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 has been progressively getting worse and worse with each recent release anyway. I had to have my mom figure out Google Hangout recently to video chat with her grandson as Skype has become totally unusable for video on my devices. With every release, more stuff that used to work starts failing.
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 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.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
It seems to get worse every release for a long time now. People around me insist on using it but I prefer WhatsApp, Slack and Hangouts for various tasks Skype tries to do.
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...
Skype has also been a disaster on other platforms. Even the Windows one is full of weird UI layouts and adverts and the Android one is buggy as anything, as is the iOS one on my mum's iPad4. Loss of sync, audio, video, high CPU usage etc. all in there.
Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android.
Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)
Skype is getting more and more useless with every iteration. Encryption is gone, file transfer first stopped to recognize direct LAN connection between clients and now some of the files get stored "in the cloud", the design is just atrocious, advertisements annoying (thank gods for workarounds).
And yesterday my 5.9 installation stopped working, so I have to put up with that.
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.
The Skype client of today is just a renamed Lync client, which actually used to be decent. They've done nothing but make it worse since Lync ceased to exist.
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