Well, it was OK in the Skype 2 days.
    - Insanity 9y ago
      Skype on linux worked quite well for me some months ago. But I did not use it for calling, only for texting. Then, at some point, microsoft released an update and now the Skype for Linux Beta does not work decently anymore even for text :( I am a skype user since close to its inception and I loved it, but the way microsoft is handling it is far from good.
      - partycoder 9y ago
        The Linux version is garbage compared to the Mac or Windows versions. This, and the fact that most Microsoft software doesn't have a Linux version, tells a lot about Microsoft's Linux strategy.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - robryan 9y ago
    Discord makes me think Electron apps are the future. I use it across windows/osx/Linux and ios, works great everywhere
mmanfrin 9y ago
This title could come from any year between 2005 and now. Skype has only ever gotten worse.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
omgtehlion 9y ago
Desktop app updated itself recently too. At first I didn't realize is this a viber or telegram client. All the messengers now look the same...
pveierland 9y ago
My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use. [0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/14/skype-lawsuit-to-yield-credit-for-customers/ https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/14/skype-lawsuit-to-yie...
- dpatrick86 9y ago
  It's actually worse than that. They seize your credits if you don't make a call (or text) that uses the credits in six months... it doesn't matter if you've been on skype or not.
  - netsharc 9y ago
    It's not really seized, just deactivated, and you can reactivate it any time. I don't know why either, I'm guessing for legal/accounting purposes, like at one point Apple had to charge people for iPod updates: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/09/accounting-rules-change-could-end-ipod-touch-update-fee/ https://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/09/accounting-rules-chang...
    - mabey 9y ago
      Wow, I never knew that was the reason why Apple used to charge for the updates. Thanks for the link.
- gerardnll 9y ago
  It is nonsense. I don't think there's a reason to do that except to scam users. Any UX-UI Dev / Engineer / Person with common sense knows that users would not understand the process. 180 days and my credit is disabled but I can reactivate it again anytime? what the hell? What I'm not sure of is what happens if you buy credit without reactivating the inactive balance... Does it reactivate the inactive balance or not? If not... they are shameless.
thecupisblue 9y ago
Disclaimer: I'm 24. I'm into tech. I am on instagram 24/7. Snapchat less and less. This update actually made me open skype and talk to people. Skype became terrible, but this update interested me and now I'm actually using it for first time in months. The design is pretty straightforward and satisfying. Could be better, but this is a huge improvement over what they had. Don't know why they put in stories tho.
- rubatuga 9y ago
  Satisfying UI? That’s not the problem here
- a2m 9y ago
  lol. you have fun with that.
- Double_a_92 9y ago
  > Don't know why they put in stories tho. That's the problem man! You wanted an app to talk to your friends. Now you got some kind of snapchat clone.
martinald 9y ago
I genuinely thought my phone had been hacked or something when I saw this update. Appalling. I can't believe they are working on this garbage instead of making it as reliable as slack. Ridiculous.
bdibs 9y ago
It seems like every Skype update leads to more frustration and (somehow) more bugs. Yet another product Microsoft has managed to mess up :(
rubatuga 9y ago
Seriously, skype is not a social media platform, so stop trying to make it one Microsoft! Skype is a standard video/voice chat/conferencing that has found its place in everywhere from gaming to professional meetings, so what you’re doing here is diluting your target market.
- Bud 9y ago
  It's not their target market. They don't care about Skype. That's clear. They bought it to eliminate it as a competitor.
  - rasjani 9y ago
    Or use the name for marketing purposes, Skype did actually work while Lync has always been pos. Maybe things have improved since but I have my doubts.
  - jackvalentine 9y ago
    Competitor to what?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
riffic 9y ago
Skype has always been an example of garbage software: https://stallman.org/skype.html https://stallman.org/skype.html
- Bud 9y ago
  Not at all true. That article is only from a few years ago. The era when Skype was quite good was more like 7-12 years ago.
  - riffic 9y ago
    "quite good" means different things to different people. For those who care about certain issues, Skype has been objectively bad for certain reasons as listed here: https://blog.grobox.de/2009/ten-reasons-why-you-should-boycott-skype/ https://blog.grobox.de/2009/ten-reasons-why-you-should-boyco... In other words, Skype has always been garbage.
makecheck 9y ago
The sad thing is that this exact Skype headline could have appeared at any point within the last several years. It seems every change that they make is just more and more ill-conceived. The best thing they could have done years ago would have been to open-source it and let it evolve naturally.
- knolan 9y ago
  I have to agree. Every version of Skype since 4 has been an exercise in a appalling design choices, in particular on the Mac. Whereas it used to occupy a tiny window listing contacts Skype 5 switched to a large obnoxious screen filling mess. Here is an excellent summary of the mess that is Skype: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/03/30/skype_5/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/03/30/skype_5/
  - Nition 9y ago
    Much the same on Windows. You used to be able to undock the chat part and have just the contact list showing until you actually started a chat or a call.
    - tpxl 9y ago
      You can still do that to the best of my knowledge.
- m1sta_ 9y ago
  I'm fine with it being closed source. It just needs to be 1000x simpler.
ravenstine 9y ago
It's absolute crap like this which is why I have turned off automatic updates in Google Play. What a terrible feeling it is to merely open an app and, out of seemingly nowhere, a seemingly different app opens up and you can't go back. There's security and all that, but literally screw security if big corps are going to remotely fiddle with my device and turn me into a beta tester. How do you take the original king of VoIP and easily make it the worst experience? Sweet Jeebus.
- makecheck 9y ago
  This is probably going to be a problem that next-generation lawmakers have to solve: how to force entities to distinguish between different types of changes, and be liable for sticking to that set. Just like it’s ridiculous to let installers run as root without a sandbox, it should be considered ridiculous that we can’t constrain updaters: I should be able to say “bug fixes only” or whatever, and see only that happen. Instead, it’s UI-of-the-week. A straightforward way to ensure this would be to have substantial limits on size. It is pretty hard to redo an entire UI if you’re restricted to a 100K update, for example. And it would help to prevent data plans from being sucked up by careless app vendors.
  - Bud 9y ago
    Wait. You actually think that individual consumers should be able to, essentially, construct their own unique snowflake version of an app which only fixes bugs but retains the UI (and god knows what other code) from an arbitrary previous version? Look, I don't like some of these stupid updates either, but that idea is completely unworkable.
    - inetknght 9y ago
      I wish I had the downvote feature just for your comment. Unworkable? Are you kidding? It's absolutely brilliant. It's exactly what I want. Give me a feature set. Give me a separate UI which interacts with that feature set. Let me pick and choose both of them, completely separately. That's what an API is supposed to be and do.
JoshMnem 9y ago
