4 ms·

Are there any sites that attempt to describe exactly what's wrong with Skype? I've been using it for years and haven't observed anything outright wrong with it.

Are there any sites that attempt to describe exactly what's wrong with Skype? I've been using it for years and haven't observed anything outright wrong with it. Is particular functionality broken or something?

tomrod 5y ago
This comment will identify the core issue: Feature creep expressing as bloat.
yoz-y 5y ago
One of the contentions is that skype evolved from an utilitarian entreprisey chat/voice app into a wannabe social network.
keb_ 5y ago
I can only speak for myself, but I've had co-workers who've corroborated my experiences: * Slow startup, slow everything * File uploads work maybe 50% of the time * Calls are frequently dropped * Sometimes will just flatout stop responding and crash in the middle of chat or a call. * Resource hog
- redm 5y ago
  I wonder if those issues could be related to a poor network connection to the Skype servers, and maybe poor handling of lossy or high latency connections. I haven't seen any of these issues with Skype.
  - forgotAgain 5y ago
    They could be but if network connection was a prime cause Microsoft would have highlighted that fact. Have they shown that is in fact the primary issue?
  - prepend 5y ago
    Perhaps, but I’ve never had these problems with Zoom or Discord or Slack or Jabber or anything else. So it’s a Skype problem as far as I’m concerned.
- abakker 5y ago
  No persistent chat, doesn't reliably report availability status / presences, tells you messages were sent when they weren't, messages don't always arrive on all devices, message with error that says "message couldn't be delivered" but they were delivered so you send them many many times... the list goes on.
  - keb_ 5y ago
    Oh man I completely forgot about the "message couldn't be delivered" error. I'll send a message to a coworker and it appears normally as if I sent it. Only 15 minutes later do I realize it never sent. I have never had that experience with another chat application.
- user5994461 5y ago
  * File uploads work maybe 50% of the time File uploads are blocked by company policy. And it fails with a cryptic error or no error at all when blocked, rather than giving a meaningful explanation.
asddubs 5y ago
Last time I used it, it just flat out stopped working, and nothing I tried could fix it. I could type messages but would not receive any messages anyone else was sending, though on their ends it would show the messages as sent. Tried the web client, same thing. I told my friends they could now reach me on discord if they wanted to continue talking to me, and that's the last time I used skype, years ago. Even before then, it was extremely spotty with occasionally refusing to deliver messages, not being able to hear the other person on calls, and other stability issues. But it's been so long, I don't remember the exact details anymore, just that it gradually went from a piece of software that I really liked to something that was giving me the most trouble out of any software I was using.
briffle 5y ago
I think part of the problem is there are 2 different products Skype and "Skype for Business" the second one is basically a rebranded MS communicator.
mavhc 5y ago
Firstly there's 3 versions of skype backend: original p2p, microsoft's intercept all your calls, and Lync. Then they renamed Lync to be Skype for Business, and now had to try to make those 2 systems work together. Then Windows 8 comes along and they rewrite the client in Metro, but it doesn't do everything, so the Win32 client still exists. Also recall that MS had MSNMessenger, so guns all pointing at each other. Then they got social network jealousy, so tried to do something with Skype, then gave up. I've still no idea if skype can call Lync/SfB/Teams or not. I assume at some point they didn't bother making Android/iOS apps because they wanted WinPhone to be a thing.
- api 5y ago
  Both Skype and FaceTime abandoned P2P at the expense of privacy and (usually) call quality because there used to be a patent troll called VirNetX going after large companies employing P2P networking. They had some ridiculous patent on "having two devices talk on a network, mediated by a third" and won in the Eastern District of Texas of course. That patent is now expired.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    It’s the same with Apple’s FaceTime. It was originally intended to be P2P, but VirNetX sued them. Some believe that’s why Steve Jobs’ claim of it becoming “open” to non-Apple devices never materialized.
  - ohthehugemanate 5y ago
    My friend who worked at Skype at the time tells me the rebuild was because of the rise of mobile devices, and the limitations of mobile internet at the time. Skype's original architecture used peer to peer routing, ie network quality relied on there being always-on nodes in between the calling parties. Demand for mobile Skype grew, but no one wanted to use their expensive, limited bandwidth mobile internet to be a router in the Skype network. Not to mention, those mobile connections weren't stable enough to be useful for nodes anyway. Hence the redesign around a client-server model, where MS could guarantee call quality a lot better, and which allowed for mobile to thrive. None of which excuses the UI of course, or problems with the back end. Or lync, or any of the other problems. But it does give some context.
prepend 5y ago
Personal Skype is annoying because it expires credits, so every couple months I have to log in and send a single text to spend some money. All my other Skyping is just messaging and calls for free so it’s lame that they keep trying to expire the money I spent. Skype for business is a giant ball of shit and perhaps the worse messenger product I’ve ever used, and I’ve used them all since IRC and text in 1993. Here’s how it sucks: -Calls and video consume large bandwidth -Client will peg cpu at 100% for unknown reasons while idling -Sometimes client will freeze in the background and not take calls or IMs -can’t drag and drop images into chat. Sends them as attachments -not reliable. Calls will drop. Individuals on calls will drop. Screen share works or doesn’t work unpredictably. Video works or doesn’t work unpredictably. -Messages aren’t delivered, sometimes with an error that says “prepend couldn’t be reached so message wasn’t delivered” even though the user shows as online and green -Sometimes that message actually was delivered -Mobile does not sync chats with desktop Instant messaging is so simple and using Skype is worse than nothing. I’d rather email than have a tool that works 90% of the time. Imagine is SMS sometimes didn’t deliver messages. Who would use that. Coupled with Skype being the reason why all other instant messenger apps were banned from orgs. In 2001, my company was using yahoo messenger, for free, without any of the problems above with 200 people IMing hundreds of times a day (although we never video or voice called). In 2021, my org pays for Teams and Skype and we use a mix of SMS/iMessage and a million other things because no one IMs any more.
- GrinningFool 5y ago
  > Imagine is SMS sometimes didn’t deliver messages. SMS does not have a delivery guarantee.
  - prepend 5y ago
    It does not, yet it’s pretty darn reliable. Comically, Skype does have an SLA including delivery and sucks at it. I don’t need delivery guarantee, I just need reliability. If I could even predict when Skype works or doesn’t, I could at least plan around it.
Liquid_Fire 5y ago
I personally dislike the following: * They replaced a reasonably fast (on Windows) or extremely fast and native (on Linux) application with a slow and bloated Electron-based client that was initially missing many of the features. * They introduced multiple different types of chats as an attempt to transition from P2P to cloud-based. Depending on when and how you started a chat, it would use one or the other system with no obvious indication but many subtle differences in terms of supported features. * The web client and desktop client (despite also being written using web technologies) had various differences, such as different parsing of chat message formatting, so what you sent differed from what the other person saw in many cases. * Terrible/no tools for managing larger chat groups. And for the mobile app: * Mobile client is by far the slowest app on my phone (even today), taking easily 10+ seconds from tapping a notification to having the chat fully loaded. (Every other chat app this is <1s) * Mobile client frequently misses or is late in showing notifications of received messages. * Mobile client used to murder my battery life. Thankfully this was fixed a few years ago.

