<Rant>
First off, I have been a Windows and Windows Mobile ****** for years, I was even recommending Lumias to everyone I knew till a year back.
My mother bought an iPhone around 4 years ago, and at that time I was amazed to see how seamless Facetime & iMessage was. Sure, it didn't have many bells and whistles, but it "just worked". This phrase is in quotes, because the same can't be applied to most MS products.
When MS merged Skype with the messaging app, it realized a long standing dream of having a unified messaging platform, although the reliability of the app was horrible, and messages always syncing in the background meant horrible battery life and when I had to make Skype to PSTN calls, I had to go back to the horrible old W8.1 app.
When they killed that app and made the Skype UWP, things looked promising. The app was feature rich, almost on par with the desktop Win.32 client, looked good, but I hardly used it because almost everyone I know uses Whatsapp.
Last week, I tried to begin an experiment to try and use Skype as the sole messaging/calling client with a few people I know. The results were horrible (Lumia 950XL, freshly factory reset and on Release Preview, the UWP app).
1. Audio/Video calls mostly fail. I would say 7/10 times, on good WiFi. Nothing happens. Skype shows it is trying to call someone, then crashes with an error that Skype needs to close
2. Messages appearing out of order
3. Some devices continuing to ring even after call has been answered on one device (I know this was supposed too be fixed when they migrated to the cloud model, but it is still there)
4. Sometimes when the other person answers the call, even though you can talk to each other, the Skype ringing music is still audible on the call (Apart from other devices that might be ringing on the far end).
5. The horrible "connecting", "updating conversations" toasts that show up on the top of the screen are unbearable.
6. I wouldn't even mention allowing Skype to find your friends using your address book and what a s***storm that creates. Multiple contacts created in your outlook people hub (up to 8 for the same person, I counted).
SMS Relay
1. If you enable SMS relay, even if your outlook contact and Skype contact are linked in the people hub, they show up separately in the Skype app. The only way to fix this is
a. Add a phone number to their Skype contact, which matches the phone number on their outlook contact. The side effect of this is, it actually creates a new outlook contact for that person with that phone number. So you end up with 2 Outlook contacts and 1 Skype contact
b. Install the Skype Win.32 desktop app, modify the person's Skype profile and add their mobile number there
2. People whom I text, who are saved in my Outlook contacts but do not have corresponding Skype contacts show up just with their numbers (without names, but curiously with their profile photos) in Skype.
I am not threatening to leave Skype or MS or anything, I just came here to vent my frustration with a first party app, which MS has been developing (and killing and rebooting) for years. And yes, I have submitted all this as feedback.
</Rant>
First off, I have been a Windows and Windows Mobile ****** for years, I was even recommending Lumias to everyone I knew till a year back.
My mother bought an iPhone around 4 years ago, and at that time I was amazed to see how seamless Facetime & iMessage was. Sure, it didn't have many bells and whistles, but it "just worked". This phrase is in quotes, because the same can't be applied to most MS products.
When MS merged Skype with the messaging app, it realized a long standing dream of having a unified messaging platform, although the reliability of the app was horrible, and messages always syncing in the background meant horrible battery life and when I had to make Skype to PSTN calls, I had to go back to the horrible old W8.1 app.
When they killed that app and made the Skype UWP, things looked promising. The app was feature rich, almost on par with the desktop Win.32 client, looked good, but I hardly used it because almost everyone I know uses Whatsapp.
Last week, I tried to begin an experiment to try and use Skype as the sole messaging/calling client with a few people I know. The results were horrible (Lumia 950XL, freshly factory reset and on Release Preview, the UWP app).
1. Audio/Video calls mostly fail. I would say 7/10 times, on good WiFi. Nothing happens. Skype shows it is trying to call someone, then crashes with an error that Skype needs to close
2. Messages appearing out of order
3. Some devices continuing to ring even after call has been answered on one device (I know this was supposed too be fixed when they migrated to the cloud model, but it is still there)
4. Sometimes when the other person answers the call, even though you can talk to each other, the Skype ringing music is still audible on the call (Apart from other devices that might be ringing on the far end).
5. The horrible "connecting", "updating conversations" toasts that show up on the top of the screen are unbearable.
6. I wouldn't even mention allowing Skype to find your friends using your address book and what a s***storm that creates. Multiple contacts created in your outlook people hub (up to 8 for the same person, I counted).
SMS Relay
1. If you enable SMS relay, even if your outlook contact and Skype contact are linked in the people hub, they show up separately in the Skype app. The only way to fix this is
a. Add a phone number to their Skype contact, which matches the phone number on their outlook contact. The side effect of this is, it actually creates a new outlook contact for that person with that phone number. So you end up with 2 Outlook contacts and 1 Skype contact
b. Install the Skype Win.32 desktop app, modify the person's Skype profile and add their mobile number there
2. People whom I text, who are saved in my Outlook contacts but do not have corresponding Skype contacts show up just with their numbers (without names, but curiously with their profile photos) in Skype.
I am not threatening to leave Skype or MS or anything, I just came here to vent my frustration with a first party app, which MS has been developing (and killing and rebooting) for years. And yes, I have submitted all this as feedback.
</Rant>
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