Skype

Microsoft has confirmed with The Verge that the company is aware of issues with current Skype apps and has been working to address said problems, as well as introduce new features. We've previously looked at how the Skype team will be looking at finally making messages synchronise across multiple platforms, but it's positive to see other issues being targeted.

What kind of issues are consumers experiencing with the service? They include, but are not limited to, missed messages, messages not synchronising, calls continuing to ring on hardware even after picking up on a device, and old messages creeping up from the past. Skype product manager Jeff Kunins said in an interview that the issues plaguing the Skype service stem from Microsoft's transition from peer-to-peer networks to the cloud.

"It’s not that we’ve been trying our best to be amazing at chat for 10 year and sucking at it, it’s that we’ve been doing a great job doing what we were born to do and now people want more out of us and we’re making the investments to expand and be great at that too. We’re not there yet, but we will be."

According to The Verge report, Kunins demonstrated future versions of Windows Phone and Windows apps, which correctly synchronised messages and only fired up notifications on the device in use - we're almost certain you've encountered the situation where multiple Windows based products chime with Skype notifications at the same time. Message sync will also include read and unread states.

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Unfortunately, while the updates sound great, Kunins couldn't provide a date as to when we can expect to see these upgrades rolled out to respective stores. Also, the bug seeing Skype calls continuing to ring even after that very call has been taken on a Windows device is currently being looked into. It's interesting how Kunins explains how difficult this particular issue is to address.

"That’s just a fun bug we’re working on. It’s one of those that seems like it should be trivial, but it’s actually quite hard especially on some platforms like Windows 8 or on the web."

More improvements for Skype for Windows Phone will arrive in 2014, but the Skype team remains hard at work to implement "fun" things in Windows Phone 8.1. That all said, what would you like to see Microsoft do with Skype?

Source: The Verge