Skype bought two mobile app companies last year: GroupMe for its group SMS service and Qik for its live mobile video streaming and sharing. GroupMe stripped out its voice conferencing as of 1 January 2012, they say for lack of use. Taking them at their word, why weren’t people using their voice chat?
Self-selection, where people who love group texting don’t want voice?
Was mode-shifting from group text to live or asynch voice too hard?
Was the audio quality sub-par, calling for a complete retooling?
Was the feature buried, never getting a fair chance?
Was it too hard to drag everyone else in your conversation from text into voice mode?
Did voice use-cases occur infrequently?
Was there another app that delivered group voice chat with more speed, quality, and convenience?
You might cure any of these problems with marketing or engineering.
Or is there some natural limit to how many features or kinds of features people will use in a handset app, one core-value-proposition-per-app? If so, Skype might keep its portfolio of Skype, Qik Video, GroupMe and SkypeWiFi apps.
Whatever the reason, paying more attention to fewer features should improve user experience. Someone at #ProductCamp once told me “product management is editing.”
It’s a graceful exit; no customers left hanging. More details on GroupMe’s sunsetting voice conferencing below the fold…
UPDATE: Screenshots including one of my friends and text mentioning him have been altered to hide his identity.
Apple added Skype for iPad 1.0.1273 to the iPad’s App store last night. Skype soon tweeted they were not quite ready for the launch, tidying up web sites and such, but they are ready now. Here’s the YouTube announcement video. You can also pick up your copy using your iPad’s App Store app. This is Skype’s second iOS app, if you don’t include those from Qik. Mobile operators should love this; anything that drives up data plan charges replaces lost income from landlines and mobile voice minutes.
Let’s walk through the features, a long call, and talk about Skype’s editing of the design.
Its new one-to-one video calling features require a user-facing camera; if you have two cameras, you can use both and switch between cameras during a call. [Look-at-me! Look-at-that! Look-at-me!] Skype has yet to offer group video calling on mobiles.
Android Skype users enjoy better integration with the phone’s native address book than their iOS cousins. You can launch a Skype call directly from the address book. iPhone users cannot.
A new user interface looks deliciously iPhone-like. So does the video advert below, with its white backgrounds, folksy music, and shiny actors. The Skype client shown loads and works very fast compared to my own experience. Reminder to self: must buy a more muscular Android phone and cut a thousand people from my Skype contacts.
Android Fragmentation Alert: Video may not work on your Android phone or tablet. You need Android v2.1 on most phones and v2.2 on Samsung Galaxy S. Skype says they’ve tested video on: Google Nexus S, HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson Xperia pro handsets.
Battery Note: The app will stay open in the background so you can still receive Skype IMs and phone calls. sangolt88 commented on YouTube “Still no freakin exit button? lol.” So “Please sign out of Skype to close the application” if you need to preserve battery life.
First, the Android software shipping on TELUS’s new LG handset is Skype’s full Android client, not a thin-client. This means high fidelity audio and no wiretap-ready intermediate gateways. This is great.
Aside from coming with Skype pre-installed, what makes the LG Optimus Black a "Skype edition" smartphone? A Skype spokesperson writes: “The Skype edition LG Optimus Black will be the only Skype-branded phone on the Canadian market. It will feature a preloaded Skype icon that connects the user to the Android Market with one touch, where the latest version of Skype for Android can be downloaded. The Skype edition LG Optimus Black also comes complete with an in-box Skype quick-start guide and up to 60 minutes of Skype Credit, so users can begin connecting with the world right away.”
Nicely designed to recruit new users. When will TELUS promote Skype to all its 7 million mobile customers on all its Android phones?
Download now in the Android market’s Skype page. “What’s in this version: 1. Security update. 2. Calling over your 3G connection is available worldwide – now including the US.” via Android Community.
Engadget published this slide from a MIX11 presentation by Microsoft. And then Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore confirms: Skype coming to Windows Phone 7 ‘this fall.’ Skype hasn’t said anything in public since they backed away from the first Windows Phone 7 release. New technology coming from Microsoft could change that. “Application multitasking for background processing, audio and file transfer, and fast application switching” makes or breaks the Skype mobile experience.
Microsoft: “The free Windows Phone Developer Tools for the new Windows Phone OS will be available to developers in May. … Today, Microsoft also provided an early glimpse of app concepts for the next version of Windows Phone OS with new experiences from Skype, Spotify, Layar, Qantas, Amazon Shopping and Kik Messenger.”