After Microsoft bought Skype, it went downhill. The Linux version became even more buggy. The Android version didn't work well. So I started telling people that "I don't use Skype" and to call me on Google Hangouts or my cell phone instead. Slack's free plan also offers voice calls. If you need a phone number that forwards to you, Twilio offers that service at a much better price than Skype. Abandoning Skype over the past few years hasn't been a problem at all.
alkonaut 9y ago
Why is there a little smiley in every message bubble? Nothing happens if I click it. Is there any way to downgrade an app on iOS short of restoring a backup? I don't have iTunes (it would be pretty ironic to use iTunes to try to avoid a bad app wouldn't it)
- ajanuary 9y ago
  If I tap it I get the option to react with different emoticons to the specific message, similar to iMessage's tapback.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    That's what I'd expect it to do too. Obviously it doesn't (it does nothing at all) but I guess I sort of expected nothing more.
pmlnr 9y ago
Just get a SIP account and use, for example, linphone. Skype is dead, and I'm going to miss it.
inetknght 9y ago
I use(d) Skype 4.3 on Linux. It was great. Then my account was "accidentally" suspended and required proof of being an adult. In order to prove I'm an adult, I had to pay $0.50. So I didn't. I was using that as an excuse to finally change to something better. ...after a couple weeks and a lot of complaining, my account was un-suspended. Welp, so much for that excuse. Now I'm getting forced to update to Skype 5. Or, at least, that's what the email said. It said Skype 4.3 would be disabled. Well it's not (yet) disabled. And, I'll keep using 4.3 until it is. I can tell you right now that Skype 4.3 was better than Skype 5 in pretty much every way imaginable. * It was more configurable. -> All notification customizations? Simplified to "do you get notifications?" and "do you want sound with your notifications?" -> It didn't bother me with system notifications for every message (really, I just want sound, not a system notification popup) -> The new Skype sound is extremely annoying, so much that I would rather miss being notified of a message instead of being constantly bothered by the sound that I cannot change -> Show me as 'away' when I am inactive for X amount of minutes feature is gone -> Where's the Skype API? Is that gone too? * It was faster. -> Skype 5 frequently (once or twice per day) hangs for minutes at a time. I just `killall -9 skypeforlinux` and restart it. * It crashed less often. -> okay it doesn't actually crash often, but I consider the hang (see above) as a crash * It actually had a window that showed file transfers and their status (although it showed them twice), instead of showing it only inline in the chat. * You could actually search your the chat history -> Skype 5 doesn't let you search your chat at all, let alone your chat history * The UI didn't follow the bloated shitware that the Web seems to be moving toward -> The list of users in chat rooms is actually usable ->-> try scrolling a chat room user list with 120 people in it? trololol no I'm serious here I can't find anyone -> Right-click menu appeared to use the system menu widgets instead of yet another "I'm going to be different than everything else" widget that takes up half of the friggen window for no reason -> Window scrolling (someone typed a message) didn't prevent the contextual menu from working -> Yeah, okay, it couldn't load images that people shared. It also couldn't load those full-screen animated movies that people shared. I consider both of those to be benefits though. At this point, Slack and Discord both seem like better communication options. ...that's just going from Skype 4.3 to Skype 5. I'd hate to see what's going on with Skype 8. Honestly, at this point, I'm very much glad that Microsoft ignores the Linux side of things.
Havoc 9y ago
Skype "works" & covers a lot. That is their value proposition. The end.
drcross 9y ago
My biggest gripe is that the REMOVED the auto answer feature on skype. I used to call my parents who are not all that computer literate in their kitchen on a whim and say hello. Now I cannot do that. The extra messing about means I talk to them less. I think Amazon's new product does something like this but I wont shell out hundred of dollars for something that used to work fine for free.
deleted 9y ago
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zoom6628 9y ago
MS is confusing me now. They do a brilliant job of fixing up Visual Studio for 2017 so that it installs quickly and efficiently. But their consumer products which they acquire and mutilate (Skype, Wunderlist) just mystify me. They take great products and make them awful when these products should be major contributors to their war chest to solidify their hold on business.
- worldsayshi 9y ago
  Microsoft is a big company. They do not ship consistent quality across all teams. Some products are kind of great. Some are absolutely awful and it perplexes me to no end how people and organisations are so willing to throw money at those products. It's like they could do better with sending hand written letters sometimes.
dharma1 9y ago
on Android you can't tap somewhere on an entered Skype Out number to place the cursor anymore - very annoying when you want to edit a number on the dialler
0xbear 9y ago
Dude is getting fired in 3, 2, 1...
knolan 9y ago
Funnily enough I can track my relationship with my partner with Skype's history. When we were doing the long distance thing and she was still on dial up we managed to use Skype just barely. It was able to route around the University firewall because of its port randomisation. It was a resource hog that likes to set its CPU affinity to high but it worked. Then it slowly got worse and worse. We both used Skype to talk to our parents and spent most of that time fixing issues related to Skype not working or explaining the latest daft UI redesign. Nowadays everyone but her parents are on Apple devices and a FaceTime just works and every visit to their place involves fixing Skype and explaining to them about the clusterfuck that is Skype on Windows 8/10.
futurix 9y ago
Another Microsoft property they don't know what to do with. Ten years ago I used Skype a lot - to keep with my parents in another country, but recently I removed it completely. We switched to FaceTime and Facebook Messenger long time ago, and I don't know anyone who uses Skype anymore.
kakarot 9y ago
Skype 2017 will now have stories!
m1el 9y ago
I might have a complete misunderstanding of the situation, but I see three main explanations: 1) Microsoft has absolutely no interest in Skype being a viable option, and wants Skype users to adopt some other Microsoft product. Why doesn't Microsoft tell Skype users "Well, Skype is done, just use MSN." 2) People responsible for Skype are optimizing for some metrics, which is opposite to user satisfaction. What is that metric? 3) People responsible for Skype have no idea what they're doing, get no input from community, don't see how people are mad about these particular UI changes, and misunderstand how people use Skype... In which case, why are they still in charge?
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  "Why doesn't Microsoft tell Skype users "Well, Skype is done, just use MSN." I'm not aware of anything else they have now that could be supposed to replace it? They already did this the other way around. They closed MSN Messenger in 2013, and told everyone to just use Skype. Skype WAS supposed to the their main messaging app now.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    You forget that they replaced Skype with an MSN service while doing this. So in reality you might as well say they "reskinned" Office messenger, called Lync (which I believe started as a version of MSN messenger long ago) and then put out an "update" for Skype that replaced it with Lync, with the banners, window titles, website names, etc, replaced with "skype". That's what happened.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - mathw 9y ago
