Since acquiring Skype, Microsoft has made very few changes to the instant messaging platform, and there are still plenty of issues that need to be addressed. Talking to the Verge, Skype product manager Jeff Kunins promises that problems will be fixed and that there’ll be better support for using the service on multiple devices: “We’re not there yet, but we will be.”
This is something that is increasingly important as more and more people find themselves using more than one device. At the moment it is easy enough to use Skype on your phone, desktop and tablet, but you’re not necessarily guaranteed to be able to access your entire message history on each device, and it is all too easy for messages and a notifications to fall out of sync. This is something that will be a problem of the past according to Kunins:
“You’ll see us very soon begin rolling that out so users get the benefit of cloud history, synced read state across all of your devices.”
A problem with call state syncing is proving rather more difficult to address — you know… when you receive a call, pick up on one device and it keeps ringing on another. Kunins describes this as “a fun bug we’re working on” but has no hints at when it might be fixed.
The evolution of Skype is about much more than just fixing problems, though — big things are planned for Windows Phone 8.1 as well. “We’ve made a ton of progress on our Windows Phone app in general, and as you can imagine we’re doing a lot of fun things for Windows Phone 8.1 as well. I think there will be some fun things to see there,” says Kunins.
There are no details about what we can expect to see, but watch this space and we’ll keep you up to date.