tomrod 5y ago

This comment will identify the core issue: Feature creep expressing as bloat.

yoz-y 5y ago

One of the contentions is that skype evolved from an utilitarian entreprisey chat/voice app into a wannabe social network.

keb_ 5y ago

I can only speak for myself, but I've had co-workers who've corroborated my experiences: * Slow startup, slow everything * File uploads work maybe 50% of the time * Calls are frequently dropped * Sometimes will just flatout stop responding and crash in the middle of chat or a call. * Resource hog

redm 5y ago
I wonder if those issues could be related to a poor network connection to the Skype servers, and maybe poor handling of lossy or high latency connections. I haven't seen any of these issues with Skype.
- forgotAgain 5y ago
  They could be but if network connection was a prime cause Microsoft would have highlighted that fact. Have they shown that is in fact the primary issue?
- prepend 5y ago
  Perhaps, but I’ve never had these problems with Zoom or Discord or Slack or Jabber or anything else. So it’s a Skype problem as far as I’m concerned.
abakker 5y ago
No persistent chat, doesn't reliably report availability status / presences, tells you messages were sent when they weren't, messages don't always arrive on all devices, message with error that says "message couldn't be delivered" but they were delivered so you send them many many times... the list goes on.
- keb_ 5y ago
  Oh man I completely forgot about the "message couldn't be delivered" error. I'll send a message to a coworker and it appears normally as if I sent it. Only 15 minutes later do I realize it never sent. I have never had that experience with another chat application.
user5994461 5y ago
* File uploads work maybe 50% of the time File uploads are blocked by company policy. And it fails with a cryptic error or no error at all when blocked, rather than giving a meaningful explanation.

asddubs 5y ago

Last time I used it, it just flat out stopped working, and nothing I tried could fix it. I could type messages but would not receive any messages anyone else was sending, though on their ends it would show the messages as sent. Tried the web client, same thing. I told my friends they could now reach me on discord if they wanted to continue talking to me, and that's the last time I used skype, years ago. Even before then, it was extremely spotty with occasionally refusing to deliver messages, not being able to hear the other person on calls, and other stability issues. But it's been so long, I don't remember the exact details anymore, just that it gradually went from a piece of software that I really liked to something that was giving me the most trouble out of any software I was using.