    Skype certainly is meant to be their main messaging app now. It's their only messaging app now. The trouble is, they also don't ever seem to have done anything to make it better, and the ongoing saga of native Windows 8 and now Windows 10 Skype clients is face-palmingly awful. Flagship chat system on flagship platform doesn't even work right... what hope for Android and iOS?
blago 9y ago
I literary spent 10-15 minutes trying to find a way to call a phone using my contacts. And I'm a software developer, I do these things for a living. Still not sure what I did it.
manigandham 9y ago
It's surprising that Skype has so much usage at all considering the immensely saturated messaging space. Outside of network effect, is there some reason that's keeping people onboard?
- Nition 9y ago
  It's the (only?) popular video chat application that works reliably and is highly cross-platform.
clamprecht 9y ago
I would pay a lot of money to be able to watch the meetings between the PM and the developers that preceded this release. How can it be so bad - did no one ever try to use their own product during testing?
partiallypro 9y ago
I've never liked the feel of Skype since its inception (before Microsoft even bought it.) There are already too many chat apps, Messenger and SnapChat (in the US) are the two dominant players. I assume that Skype for Business will eventually be phased out and become a sort of extension for Microsoft Teams. Skype will go back to being more consumer based, and as much as it hurts to hear from former Skype users...this is the type of crap most tweens want now, and it's easier to monetize to consumers. There's a reason why every other chat app is copying SnapChat. So it's not a surprise Microsoft would go this direction, I'm sure it will get better with time in this format.
codedokode 9y ago
Skype has become horrible long ago when original team sold it. I remember Skype when its binary was several megabytes and there was no Facebook inside. And now it became slow (at least on Windows XP) and buggy - for example I have no notifications sound anymore and it is unable to accept incoming calls. Judging by interface lagginess they have put at least several modern Javascript frameworks inside. And maybe something to work with immutable values judging by memory consumption. Every proprietary messenger ends up like Skype sooner or later.
- 8draco8 9y ago
  Are you still using XP? If yes, can I ask why?
  - codedokode 9y ago
    Yes, because it uses less resources than newer OSes. Windows 7 for me has no advantages over Windows XP but works slower. The only good thing in Windows 7 is search field integrated into main menu. I guess I will have to upgrade either to Windows 7 or to Debian (if it won't work too slow) because many applications including browsers don't work on XP anymore.
    - 8draco8 9y ago
      You should really update fast. Windows XP have massive vulnerabilities. It's very risky to use XP every day.
    - martinald 9y ago
      Err Windows 7 has the advantage of not being incredibly insecure, which I would definitely consider a major advantage, probably the most important one for an OS... Windows 10 is pretty resource efficient. There's even a stripped back 'long term support one' which is incredibly lightweight. Anyway, RAM is incredibly cheap now, I don't think you should be risking getting totally pwned for the sake of an investment in a few GB of ram.
jordache 9y ago
they have taken away the ability to do group calls with free accounts.. cya MSFT...
bash-j 9y ago
Haven't seen anyone else mention it. Our company uses Cisco software for IM, calls, video conferencing and VOIP handsets. Been using it for about 5 years, haven't had any issues. It integrates with our outdated Office suite. With the jabber software I can chat with my colleagues, share my screen, video chat, route my phone, check voicemail.
voycey 9y ago
I rarely have to use it thank god, I have switched pretty much everything over to appear.in for our company, it is seamless :)
badrealam 9y ago
Microsoft had really screwed up Skype. Every update is making Skype worst and there are frequent outage in different part of the world.
cygned 9y ago
Using Skype for business communication and I think this update is awful. The new tabs do not make any sense to me - "Highlights"? "Capture"? I cannot see if someone is online from the contact list anymore. Swiping back to close a chat hardly works, most of the time it opens the "Find" tab - where I can find things I don't need. The call screen is confusing (what is difference between "Microphone" and "Headset" anyway?). Skype does not feel like a serious communication tool anymore.
minusSeven 9y ago
Dunno, microsoft to me is slowly becoming like IBM. They don't see very confident in delivering bug free application anymore. 50% of the windows 10 updates breaks my system. There failure to go mobile despite starting late.
torrent-of-ions 9y ago
I rarely use Skype, but I have it installed on my phone. The other day my girlfriend decided to call me on Skype after it had updated without me realising and I wondered what on earth was going on with my phone. It just popped up with some bullshit about choosing a theme with no indication of what was actually happening. I guess nobody thought that somebody might be receiving a call the first time they launch the new version. Once you actually get the thing working it's incredibly confusing. It has weird line drawn icons that are not intuitive at all. Really hard to use.
thechile 9y ago
It is truly the worst thing I have ever used.
whatitis123 9y ago
My friend updated Skype on her phone. I called her from my comp Skype when she was in a shower. Her new Skype got connected without her pressing any buttons and I head everything what was going in her room (TV)! I called 3 times and it happened every time! Seems that everyone can connect to your new Skype on your phone without your permission and hear all your conversations? What is going on? What they did? What for? When I told her about it she turned off her phone and we talked by comp Skype. BTW she lives outside of the US. It's dangerous for everyone, especially for businesses, and also for kids!
AlvySinger 9y ago
Just tried to use skype on my iphone when an alert came up notifying me of a required update. I updated to find, not skype- but some new social network I want absolutely no part of. The app is no longer on my phone. I'll continue to try and use skype through my computer until the powers that be decide to mess with that as well. Hello Google voice & Facetime
AlvySinger 9y ago
Just tried to use skype on my iphone when an alert came up notifying me of a required update. I updated to find, not skype- but some new social network I want absolutely no part of. The app is no longer on my phone. I'll continue to try and use skype through my computer until the powers that be decide to mess with that as well. Hello Google voice & Facetime
onetokeover 9y ago
When Wechat updates it's voluntary. Made a free w/c to w/c call internationally. Decent sound. Then went to make a paid call on Skype. Forced upgrade again? We went through this 2 or 3 years ago. It won't work this time, not with me. I just got a refund. Will spend the day looking for an old school html (not html5) site that let's us call the world for a penny a minute. They're out there.
rabboRubble 9y ago
Skype v2.8 was the last perfect version of Skype. Lightweight, respectful of screen territory, and worked flawlessly. Even had the super sketchy "Skype Me" mode in case you wanted to get weird p0rny type stuff and invitations from Nigerian princes. IMO the crappifying had a lot to do with centralizing of Skype's backend for USLEO intercepts. At one point in time, Skype was the Signal of its day.
onetokeoverthe 9y ago
I found mangnocall. Seems to be a free voice setup. You send the other person a link. They click on the link and the call connects. Too bad today's appointment said, "We need to do a normal phone call on a phone.". I wanted to say, Sir, it's 2017. But I digress. Still need to find something accessible that lets me use legacy MAC OS and IOS to call phones. Feels more like regression than progression.
vilkbg 9y ago
Well done microsoft you have introduced yet another dissapointment. I guess my days of using skype are over now. Seriously what is wrong with this company...

