[bad_user]

I really hate Skype, but unfortunately Skype has no alternative for group audio / video calls, with the occasional screen sharing. Hangouts seemed promising, but it's worse. But I can tell you that at our company we are giving up on Slack, but not on Skype.

> rebuilding every native app they have from the ground up, every single one is awful

On Mac OS X, which is what I use, it's acceptable. I found it to be fairly acceptable on iOS as well, though you can't rely on receiving group chat messages in time (in all honesty, I think that's a feature :)). I don't use Windows, I imagine it's fine there.

On Linux it's super awful. I have hope for the new web interface to replace my needs for a Linux client, but the web interface is awful as well. On Android last year it leaked my battery like crazy. Nowadays it's maybe better in battery usage, but I had problems with my microphone - if I mute and then un-mute, then it can happen for the mic to not recover and I have to reinitiate the call. It's super annoying.

My personal feeling is that Microsoft does not invest enough resources in these clients. On the primary platforms they always seem to be one or two bugs away from being OK. On Linux it's like the same client from 5 years ago and it still works, but it never got any love from Microsoft. So I think they simply didn't give a crap, hoping to lure people into Lync or something. Which is too bad, because Skype always had great potential, it still has.

[recursive]

Hangouts works far better for me than Skype. It just works. With skype, I struggle to even create video conversation. I remember one fateful day when I tried 4 different devices with skype installed, and had a complete failure to get any of them to work.

[bad_user]

It depends on your location I guess. I'm from Romania and travel and speak with people mostly in Europe. I've had the same failure you mention with Hangouts. And video quality was never OK whenever I tried, with frames being dropped and so on. Whereas Skype has been OK even on my mobile 3G/4G connection and I'm a heavy user.

In fairness, Skype had a couple of major network outages. Maybe you hit one of those.

[FireBeyond]

Hangouts is horrific on a Mac. It'll peg an i7 with discrete graphics at 80%+ CPU, and run at 170F for the length of the call.

[rleigh]

My group switched from Skype to Zoom (.us) a year or so back. We did try using Hangouts for a few months, but we found the browser plugin pretty terrible for pegging the CPU at 100%, even when not in use. In comparison, Zoom has vastly better video and audio quality, allows group chats with very large numbers of participants, and allows screen sharing and chat on the side.

Shame really, we used to be pretty heavy cross-platform users of Skype. But it had annoying problems with group limits and audio quality before the Microsoft acquisition, and that quality seemed to take a nosedive shortly afterward. On the positive side, there are at least better alternatives cropping up.