I agree both with those who hated skype, but also with those who loved it in messaging.
My GF is from the US and I live in Europe, we use skype every day exchanging hundreds messages (and some calls) per session.
It IS frustrating (I'm not on the redstone branch, but I was in the preview before), and I encountered many issues since November:
- The app was definitely draining battery, even on standby, mostly when using data connection. Now, after few updates, it works much better.
- Messages suddenly stop synching and device starts heating like a stove (both on phone and surface, on surface you can see the skype process starts using most of the CPU power and even disk I/O). You could literally cook eggs and bacon on it.
- Notifications sometimes not notifying anything. (in the last month it happens every day to me).
- The dreaded "couldn't send" message that requires you to wait days for it to be fixed. (it happened to me 3-4 times since November, and there was nothing to do than turning skype integration off and waiting)
- Sometimes you hit send and you don't know if your message is really sent because the app just hang there. Then you close it, reopen it and it sends the message.
- Every single update of the messaging app broke the experience for hours, sometimes requiring many reboots.
- Switching from phone to desktop and from desktop to phone sometimes breaks the conversation, leaving only the current device working and all the other hanged (again hot like a stove, few reboots required to make it working again).
- Sometimes conversations splits, and you have an old conversation and a new working one (this happened twice to me).
Honestly, the whole skype experience with integrated apps is crap to me.
That said, I DO love the concept of having all my conversations in a single messaging app, and I hope while publishing the Universal App they can still hook everything in messaging and let me choose the medium (also for xbox, since they did it for people). Actually they should open messaging integration to third parties and I hope other publishers (like WhatsApp) will give you the chance to hook their application to messaging (I know this is fiction, but.. That would be really cool to me)
MS concept of having a single messaging hub is more than good, it's excellent, realization though is.. Well, horribly handled.
Whatever they do though, I hope this is the LAST change they make, for good. I have this bad feeling they don't have a real plan and are just trying multiple path, but this is confusing for both them and more important, to all of us. They should just make a plan and stick with it.