499 points by Kaibeezy 9y ago

When I minimize skype, it puts my status as offline. My friends haven't figured this out yet, so they are all labeled ass offline when they really aren't. Fucking stupid.

hatemicrosoft 9y ago

I HATE MICROSOFT, HOPE THE COMPANY COLLAPSES. Everything they touch turns to shit. They have totally destroyed skype like they did with messenger. Totally made Skype complicated and user unfriendly. I really hate you Microsoft.

rodtalbot 9y ago

New Skype makes it frustratingly difficult to make calls to my contacts' phones. Way too hard! Older version was eminently easier and friendly. Didn't MS learn anything from its disasterois Windows 8 experience!?

rodtalbot 9y ago

With the latest version of Skype (iPhone) it is frustratingly difficult to make phone calls using my credit to my contacts' phones. What does MS make it so hard!? Did MS learn nothing from its disastrous W8!?

Kaibeezy 9y ago

I just got forced to update on iOS. OMFGJMOAP, it is a horror. I use it to make calls from Europe to the US and elsewhere, and it has worked great for that, but now it's all about chit-chat and colorfulness, bleh. What's a good option?

m3kw9 9y ago

Still can't make a (edit-added SKYPE.) call from contacts app in iOS. What's so hard about that?

caryhartline 9y ago
Do you mean a Skype call? Because you absolutely can make a phone call or FaceTime video/audio call from contacts.

nyolfen 9y ago

it's almost impressive how skype manages to become unidirectionally worse and worse over time

komali2 9y ago

Has skype ever been good? For as long as I can remember it was a necessary evil until we finally managed to replace it with Hangouts and the like.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
...Has Hangouts ever been good? Like, I totally get complaining about Skype. The P2P stuff caused it to be kinda wonky. But your choice for "better" is Hangouts? Between the five or six alternative Google chat offerings, the attempts to merge it with the dialer and SMS apps, the cutting out of the online/offline statuses. Google Talk was great though, back in the day.
- nemothekid 9y ago
  It's really hard to find a decent, no frills video conferencing tool. FaceTime comes the closest to this, but unfortunately it can only be used on Apple products. I'm continually frustrated by the fact Chrome constantly breaks in Hangouts.
- jchw 9y ago
  Hangouts has worked well for me on Chromium on Linux. We use it for meetings and while I'll admit it amazes me there's not really anything better, it does the trick. If anything, I hope Google continues to improve it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
  Five or six Google chat offerings? There's one more now, Hangouts video chat is becoming "meet". https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/9/14864552/google-hangouts-chat-update-announced-slack-group-messaging-video https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/9/14864552/google-hangouts-c... https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/google-quietly-launches-meet-an-enterprise-friendly-version-of-hangouts/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/google-quietly-launches-me...
  - komali2 9y ago
    Well there's Allo, or Duo, I can't remember which, then Hangouts, and I guess "meet."

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

So, I'm only on Windows (desktop and mobile), and funny enough, Windows is the platform that hasn't gotten the update yet. But everyone from the Android and iOS camps is constantly complaining about this. :/ I feel lucky I haven't gotten the update yet, and have a feeling I'll need to find a new messaging client of choice soon.

CSDude 9y ago

I have witnessed Skype to go from almost perfect video & chat communicator to absolute crap over almost 10 years, and I feel very sad that it has come to rip off Snapchat. There is no alternative like the old Skype now in the desktop.

tsukaisute 9y ago
WeChat, while excellent on iOS, is also a lifesaver on the desktop given that they provide true native apps for Mac and Windows (no Electron!) Video/voice calls, file sharing, group chat, stickers, everything is there, but the performance alone makes this more usable over other chat apps today. It seems that over the years, their PM team is more confident (capable?) in keeping a good balance between core chat usability and all the "extras", perhaps because they are not playing catch-up in the market.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  Does WeChat offer any thing over LINE? I ended up uninstalling WeChat because it was using up 20% of my daily battery despite only opening up the app once every couple weeks.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jwong_ 9y ago
    If you know anyone from China, it has everyone there on it. Otherwise, I don't know of any huge differences. Maybe more free stickers?
- jwong_ 9y ago
  How do you get this fabled native WeChat desktop application? As far as I can tell, it's an Electron app. It sucks up tons of resources on my computers.
  - tsukaisute 9y ago

rynop 9y ago

You could totally remove "New" and "Update" from that sentence and it would still be a very true statement. * Full disclosure: my co. was acquired and forced to use office suite.

necessity 9y ago
What are better alternatives in terms of call quality? Hangouts is pretty bad and WhatsApp is awful in my experience. Despite the bloat and the UI Skype is still the only good experience I had.
- fazilakhtar 9y ago
  Slack team chat
  - berdario 9y ago
    It fails to work with Firefox
- spooneybarger 9y ago
  zoom
  - MichaelApproved 9y ago
    Best part about Zoom and similar programs is that you don't have to deal with the horrible Skype search feature for everyone in the call before starting it. Why can't people find me by my username? Who knows. Why don't I see people online even though I know they are already, forcing both of us to message each other before we can start a call? Who knows. With Zoom and other conference programs, callers just join the call (after they've downloaded the program which admittedly is an initial pain point).
    - __float 9y ago
      Zoom has a web client these days that I find rather decent.

Meekro 9y ago

What could I switch to (on both Mac and PC) that would give me better video chat functionality? Edit: Just to clarify, here's what I'm looking for: 1. Free plan; available everywhere in the world (I have family outside the US). 2. Both Mac and PC clients that are actually good. 3. Video chat quality (including noise filtering and such) that matches or exceeds what Skype can do. 4. IM-like client that supports text, voice, and video chat. This disqualifies business-type solutions that are geared around groups pre-scheduling meetings. I just want to see who's online and send them an IM or video chat request.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Signal, Join.me, FaceTime, et cetera. I no longer accept invitations to communicate via Skype.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  appear.in has worked fine with me too.
  - lqdc13 9y ago
    Yup. Great for home but doesn't work on some networks because it's WebRTC.
- Meekro 9y ago
  FaceTime is Mac only. Join.me seems geared towards business users and pre-arranged meetings -- I want something more like an IM client where I can see who's online and ask to video chat with them. Also, join.me doesn't seem to have a free plan (only a free trial.) Signal actually looks great, but their Mac/PC client has been in beta since 2015 and isn't linked from the homepage -- I had to dig it up on their blog. Also, video chat has been in beta since March 2017. It's not clear if their beta non-phone client supports the beta video chat. Still, I'm digging their encryption. I don't mean to shit over your suggestions, I really am looking for something better. But so far, nothing seems like a clear winner.

sagivo 9y ago

You had only one job...

ryandrake 9y ago
Companies should have to print that out on banners and hang them up all over the office in order to be allowed to publish software. If only product managers could simply resist that urge to de-focus, cram features and endlessly re-design, and instead just continue to do That One Job really well....
- barbs 9y ago
  I agree, but unfortunately it's less obvious how much value you're adding as a product manager if the software you're working on doesn't visibly change.

