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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his grandmother in Norway.

So I tried Google Hangouts. It's marginally better. But it's still awful, and odds are about 50% that one or the other end of just fails to work (suddenly wants to reinstall the plugin, or just plain refuses to recognize the camera).

It's just incredible to me that a decade after I had reliable, working video chat, things appears to have gotten steadily worse, not better... I have 10 times the bandwidth - or more -, for example, both up and down.

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I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.

In the end, FaceTime is only adequate software. There isn't anything particularly annoying about it, and it does what the average user expects.

What makes FaceTime incredible is that no one else on the planet can make anything even close to adequate in that space.

It can be mind boggling to cycle through Skype, Lync, Google Hangouts, and every other piece of chat software on your computer, all failing in bizarre ways, only to think, "Oh yeah. Let's try FaceTime" and have it work.

If I ever move overseas again, I will be purchasing an iPod Touch for each and every older family member before departing. FaceTime works remarkably well.

I'll leave aside the meta commentary on your (unneccessary) downvote comment.

Facetime is what makes it possible for me to stay in touch with my family on the other side of the planet, and that's even if I'm sitting out in a park far from Wifi. It just works, and even if it hiccups once in a while, the reliability is high enough that you just shrug it off with the confidence that it will recover. This is on LTE with good reception.

On a recent trip to the US from the UK my wife and I each used a BlackBerry Playbook with the built-in video chat. It was perfect -- no discernible lag and I was able to talk with the kids with great video and sound quality.

So, perhaps Skype and GV are suffering from over-extended networks? It must be hard to justify investing in better network infrastructure for a free product (or when your revenues are minimal). On that note, I don't get the impression that BlackBerry's network has much of a problem with network load these days...

This is what's so annoying about Apple: why no Android client? How can you hope to have a communications platform that is so severely constrained? That's why so few here barely even know about Facetime. You can't invest in it because it's so limited.

'hope to'? They don't hope to, it exists. 15-20 million FaceTime calls every day: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessag...

So 8% of users try it once per day? I'm wondering how that compares to phone, messages, email, whatsapp, Skype, etc? Very poorly, I'd say.

Might also be ISPs introducing traffic management and whatnot.

It should be possible to test and analyze this.

Give a try to Netalyzer: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Here is an report sample: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session

I work for a startup in the commercial video space, and one of the reasons we can compete against such giants is that their software really doesn't work that well... even for people who've paid shedloads for Lync.

I also work in the commercial telecommuting space. Its easy to compete there, because existing solutions are so crusty its laughable. All the voice apps revolve around phone calls and conference calls, things rooted in 1800's ideas about communications.

Try appear.in or one of the many other webrtc providers.

skype on android is really, really bad. it doesn't even bother to tell you if your wifi is turned off. it'll just "ring ring ring ring" then show a message that the person wasn't available.

I use their subscriptions plan to call home from my Nexus 4. Most of the time skype on android shows offline users as online. Sometimes it shows me that I am signed in and online, but nobody could see me till I try to signout and signin multiple times. The worst problem is it reboots the phone frequently whenever i do video calls. Gets updates often, but they never fixed any of these problems.

Worse than that; I've found Skype on Android will actually kill the wifi connection. It's awful.

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