Comment by gregdoesit
10 years ago
Of course we used it as our main communication tool. With each other and within the company.
The problem? We had it running 24/7 on work laptops and phones so the messaging issue was less obvious. The typical user started Skype on their desktop, and killed it after a video call. They also killed it from running in the background on their phone because it killed the battery. We just keep charging the phone.
And as we saw issues come up with Skype for our usage patterns, we did focus on those. Did you know that originally the limit of a group size was 300, a random constraint someone added in, and got hardcoded in all the apps? That size was basically chosen because we were pretty sure the largest company Skype group would not grow beyond it. Well, it did a couple years in and we spent more time and effort trying to solve this then a lot of the other stuff. I mean people could not get in to the Tallin office social chat channel and were missing the gossip!
Eating your own dogfood is a good thing - but it also leads to overusing your product and being less critical with it over time.
Also, on top of this the fact that our user base kept growing despite these flaws did give us a false sense of security.
>"They also killed it from running in the background on their phone because it killed the battery."
This probably compounded the issue. If the battery-drain never presented itself, users would have been more likely to not turn the application off.
Not really. Two more reasons to kill Skype immediately after use:
- Network drain - just how much data an app uses is nonobvious for most people, especially that it changes over time.
- System resources drain - low-to-mid-end Android phones are usually pretty underpowered; they can barely lift their OS. Any application running in the background makes using other applications more frustrating. Hence the popularity of auto-killers on Android.
What is the fix here that does not involve intermediate servers? The xmpp client conversations asks you to opt out the app from aggressive battery optimization in Android Lollipop. I tried saying no and killing the app. Messages took over two minutes to arrive while I was using the device (not the app). I don't think there is an easy fix. This is why Google Cloud Messaging makes sense but the problem is that now Android is coupled with Google services. :(