derefr 9y ago

Question: does Skype for Business (nee Lync) mirror these same UX changes as Skype makes them, or does it do its own thing? Because I'm guessing this is just Microsoft further differentiating their product categories: today's Skype is for consumers (ala Facebook Messenger), so it gets "cute" features at the expense of the ability to use it for productivity; while Skype for Business continues to be about efficient collaboration and productivity (ala Slack) at the expense of "fun." The real thing that's upsetting people, I think, is that before Skype for Business existed, Skype was for both use-cases, so a lot of people used "Skype" to get things done and were satisfied with it, and it has since evolved into a product that's not for them. The product that serves those people's needs now is Skype for Business, not Skype.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Skype for Business (a.k.a. Lync), AFAICT, still has absolutely nothing in common whatsoever with Skype. Except for the name.
kyriakos 9y ago
Skype for business in my experience has a much worse call quality even though the ui is somewhat more business oriented
starik36 9y ago
Not on the iPhone (which needs a good bug fixing rev) so far. The desktop version is not auto-updating, so I couldn't tell you.
julianz 9y ago
The Business one still looks like MSN Messenger of old, give or take. Unfortunately it has a host of it's own small, annoying bugs. The first chat message of the day routinely appears above yesterday's messages so you don't see it. Emailed "missed conversations" have timestamps that are 8 hours out so you wonder why someone was talking to you in the middle of the night and it turns out it was 10 minutes ago. All of these seem to have been reported to Microsoft, who have ignored or wilfully misunderstood them.

jokoon 9y ago

The worst part is that google hangout doest seem to work well anymore, the plugin crashes, etc.

kilroy123 9y ago
Not sure about you, but the call quality has gone to shit the last 2 years. At least it seems like it to me.

jeltz 9y ago

So it is not just us Linux users which will be hit by a horrible Skype upgrade? I run the by now ancient 4.3.0.37 (they never bothered to port Skype 5.0 an later to Linux) which they will kill off by the end of the month in a favor for their half-assed beta client which is still missing many of the features which Skype 4.3 had.

Jach 9y ago
I gave up with the native clients earlier this year when I could no longer get any to run and log me in. I now use https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype Yeah it's Electron web-shit and it doesn't work with video calls (but there are enough low-friction alternatives now like Hangouts I can insist on should a skype friend really want to video chat) but at least it's no worse than their browser interface and won't just stop working. And I don't have to worry about the potential of some RCE in their really old native binary. I really just want them to de-unify MSN Messenger (those contacts who don't get on Matrix or anything else are the only reason I still use skype) and let me use Pidgin/Emesene again but that's way up there in the pipe dream clouds of never happening.
- jeltz 9y ago
  There is a plugin which adds Skype support to Pidgin which I have yet to try. https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...
  - Jach 9y ago
    I tried it once and it didn't work, didn't realize they had a flow chart though. Maybe I'll try it again in the future. But the other potential issue is that I login with my old MSN credentials (in the native app there used to be a separate 'login with Microsoft account' screen) so that might screw things up too.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    I use Pidgin to chat with other people at my work who are on Skype For Business (Lync). Works decently.

projectramo 9y ago

Maybe mine is a lonely voice but I like Skype because: 1. It works. Every other video chat platform I have tried is simply unreliable and crashes. (Skype does so but with far less frequency). 2. Facetime is more reliable, true, but it is the only one and does not allow for group chat. (I have thrown down the gauntlet, and I realize I risk major downvoting for making such a controversial statement, but I cannot sit in silence anymore).

djrogers 9y ago
There’s nothing controversial about what you’ve said - nobody would be P.O.’d if a useless app updated to a horrible UI. The reason everyone is so angry is that they don’t like/can’t use the new app for the things Skype is good at.
derefr 9y ago
For video chat, sure. I think video chat itself is a bit over-rated, though; for most use-cases, a combination of frequent audio chat and less-frequent face-to-face conversation works just as well, and audio chat is a very-well-solved problem at the enterprise level (that solution being: set up a PBX server local to your central office; create a conference-call room in it. Bonus: make your employees SIP accounts; get them all to install soft-phone apps; now the conference line is "local" to all of them, so jitter is zero and everyone will hear everyone else in high-bitrate digital fidelity.) Because that "solution" exists for N:M conversations, N:M video-streaming infrastructure just doesn't get very heavily invested in by any major parties. Instead, what you do see is heavy investment in 1:N video-streaming, ala Livestream/Twitch. If only one person needs to be visible at a time, and everyone else can survive with existing in a text chat-box adjacent to the video stream, you can do fine as well. But, like you said, for N:M streaming with "conference call" semantics, Skype is one of the only good solutions.
drdaeman 9y ago
It works, except for when it breaks. Which happens every 1-2 months. Group messages fail to send or don't show up, notifications either don't happen or unread messages get stuck, calls seem to fail to connect at random. Last time - I think it was just a pair of weeks ago (I'm bad with remembering exact times), even the web version haven't worked (usually, it still does).

muppetman 9y ago

Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground. How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand. If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible. Nothing will happen though. We're all upset, but Microsoft isn't going to roll back an upgrade/decision of this magnitude.

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
Microsoft wants to be Oracle instead of Oracle (as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iznogoud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iznogoud used to put it), and will not be deterred.
blibble 9y ago
skype for business is by far the worst piece of software I've used in the past 5 years things randomly don't work (e.g. video in groups, picture whiteboards in groups), there's an inability to turn off highlights in group messages, and my machine locks up when a voice call comes in (because the skype client is using 4gb of RAM and windows has swapped it out) only the MS group chat software comes close to being that awful, that feels like an intern's first C# app
- karrotwaltz 9y ago
  The worst part about "Skype for business" is that it replaced Lync, which was much better IMO. It was simple but effective, and I don't remember having any kind of problem with it
  - me_again 9y ago
    Skype for Business IS Lync, mildly rebranded. The executable is even called lync.exe...
    - 9y ago

mosselman 9y ago

They also keep breaking APIs left and right: my dedicated skype phone (DECT + Skype) keeps losing features and now I can't even call people from the mobile app that have a slightly older Skype version running. The UI is nonsense: you can't quickly hang up and you have to click several buttons to reach a core feature, the number pad. What good alternatives are there that also allow me to call landlines?

mustacheemperor 9y ago
The Skype api exists in a kind of semi-deprecated limbo. MS tried to kill it abruptly a while back and were talked into keeping limited support over time. It's completely undocumented now though. They're actively discouraging developers from the platform.

api 9y ago

Video chat and IP telephony apps seem like some kind of software lemon market. There's some kind of perverse incentive operating here. Even ones that start out nice inevitably degrade over time. FaceTime used to be nice if you were all Apple, but when they removed P2P it went to crap. The performance got terrible. Lately I've been using appear.in, which works if you have a webrtc browser or you use the app. It works decently well.

sgt 9y ago
I don't know. FaceTime is my go to choice for video calls, and I use it almost daily. I wouldn't say the performance is terrible, and it doesn't spin up my MBP's fans like Google Hangouts does in the browser.
- api 9y ago
  Hangouts is another one that's gotten awful.

