Not to mention, in the process they more or less broke the core functionality of Skype: video and audio conferencing. Skype is so bad it's difficult to believe it's not some sort of a practical joke.
Skype is, in terms of performance, one of the worst apps (actually, currently, the worst) I have to deal with on a daily basis.
I actually upgraded my slow, old but otherwise fine android to a Nexus 5 specifically so that Skype would open in reasonable time (it was the company chat app of choice back then, and I needed to be in the loop). I preferred paying a few hundred dollars, and not wasting 30 seconds every time I needed to talk to my team. It crashes all the time, it's slow to refresh, has erratic, unpredictable behaviour that causes me to simply restart it instead of waiting when I want to check if I have new messages. When you use it alongside Whatsapp and Telegram, the difference is painful. No wonder Slack etc. are growing so fast. I'll give Skype one thing: call quality is usually alright.
Now we see all these bugs coming up for various versions, this one for Windows, the weird arabic characters for Mac, it's further proof of the codebase decay that must be going on over there. It's amazing how powerful network effects can be, that everybody is still stuck with Skype. Because everybody has Skype...
I think skype is good and important, it just isn't trending, but who cares. The problems are in the frontend unfortunately. It seems to be a Javascript app, and that s just bad choice for a real-time video app. Split mode doesnt work, scrollback fails on long conversations, can't control the placement of windows, designed for maximized windows, private mode disconnects randomly. And please do not ring all the devices in the house when there's a call, let me select only the one i m using its ridiculous, like a band playing the skype ringtone in the house.
Skype became really really terrible, it looks like it's been unmaintained during the past 10 years, I'd rate its usability worse than most open-source software. The sound quality is also awful, it feels like I'm calling a landline.
Skype hasn’t ever (with people I know) been “beloved,” merely tolerated as the only option back when it really was, well, the only option.
Today, Skype’s voice quality is as bad as it was 15 years ago but even the cheapest alternatives from 3rd party cross-platform vendors easily put it to shame (such as voip.ms) and free offerings from the big names (Google’s Voice, WhatsApp audio, Apple’s FaceTime Audio, etc) also do the same if you’re willing to deal with network lock-in or privacy issues.
Skype video chat is basically unusable: the latency multiplier is horrendous and the video quality is at best subpar and extremelyhorriblt noisy.
The client itself is a mess. Ugly, bloated, difficult to navigate, constantly changing, buggy, and more. It’s been that way since the redesign years before MS bought them out (Skype “Classic” was the last “OK” release on that end).
Skype is one of those applications that peaked about ~5years ago. It's been getting worse and worse every in single update since then. (and I mean the UI and the UX, perhaps the voice engine is better but that's not visible to the users).
It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.
Skype for business is the biggest dumpster fire of software that I've had to use for work in the last few years. Truly awful- resource hog, screen sharing rarely works, and frequently crashes.
Yea, the UI blows but one of the biggest concerns with Skype is that it is a leaky box. I know a lot of friends who have left skype because of government tapping. By tapping, I mean multiple governments all over the world seem to have unfettered access to every call and chat on the system.
When you are using the tool for business, that is a deal breaker.
Skype on Windows is awful. Frequent crashes, shared screens drop all the time, and very inefficient. Only reason it's not uninstalled is that we have to use it at work.
most of the people I know, regardless of what platform they use seem to think that skype sucks. especially if they tried to use it on their mobile phones. We all put up with it because there are no real competitors, and the open source alternatives are all pretty lacking as well
For once I agree with RS; I haven't used Skype in ages, particularly because it's just crappy software.
Honestly, I'd view Skype as malware at this point, the number of exploits is too damn high and it barely integrates with anything ever. It's the kind of integration you'd normally see from a cheap car purchase where the Entertainment System is a iPhone 2 taped to the seats and the trunk smells like dead raccoon.
By Skype getting gradually worse with every release. It is mindboggling how it is WORSE than the Skype I used 15 years ago in every way I can think of.
Skype is pretty awful for calling phones. The user interface has become a mess and is difficult to use. They are constantly making it more difficult to call phone.
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
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