In its current form, Skype is one of the worst messaging tools available on the Internet. It's quite a shocker when you take into account how long Skype has been around, and yet the app is so far behind in key messaging areas compared to competing apps that came before it. The good news is that Microsoft has realized there's a problem with Skype and is on the verge of releasing an update in the near future that would fix some of these problems once and for all.
Problems include out of sync messages, missed messages, and the attack of old messages popping up again whenever a new version of Skype is installed. Furthermore, if a user has several devices with Skype installed, all of them will ring if a Skype call is coming in. A smart app, on the other hand, would allow for only one instance to ring instead of all. Moreover, if all devices are ringing and the user answers one, the others continue to ring despite the call being answered. It doesn't make much sense, and this has been happening for years.
According to Skype product manager Jeff Kunins, Microsoft will transition Skype from peer-to-peer networks to the cloud. This means all the problems we've mentioned above should disappear and bring Skype into the modern age.
"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," explains Kunins in an interview with The Verge. "We're not there yet, but we will be."
At the moment, Microsoft is testing multiple updates for Skype that will allow message synchronization across all apps on every supported device. "You'll see us very soon begin rolling that out so users get the benefit of cloud history, synced read state across all of your devices," says Kunins.
Furthermore, if you're a Windows Phone 8 user, then you might have realized how Microsoft chose to cater to Android and iOS users first when it comes to new Skype features. The company plans to end this strange act of abandoning Windows Phone users for competitor platforms.
No word as yet when users should expect the newly improved Skype, but it shouldn't take very long.