amelius 9y ago

Reminds me of this Silicon Valley tv-series sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU

elmar 9y ago

and now that PiperChat’s as been acquired by Hooly it will probably suffer the same fate as Skype. http://www.piedpiper.com/farewell-piperchat/ http://www.piedpiper.com/farewell-piperchat/

martin-adams 9y ago
That better not be a spoiler!!!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
sctb 9y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691295 and marked it off-topic.

curiousgal 9y ago

>If the Skype desktop is made anywhere near as bad, I'm officially going to switch to Discord. Aha, not a Linux user I see.

scrollaway 9y ago
? Discord works wonderfully well on Linux
- jchw 9y ago
  I think they mean, because Skype Desktop on Linux is already unbelievably horrible. And always has been! Well, it was OK in the Skype 2 days.
  - Insanity 9y ago
    Skype on linux worked quite well for me some months ago. But I did not use it for calling, only for texting. Then, at some point, microsoft released an update and now the Skype for Linux Beta does not work decently anymore even for text :( I am a skype user since close to its inception and I loved it, but the way microsoft is handling it is far from good.
    - partycoder 9y ago
      The Linux version is garbage compared to the Mac or Windows versions. This, and the fact that most Microsoft software doesn't have a Linux version, tells a lot about Microsoft's Linux strategy.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- robryan 9y ago
  Discord makes me think Electron apps are the future. I use it across windows/osx/Linux and ios, works great everywhere

mmanfrin 9y ago

This title could come from any year between 2005 and now. Skype has only ever gotten worse.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

omgtehlion 9y ago

Desktop app updated itself recently too. At first I didn't realize is this a viber or telegram client. All the messengers now look the same...

pveierland 9y ago

My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use. [0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/14/skype-lawsuit-to-yield-credit-for-customers/ https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/14/skype-lawsuit-to-yie...

dpatrick86 9y ago
It's actually worse than that. They seize your credits if you don't make a call (or text) that uses the credits in six months... it doesn't matter if you've been on skype or not.
- netsharc 9y ago
  It's not really seized, just deactivated, and you can reactivate it any time. I don't know why either, I'm guessing for legal/accounting purposes, like at one point Apple had to charge people for iPod updates: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/09/accounting-rules-change-could-end-ipod-touch-update-fee/ https://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/09/accounting-rules-chang...
  - mabey 9y ago
    Wow, I never knew that was the reason why Apple used to charge for the updates. Thanks for the link.
gerardnll 9y ago
It is nonsense. I don't think there's a reason to do that except to scam users. Any UX-UI Dev / Engineer / Person with common sense knows that users would not understand the process. 180 days and my credit is disabled but I can reactivate it again anytime? what the hell? What I'm not sure of is what happens if you buy credit without reactivating the inactive balance... Does it reactivate the inactive balance or not? If not... they are shameless.

thecupisblue 9y ago

Disclaimer: I'm 24. I'm into tech. I am on instagram 24/7. Snapchat less and less. This update actually made me open skype and talk to people. Skype became terrible, but this update interested me and now I'm actually using it for first time in months. The design is pretty straightforward and satisfying. Could be better, but this is a huge improvement over what they had. Don't know why they put in stories tho.

rubatuga 9y ago
Satisfying UI? That’s not the problem here
a2m 9y ago
lol. you have fun with that.
Double_a_92 9y ago
> Don't know why they put in stories tho. That's the problem man! You wanted an app to talk to your friends. Now you got some kind of snapchat clone.

martinald 9y ago

I genuinely thought my phone had been hacked or something when I saw this update. Appalling. I can't believe they are working on this garbage instead of making it as reliable as slack. Ridiculous.

bdibs 9y ago

It seems like every Skype update leads to more frustration and (somehow) more bugs. Yet another product Microsoft has managed to mess up :(

rubatuga 9y ago

Seriously, skype is not a social media platform, so stop trying to make it one Microsoft! Skype is a standard video/voice chat/conferencing that has found its place in everywhere from gaming to professional meetings, so what you’re doing here is diluting your target market.

Bud 9y ago
It's not their target market. They don't care about Skype. That's clear. They bought it to eliminate it as a competitor.
- rasjani 9y ago
  Or use the name for marketing purposes, Skype did actually work while Lync has always been pos. Maybe things have improved since but I have my doubts.
- jackvalentine 9y ago
  Competitor to what?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

riffic 9y ago

Skype has always been an example of garbage software: https://stallman.org/skype.html https://stallman.org/skype.html

Bud 9y ago
Not at all true. That article is only from a few years ago. The era when Skype was quite good was more like 7-12 years ago.
- riffic 9y ago
  "quite good" means different things to different people. For those who care about certain issues, Skype has been objectively bad for certain reasons as listed here: https://blog.grobox.de/2009/ten-reasons-why-you-should-boycott-skype/ https://blog.grobox.de/2009/ten-reasons-why-you-should-boyco... In other words, Skype has always been garbage.

makecheck 9y ago

The sad thing is that this exact Skype headline could have appeared at any point within the last several years. It seems every change that they make is just more and more ill-conceived. The best thing they could have done years ago would have been to open-source it and let it evolve naturally.

knolan 9y ago
I have to agree. Every version of Skype since 4 has been an exercise in a appalling design choices, in particular on the Mac. Whereas it used to occupy a tiny window listing contacts Skype 5 switched to a large obnoxious screen filling mess. Here is an excellent summary of the mess that is Skype: http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/03/30/skype_5/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/03/30/skype_5/
- Nition 9y ago
  Much the same on Windows. You used to be able to undock the chat part and have just the contact list showing until you actually started a chat or a call.
  - tpxl 9y ago
    You can still do that to the best of my knowledge.
m1sta_ 9y ago
I'm fine with it being closed source. It just needs to be 1000x simpler.

ravenstine 9y ago

It's absolute crap like this which is why I have turned off automatic updates in Google Play. What a terrible feeling it is to merely open an app and, out of seemingly nowhere, a seemingly different app opens up and you can't go back. There's security and all that, but literally screw security if big corps are going to remotely fiddle with my device and turn me into a beta tester. How do you take the original king of VoIP and easily make it the worst experience? Sweet Jeebus.

makecheck 9y ago
This is probably going to be a problem that next-generation lawmakers have to solve: how to force entities to distinguish between different types of changes, and be liable for sticking to that set. Just like it’s ridiculous to let installers run as root without a sandbox, it should be considered ridiculous that we can’t constrain updaters: I should be able to say “bug fixes only” or whatever, and see only that happen. Instead, it’s UI-of-the-week. A straightforward way to ensure this would be to have substantial limits on size. It is pretty hard to redo an entire UI if you’re restricted to a 100K update, for example. And it would help to prevent data plans from being sucked up by careless app vendors.
- Bud 9y ago
  Wait. You actually think that individual consumers should be able to, essentially, construct their own unique snowflake version of an app which only fixes bugs but retains the UI (and god knows what other code) from an arbitrary previous version? Look, I don't like some of these stupid updates either, but that idea is completely unworkable.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    I wish I had the downvote feature just for your comment. Unworkable? Are you kidding? It's absolutely brilliant. It's exactly what I want. Give me a feature set. Give me a separate UI which interacts with that feature set. Let me pick and choose both of them, completely separately. That's what an API is supposed to be and do.