briffle 5y ago

I think part of the problem is there are 2 different products Skype and "Skype for Business" the second one is basically a rebranded MS communicator.

mavhc 5y ago

Firstly there's 3 versions of skype backend: original p2p, microsoft's intercept all your calls, and Lync. Then they renamed Lync to be Skype for Business, and now had to try to make those 2 systems work together. Then Windows 8 comes along and they rewrite the client in Metro, but it doesn't do everything, so the Win32 client still exists. Also recall that MS had MSNMessenger, so guns all pointing at each other. Then they got social network jealousy, so tried to do something with Skype, then gave up. I've still no idea if skype can call Lync/SfB/Teams or not. I assume at some point they didn't bother making Android/iOS apps because they wanted WinPhone to be a thing.

api 5y ago
Both Skype and FaceTime abandoned P2P at the expense of privacy and (usually) call quality because there used to be a patent troll called VirNetX going after large companies employing P2P networking. They had some ridiculous patent on "having two devices talk on a network, mediated by a third" and won in the Eastern District of Texas of course. That patent is now expired.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  It’s the same with Apple’s FaceTime. It was originally intended to be P2P, but VirNetX sued them. Some believe that’s why Steve Jobs’ claim of it becoming “open” to non-Apple devices never materialized.
- ohthehugemanate 5y ago
  My friend who worked at Skype at the time tells me the rebuild was because of the rise of mobile devices, and the limitations of mobile internet at the time. Skype's original architecture used peer to peer routing, ie network quality relied on there being always-on nodes in between the calling parties. Demand for mobile Skype grew, but no one wanted to use their expensive, limited bandwidth mobile internet to be a router in the Skype network. Not to mention, those mobile connections weren't stable enough to be useful for nodes anyway. Hence the redesign around a client-server model, where MS could guarantee call quality a lot better, and which allowed for mobile to thrive. None of which excuses the UI of course, or problems with the back end. Or lync, or any of the other problems. But it does give some context.

prepend 5y ago

Personal Skype is annoying because it expires credits, so every couple months I have to log in and send a single text to spend some money. All my other Skyping is just messaging and calls for free so it’s lame that they keep trying to expire the money I spent. Skype for business is a giant ball of shit and perhaps the worse messenger product I’ve ever used, and I’ve used them all since IRC and text in 1993. Here’s how it sucks: -Calls and video consume large bandwidth -Client will peg cpu at 100% for unknown reasons while idling -Sometimes client will freeze in the background and not take calls or IMs -can’t drag and drop images into chat. Sends them as attachments -not reliable. Calls will drop. Individuals on calls will drop. Screen share works or doesn’t work unpredictably. Video works or doesn’t work unpredictably. -Messages aren’t delivered, sometimes with an error that says “prepend couldn’t be reached so message wasn’t delivered” even though the user shows as online and green -Sometimes that message actually was delivered -Mobile does not sync chats with desktop Instant messaging is so simple and using Skype is worse than nothing. I’d rather email than have a tool that works 90% of the time. Imagine is SMS sometimes didn’t deliver messages. Who would use that. Coupled with Skype being the reason why all other instant messenger apps were banned from orgs. In 2001, my company was using yahoo messenger, for free, without any of the problems above with 200 people IMing hundreds of times a day (although we never video or voice called). In 2021, my org pays for Teams and Skype and we use a mix of SMS/iMessage and a million other things because no one IMs any more.

GrinningFool 5y ago
> Imagine is SMS sometimes didn’t deliver messages. SMS does not have a delivery guarantee.
- prepend 5y ago
  It does not, yet it’s pretty darn reliable. Comically, Skype does have an SLA including delivery and sucks at it. I don’t need delivery guarantee, I just need reliability. If I could even predict when Skype works or doesn’t, I could at least plan around it.

Liquid_Fire 5y ago

I personally dislike the following: * They replaced a reasonably fast (on Windows) or extremely fast and native (on Linux) application with a slow and bloated Electron-based client that was initially missing many of the features. * They introduced multiple different types of chats as an attempt to transition from P2P to cloud-based. Depending on when and how you started a chat, it would use one or the other system with no obvious indication but many subtle differences in terms of supported features. * The web client and desktop client (despite also being written using web technologies) had various differences, such as different parsing of chat message formatting, so what you sent differed from what the other person saw in many cases. * Terrible/no tools for managing larger chat groups. And for the mobile app: * Mobile client is by far the slowest app on my phone (even today), taking easily 10+ seconds from tapping a notification to having the chat fully loaded. (Every other chat app this is <1s) * Mobile client frequently misses or is late in showing notifications of received messages. * Mobile client used to murder my battery life. Thankfully this was fixed a few years ago.