Posted by Perhaps the most bloated and sluggish mobile application that I have used in recent times is the Skype Android app. Even on high end hardware, it was a constant pain using it. It was sluggish in every way and I tended to avoid it. Thankfully, after over a year of complaints, Microsoft says they have fixed the bloated Skype app.
Bearing in mind my personal experiences with the app on a flagship device like the LG G6, I can only imagine how painful an experience it must be on mid-range and cheap smartphones.
A Year Of Complaints About The Bloated Skype App
While I never put up a blog post about the painful user experience with Skype for Android, I did tweet about it. Here are two such tweets:
The Skype app for Android is as bad as BBM for Windows Phone. Most times, unless I open it, no messages come in. #fail #skype #bbm
— 📱 Mister Mo (@moverick) December 13, 2016
The new Skype app for Android appears to be very heavy. Microsoft needs to understand and deploy software for mobile better.
— 📱 Mister Mo (@moverick) December 30, 2017
I was a lover of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), and what finally ended my relationship with it was how it ground my smartphone to a sluggish crawl once installed. Skype app for Android never got that bad, but in use was sluggish enough to make me set it aside.
Skype Lite To The Rescue
I had to use Skype Lite in place of the regular app. Skype Lite is designed to provide a smooth user experience for users of low-end smartphones and of slow network connections.
The Updated Skype App Is Lighter and Faster
Microsoft’s official statement says that the new Skype app is “lighter on both disk and memory consumption, allowing for greater speed and better audio and video quality on lower end Android devices”. Sounds sort of like Skype Lite all over again. Which is not like a bad thing.
The optimized app will also run on Android for 4.0.3 to 5.1 smartphones. All these sound good on paper. I hope it works as good in usage. Bloated, sluggish apps are a bad idea in every way, whether the devices in question are high end, mid-range or cheap smartphones.
The update isn’t rolling out yet as at the time of publishing this, but Microsoft says it will happen “in the coming weeks”.
We hope that the Skype development team got it right this time. I might not be able to have a go with it though, as I have stopped using my Microsoft account and Skype totally. You can get the full story behind that in this Forum conversation: Why I dumped and deleted Skype everywhere.
Founder of MobilityArena. Yomi’s journey in mobile started in 2001. Besides obsessing over mobile phones, he also started creating WAP sites (early mobile-friendly websites created with WML). He began writing about phones in 2004 and has been at it since then. He has owned over 200 devices, from Symbian, Palm, PocketPC/Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/BB10, webOS, Windows Phone, Firefox, Ubuntu Touch, to Android, iOS, and KaiOS operating systems.
Lag is horrible.
There is this keyboard application I love so much. Kii Keybaord 2. Like Swype it has been abandoned by the author.
The keyboard is good but the problem rears its head when you are handing voluminous text, and the lag slows you to a crawl.
No other solution except delete. A shame.
Microsoft Corporation has always been known for writing inefficient code, right from the days of desktop. A visual Basic app to display ‘Hello” would be as big as another app on that same platform to do far far more. No optimizations.
Yes, learning to write lean efficient code is something Microsoft Corporation needs to learn, but can an old dog really learn new tricks!? They have carried over their age long inefficiency from the desktop to the mobile world!
Compare an app like WPS Office – on Android (an epitome of lean efficiency and competence) with the Microsoft offering, and the difference is as clear as day versus night!
Good to know that Microsoft is responding to this, even though it takes them a year to do so. I just hope the coming of the new Skype light version will give the users the same experience they had in the past from the old version.
I still do not get it. Why do Microsoft take time to fix anything and when they do it is becomes sluggish the more or have more ads attached to it.
By Now mister Mo should have considered and re-install the Skype app.. Another try.