JoshMnem 9y ago

After Microsoft bought Skype, it went downhill. The Linux version became even more buggy. The Android version didn't work well. So I started telling people that "I don't use Skype" and to call me on Google Hangouts or my cell phone instead. Slack's free plan also offers voice calls. If you need a phone number that forwards to you, Twilio offers that service at a much better price than Skype. Abandoning Skype over the past few years hasn't been a problem at all.

alkonaut 9y ago

Why is there a little smiley in every message bubble? Nothing happens if I click it. Is there any way to downgrade an app on iOS short of restoring a backup? I don't have iTunes (it would be pretty ironic to use iTunes to try to avoid a bad app wouldn't it)

ajanuary 9y ago
If I tap it I get the option to react with different emoticons to the specific message, similar to iMessage's tapback.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  That's what I'd expect it to do too. Obviously it doesn't (it does nothing at all) but I guess I sort of expected nothing more.

pmlnr 9y ago

Just get a SIP account and use, for example, linphone. Skype is dead, and I'm going to miss it.

inetknght 9y ago

I use(d) Skype 4.3 on Linux. It was great. Then my account was "accidentally" suspended and required proof of being an adult. In order to prove I'm an adult, I had to pay $0.50. So I didn't. I was using that as an excuse to finally change to something better. ...after a couple weeks and a lot of complaining, my account was un-suspended. Welp, so much for that excuse. Now I'm getting forced to update to Skype 5. Or, at least, that's what the email said. It said Skype 4.3 would be disabled. Well it's not (yet) disabled. And, I'll keep using 4.3 until it is. I can tell you right now that Skype 4.3 was better than Skype 5 in pretty much every way imaginable. * It was more configurable. -> All notification customizations? Simplified to "do you get notifications?" and "do you want sound with your notifications?" -> It didn't bother me with system notifications for every message (really, I just want sound, not a system notification popup) -> The new Skype sound is extremely annoying, so much that I would rather miss being notified of a message instead of being constantly bothered by the sound that I cannot change -> Show me as 'away' when I am inactive for X amount of minutes feature is gone -> Where's the Skype API? Is that gone too? * It was faster. -> Skype 5 frequently (once or twice per day) hangs for minutes at a time. I just `killall -9 skypeforlinux` and restart it. * It crashed less often. -> okay it doesn't actually crash often, but I consider the hang (see above) as a crash * It actually had a window that showed file transfers and their status (although it showed them twice), instead of showing it only inline in the chat. * You could actually search your the chat history -> Skype 5 doesn't let you search your chat at all, let alone your chat history * The UI didn't follow the bloated shitware that the Web seems to be moving toward -> The list of users in chat rooms is actually usable ->-> try scrolling a chat room user list with 120 people in it? trololol no I'm serious here I can't find anyone -> Right-click menu appeared to use the system menu widgets instead of yet another "I'm going to be different than everything else" widget that takes up half of the friggen window for no reason -> Window scrolling (someone typed a message) didn't prevent the contextual menu from working -> Yeah, okay, it couldn't load images that people shared. It also couldn't load those full-screen animated movies that people shared. I consider both of those to be benefits though. At this point, Slack and Discord both seem like better communication options. ...that's just going from Skype 4.3 to Skype 5. I'd hate to see what's going on with Skype 8. Honestly, at this point, I'm very much glad that Microsoft ignores the Linux side of things.

Havoc 9y ago

Skype "works" & covers a lot. That is their value proposition. The end.

drcross 9y ago

My biggest gripe is that the REMOVED the auto answer feature on skype. I used to call my parents who are not all that computer literate in their kitchen on a whim and say hello. Now I cannot do that. The extra messing about means I talk to them less. I think Amazon's new product does something like this but I wont shell out hundred of dollars for something that used to work fine for free.

deleted 9y ago

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zoom6628 9y ago

MS is confusing me now. They do a brilliant job of fixing up Visual Studio for 2017 so that it installs quickly and efficiently. But their consumer products which they acquire and mutilate (Skype, Wunderlist) just mystify me. They take great products and make them awful when these products should be major contributors to their war chest to solidify their hold on business.

worldsayshi 9y ago
Microsoft is a big company. They do not ship consistent quality across all teams. Some products are kind of great. Some are absolutely awful and it perplexes me to no end how people and organisations are so willing to throw money at those products. It's like they could do better with sending hand written letters sometimes.

dharma1 9y ago

on Android you can't tap somewhere on an entered Skype Out number to place the cursor anymore - very annoying when you want to edit a number on the dialler

0xbear 9y ago

Dude is getting fired in 3, 2, 1...

knolan 9y ago

Funnily enough I can track my relationship with my partner with Skype's history. When we were doing the long distance thing and she was still on dial up we managed to use Skype just barely. It was able to route around the University firewall because of its port randomisation. It was a resource hog that likes to set its CPU affinity to high but it worked. Then it slowly got worse and worse. We both used Skype to talk to our parents and spent most of that time fixing issues related to Skype not working or explaining the latest daft UI redesign. Nowadays everyone but her parents are on Apple devices and a FaceTime just works and every visit to their place involves fixing Skype and explaining to them about the clusterfuck that is Skype on Windows 8/10.

futurix 9y ago

Another Microsoft property they don't know what to do with. Ten years ago I used Skype a lot - to keep with my parents in another country, but recently I removed it completely. We switched to FaceTime and Facebook Messenger long time ago, and I don't know anyone who uses Skype anymore.

kakarot 9y ago

Skype 2017 will now have stories!

m1el 9y ago

I might have a complete misunderstanding of the situation, but I see three main explanations: 1) Microsoft has absolutely no interest in Skype being a viable option, and wants Skype users to adopt some other Microsoft product. Why doesn't Microsoft tell Skype users "Well, Skype is done, just use MSN." 2) People responsible for Skype are optimizing for some metrics, which is opposite to user satisfaction. What is that metric? 3) People responsible for Skype have no idea what they're doing, get no input from community, don't see how people are mad about these particular UI changes, and misunderstand how people use Skype... In which case, why are they still in charge?

