June 30, 2014

The latest version of Skype (Skype 5.0) promises to live up to user expectations. With many changes being made to the user interface and a host of other features added, iPhone users can hope to have a great experience as they use the app on their smartphone.

Majority of the changes that have been incorporated in Skype 5.0 are based on feedback from customers and are related to application’s interface and navigation. In newer version of Skype, measures have been taken to enhance performance when it comes to users syncing their chats from other platforms.

While using an iPhone, there is a certain set of features in Skype that customers make use of more often. With version 5.0, care has been taken to have those features and displays at the forefront of the application. Everything else can be made use of through a ribbon navigation bar that sits at the top of the app. The additions and changes in Skype 5.0 in comparison to its previous versions is sure to benefit iOS users, and transform the way they use the app.

Skype’s product marketing manager, Eric Lin, was quoted as saying, “This app is really remastered for you and the way you use Skype. We take our users and our user feedback very seriously here, and pretty much every choice that we made when we created this application was really based on feedback. The new Skype for iPhone is rebuilt from the ground up, it’s a 100 percent rewrite, and the entire time we were writing this we had a laser focus on performance.”

Lin did admit that previous versions of Skype had a lot of performance issues when it came to iOS users. But that will change now with the new version that has come up. A user will no more have to wait for prolonged periods of time before the chats from desktop are synced on to the mobile Skype application every time it is launched. The notifications will sync at a faster rate; users can also see the read status of messages that were a part of desktop conversations.

Group chats however, could take a bit longer to sync. This is mainly because the switch from legacy systems to the new backend is still in progress. Lin explains that; “That is a backend procedure that users will see updated throughout the coming months. We moved some conversations to the new system before we moved other conversations. You alone probably have hundreds of existing conversations, and then you multiply that times our over 300 million monthly users and that’s a lot of conversations to move.”

Skype 5.0 for iPhone users promises to make text conversations, especially group chats, easier, faster, and convenient like never before.