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Comment by nkkollaw | Hacker News Reader

How about Skype, though?

People loved Skype so much, it was really a feat to make people hate it.

They had a decent Android app, then someone saw that it was too fast/responsive and was using too little memory and took that as a challenge, how can I make skype worst? React Native!

Obviously that didn't pleased people (see rating in Play Store), and they had to provide something for low/mid range phones, and skype lite was born (which is really good one).

Hey, thanks for mentioning skype lite. That a mile better than skype .

The design history of Skype for iPhone was particularly misguided: First it was a native UIKit app, then MS put a lot of effort into making it look and behave exactly like a Windows Phone app [1], down to the unusual gestures. When they gave up on that, the app reverted to a native UIKit design, but just a few updates later we got the current Snapchat clone instead. Needless to say, features regularly got lost during these radical redesigns.

That‘s still very clearly the same Microsoft where a gazillion layers of dumb middle management ruin everything[2].

[1] http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/06/skype-redesign-iphone-app... [2] http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...

They undoubtedly did a bad job, but I think that Skype has a lot going against it from external factors anyway.

Everyone I know is using FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. The only time I hear Skype anymore is people using it for podcasts. Obvious anecdata but it seems reasonable that services with better device integration (FaceTime) or social graph access (Facebook) would do better in the long run.

Disagreed.

Skype used to be mainstream. It was essentially a cross platform iMessage & FaceTime, almost ahead of its time. It was also efficient in terms of network usage, being peer-to-peer for the most part.

Had it continued to be usable, it would still be mainstream and might have the place of WhatsApp today. Instead, we now have this garbage Snapchat-like UI, a server-based model that doesn't even work (it was supposed to "fix" the P2P model, but for me it's been way worse than P2P which always worked), and a shitty Electron client that melts your battery and looks awful (they killed a gorgeous - especially on Mac - native client to replace it with this shit).

Or google hangouts. It's skype but in the web and with an interface that actually works.

Hangouts is a great example of another horrible UI. The whole tie in to Chrome made it unusable for anyone non technical (where did it go? What did you want me to click? I am in the call, but you're not there... oh you're in another call? How do you hangup? I don't see the window anymore, etc.)

A standalone app would fix this, but there seems to be some strange internal agenda tying it to Chrome... Chromebooks I guess?

Minus a few gigs of ram

Yup, all these came after Skype started sucking, most probably because of it.

I think people forget how bad Skype was in a lot of ways though. The big reason they shifted to the cloud model, for instance, was how unreliable message delivery was on phones with peer-to-peer. I remember when, in order to send images, you and the other person had to be online at the same time.

They made some missteps, sure, but Skype was already a very dated solution.

I am not sure how "unreliable" the peer to peer model was. From what I remember it's always been perfect for me.

Media uploads could have been solved by a server-based "media" service, while keeping the reliable & battle-tested P2P architecture.

As of currently, the server-based architecture is an absolute disaster, way worse than P2P.

I regularly had whole chatrooms that wouldn't update for days. I had no way of knowing if a message I sent would really like... ever... get delivered.

I've been a pretty big Skype user in the past, and still use it a bit now, and it is actually so much more reliable now that Microsoft runs it.

Haven't really used group chats that much on it, but for call establishment, I stand behind my words when I say it used to be a lot better.

With P2P it would sometimes take a bit longer (10 seconds?) but it would always work. When it wouldn't, it was because of a problem on either one of the endpoints, and switching network connections or rebooting the router fixed it.

With the current model it would just randomly not work (the client also sucks and sometimes hangs in an inconsistent state after the failed call attempts), without anything we can do - it's something with the software and/or servers.

I used to trust Skype calls to actually go through - now even if I see "ringing" I have no faith in whether it's actually ringing on the other side (and if it was, whether the call would actually connect once picked up).

They wanted total control over the data so they converted the p2p supernodes to Microsoft servers... now the government can get what it needs more easily.

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