ClassyJacket 9y ago
"Why doesn't Microsoft tell Skype users "Well, Skype is done, just use MSN." I'm not aware of anything else they have now that could be supposed to replace it? They already did this the other way around. They closed MSN Messenger in 2013, and told everyone to just use Skype. Skype WAS supposed to the their main messaging app now.
- candiodari 9y ago
  You forget that they replaced Skype with an MSN service while doing this. So in reality you might as well say they "reskinned" Office messenger, called Lync (which I believe started as a version of MSN messenger long ago) and then put out an "update" for Skype that replaced it with Lync, with the banners, window titles, website names, etc, replaced with "skype". That's what happened.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- mathw 9y ago
  Skype certainly is meant to be their main messaging app now. It's their only messaging app now. The trouble is, they also don't ever seem to have done anything to make it better, and the ongoing saga of native Windows 8 and now Windows 10 Skype clients is face-palmingly awful. Flagship chat system on flagship platform doesn't even work right... what hope for Android and iOS?

blago 9y ago

I literary spent 10-15 minutes trying to find a way to call a phone using my contacts. And I'm a software developer, I do these things for a living. Still not sure what I did it.

manigandham 9y ago

It's surprising that Skype has so much usage at all considering the immensely saturated messaging space. Outside of network effect, is there some reason that's keeping people onboard?

Nition 9y ago
It's the (only?) popular video chat application that works reliably and is highly cross-platform.

clamprecht 9y ago

I would pay a lot of money to be able to watch the meetings between the PM and the developers that preceded this release. How can it be so bad - did no one ever try to use their own product during testing?

partiallypro 9y ago

I've never liked the feel of Skype since its inception (before Microsoft even bought it.) There are already too many chat apps, Messenger and SnapChat (in the US) are the two dominant players. I assume that Skype for Business will eventually be phased out and become a sort of extension for Microsoft Teams. Skype will go back to being more consumer based, and as much as it hurts to hear from former Skype users...this is the type of crap most tweens want now, and it's easier to monetize to consumers. There's a reason why every other chat app is copying SnapChat. So it's not a surprise Microsoft would go this direction, I'm sure it will get better with time in this format.

codedokode 9y ago

Skype has become horrible long ago when original team sold it. I remember Skype when its binary was several megabytes and there was no Facebook inside. And now it became slow (at least on Windows XP) and buggy - for example I have no notifications sound anymore and it is unable to accept incoming calls. Judging by interface lagginess they have put at least several modern Javascript frameworks inside. And maybe something to work with immutable values judging by memory consumption. Every proprietary messenger ends up like Skype sooner or later.

8draco8 9y ago
Are you still using XP? If yes, can I ask why?
- codedokode 9y ago
  Yes, because it uses less resources than newer OSes. Windows 7 for me has no advantages over Windows XP but works slower. The only good thing in Windows 7 is search field integrated into main menu. I guess I will have to upgrade either to Windows 7 or to Debian (if it won't work too slow) because many applications including browsers don't work on XP anymore.
  - 8draco8 9y ago
    You should really update fast. Windows XP have massive vulnerabilities. It's very risky to use XP every day.
  - martinald 9y ago
    Err Windows 7 has the advantage of not being incredibly insecure, which I would definitely consider a major advantage, probably the most important one for an OS... Windows 10 is pretty resource efficient. There's even a stripped back 'long term support one' which is incredibly lightweight. Anyway, RAM is incredibly cheap now, I don't think you should be risking getting totally pwned for the sake of an investment in a few GB of ram.

jordache 9y ago

they have taken away the ability to do group calls with free accounts.. cya MSFT...

bash-j 9y ago

Haven't seen anyone else mention it. Our company uses Cisco software for IM, calls, video conferencing and VOIP handsets. Been using it for about 5 years, haven't had any issues. It integrates with our outdated Office suite. With the jabber software I can chat with my colleagues, share my screen, video chat, route my phone, check voicemail.

voycey 9y ago

I rarely have to use it thank god, I have switched pretty much everything over to appear.in for our company, it is seamless :)

badrealam 9y ago

Microsoft had really screwed up Skype. Every update is making Skype worst and there are frequent outage in different part of the world.

cygned 9y ago

Using Skype for business communication and I think this update is awful. The new tabs do not make any sense to me - "Highlights"? "Capture"? I cannot see if someone is online from the contact list anymore. Swiping back to close a chat hardly works, most of the time it opens the "Find" tab - where I can find things I don't need. The call screen is confusing (what is difference between "Microphone" and "Headset" anyway?). Skype does not feel like a serious communication tool anymore.

minusSeven 9y ago

Dunno, microsoft to me is slowly becoming like IBM. They don't see very confident in delivering bug free application anymore. 50% of the windows 10 updates breaks my system. There failure to go mobile despite starting late.

torrent-of-ions 9y ago

I rarely use Skype, but I have it installed on my phone. The other day my girlfriend decided to call me on Skype after it had updated without me realising and I wondered what on earth was going on with my phone. It just popped up with some bullshit about choosing a theme with no indication of what was actually happening. I guess nobody thought that somebody might be receiving a call the first time they launch the new version. Once you actually get the thing working it's incredibly confusing. It has weird line drawn icons that are not intuitive at all. Really hard to use.

thechile 9y ago

It is truly the worst thing I have ever used.

whatitis123 9y ago

My friend updated Skype on her phone. I called her from my comp Skype when she was in a shower. Her new Skype got connected without her pressing any buttons and I head everything what was going in her room (TV)! I called 3 times and it happened every time! Seems that everyone can connect to your new Skype on your phone without your permission and hear all your conversations? What is going on? What they did? What for? When I told her about it she turned off her phone and we talked by comp Skype. BTW she lives outside of the US. It's dangerous for everyone, especially for businesses, and also for kids!

AlvySinger 9y ago

Just tried to use skype on my iphone when an alert came up notifying me of a required update. I updated to find, not skype- but some new social network I want absolutely no part of. The app is no longer on my phone. I'll continue to try and use skype through my computer until the powers that be decide to mess with that as well. Hello Google voice & Facetime

AlvySinger 9y ago

onetokeover 9y ago

When Wechat updates it's voluntary. Made a free w/c to w/c call internationally. Decent sound. Then went to make a paid call on Skype. Forced upgrade again? We went through this 2 or 3 years ago. It won't work this time, not with me. I just got a refund. Will spend the day looking for an old school html (not html5) site that let's us call the world for a penny a minute. They're out there.

rabboRubble 9y ago

Skype v2.8 was the last perfect version of Skype. Lightweight, respectful of screen territory, and worked flawlessly. Even had the super sketchy "Skype Me" mode in case you wanted to get weird p0rny type stuff and invitations from Nigerian princes. IMO the crappifying had a lot to do with centralizing of Skype's backend for USLEO intercepts. At one point in time, Skype was the Signal of its day.

onetokeoverthe 9y ago

I found mangnocall. Seems to be a free voice setup. You send the other person a link. They click on the link and the call connects. Too bad today's appointment said, "We need to do a normal phone call on a phone.". I wanted to say, Sir, it's 2017. But I digress. Still need to find something accessible that lets me use legacy MAC OS and IOS to call phones. Feels more like regression than progression.

vilkbg 9y ago

Well done microsoft you have introduced yet another dissapointment. I guess my days of using skype are over now. Seriously what is wrong with this company...