Skype Promises Major Improvements Within The Year

Skype, like many other pieces software, collects a large amount of feedback.  Here is what they have been hearing from their customers:

• Make Skype more reliable, and less power hungry. Be nice to my battery life. Pretty self-explanatory, and the work is never done.
• Messaging needs to be easier and at my fingertips. People use a lot of different apps for messaging – and it’s very easy to switch back and forth, using the one that feels right in the moment. While Skype is known best for calling (recently exceeding 2 billion minutes in one day!), our users also send tens of billions of chat messages every month to the people they care about most. They simply want it to be more convenient.
• I now use Skype on multiple devices, so make the experience fast and familiar. More and more of our users have Skype on their phone, tablet, and PC. So while we still need to make Android feel like Android and Windows feel like Windows, people want a fast, beautiful, and more coherent design across all the devices they use.

Skype expects to make improvements on the following within the year:

• Increasing performance and quality. This is our number one priority and a key component of every update we roll out. Earlier this year, we started making some significant changes under the hood to the way in which our apps work, specifically around reliability, battery life and performance. We debuted some of this work first on Skype for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. As we said back then, this work helps ensure that calls and messages come in quickly, reliably and without affecting your battery life. We plan to bring these same enhancements to all the devices you use Skype on.
  • Modern design, putting conversations first. To make all your interactions on Skype easier, we are putting conversations at the heart of a redesigned experience. Not only is this Modern design bold and beautiful, but it’s also simpler and easier to use. Doing this on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 dramatically reduced the time it takes to reply to a message, while making it even simpler to upgrade that conversation to a voice or video call. Our aim is to make the experience and design of our apps as consistent as possible, while still respecting each device’s unique look and feel.
  • Completing the experience across devices. We’ve seen an incredible response to the new capabilities we’ve brought to Skype recently including video messaging, picture sharing, HD video, and more. And we want everyone to have the same great Skype experience regardless of the device they choose. We have some work to do in this area, but you’ll increasingly see a more consistent feature set across all our apps by the end of the year.

Here’s a few things you may not know about Skype:

• At certain points in the day, there are more people using Skype from their phone or tablet than from a PC.
• Each month, the growth rate of new users coming to Skype on a tablet or phone is double what it was the year before. And those people now represent nearly half of the total new users joining Skype every month.
• Skype continues to be an essential app, ranked in the top 10 most downloaded apps of all time on Windows Phone, iOS, and Android.

Source: Skype Blog