UPDATE 0730 Pacific: A Skype spokesperson wrote “Skype is committed to supporting mobile platforms globally, and we welcome the opportunity to work with any platform developer. At the MIX11 conference, Microsoft shared a visual that represents an early design of what the Skype app for Windows Phone could look like. We look forward to having an opportunity to work with Microsoft to help optimize the Skype for mobile experience as Microsoft develops its new platform.” Microsoft said these pictures were from “an early motion study that we’ve been working with Skype on that shows what Skype could look like on Windows Phone.” This sounds like corporate flirting to me.
An information architecture thought: isn’t there something (anything!) more important to show a Skype user on the home screen? Presence updates of my closest friends? List of recent conversations? Missed calls or conversations? New voicemails to play? The mood and avatar I’m showing to my Skype peeps? Shouldn’t the app home page be less menu and more relationship infographic, communication dashboard or collaboration steering wheel? Is the home page for navigation? Or action?
It looks wasteful to me. I want my home page brimming with freshness. Provoke insight and action. Bring the app’s context to the fore.
Tell me the next thing I must do.
the person to IM or call back.
the conversation to continue.
invites that matter.
scheduled calls coming soon.
contacts with changed presence/profiles/relationships.
moderator responsibilities.
chats i should join.
account issues.
imho, I think that’s what gripingMacUsers kvetch about most. Skype 5 can make the next step, choosing the most important trigger, more opaque. It makes us think, a barrier to decisive (rewarding) action.
The rumor mill: We should expect voice control technologies in iOS 5. More generally, should I be able to control Skype through speech? “Skype, call Rango.” “Skype, answer the call.” “Skype, call Paul at noon.” “Skype, text to George Let’s talk this afternoon.” “Skype, who is near me?” Hands-free is not just safe for driving and easy on the carpal tunnel; talking to machines is becoming a more common user interface.
Qik for iOS is now out in free and $2.99 versions. The three bucks buys you video editing, real-time effects, “HD quality” video, file sync to your camera roll. Both let you point and shoot live video, streaming to friends or the web, and live video calling. Jim Courtney and I tested Qik Video Connect’s presence this morning and neither of us could see if the other was online. If that’s the worst of things, this is a fabulous product. More testing to come. Product tour, Skypenews release, Qik blog post from last week updated with a link to the free version.
Qik updated their latest iPhone app. Downloadrelease 6.1 (4) built 5 March 2011. Dead simple, pretty, and full of features missing from Skype’s other mobile apps.
I’ll show Qik’s features below the fold but expect all their technologies to show up in Skype’s consumer mobile software, consumer and enterprise desktop clients, and Skype’s platforms. Qik’s plumbing that makes this possible is now a Skype asset: cloud video storage and video streaming, proper integration with YouTube for file uploading, video chat performance tuning for a wide range of mobile phones. For the record, Qik’s APIs are Skype’s first web service APIs.
Fellow Emerging Communications Conference speakerChris Mairs brings you Thrutu. “Thrutu™ lets you share all kinds of information and media while you’re on a call — at the touch of a button, and without disrupting the conversation.” Skype set the expectation that you will do more than just talk and Thrutu helps meet that need during PSTN calls on smartphones. Thrutu adds five additional modes to ordinary wireless PSTN calls for US, Canada and UK users but only for GSM and WiMax mobile networks. Sorry, Verizon and Sprint. The modes:
Live map, updated as you walk/drive/ride/levitate. This is great, exploiting a strength of a mobile app and answering visually a common problem: Where are you now? How do we coordinate our arrival at the same place?
Skype doesn’t support locative information beyond an account’s profile of city and country. Skype, often running on more than one device, poses the added barrier of hiding from the other people in a conversation the device(s) being used.
Skype’s newly announced Mobile Partner Program for operators continues work it has done with mobile operators Verizon (US), KDDI au (Japan) and Hutchison 3 (UK). In each case Skype offered thin clients for mobile phones that talked to the Skype cloud through gateways hosted at the operator’s data centers. This meant lighter use of 3G broadband and deployment on a wider range of mobile phones.
Skype’s thin-client/fat-server approach moves most of the heavy bandwidth and processing to the operator-Skype gateways from the phone. Skype voice calls travel over the mobile voice channel using normal mobile quality, not on the mobile broadband data channel. Contrast this with the full Skype client like Skype for iPhone, where the mobile device is a node on the Skype network and voice, video and data travel over the wireless or Wi-Fi data channels. Full clients use Skype’s wideband audio codecs for cinema quality sound, where thin clients produce and consume normal, clipped, mobile phone sound quality.
So this is looking like three product tiers:
Skype Litemobile for 3G with light broadband coverage and low smartphone penetration.
Skype full clients for 3G and Wi-Fi.
Skype rich clients for 4G, ready for mobile video calling, video conferencing, and the latest smartphones.
Now might be a great time to drop in to the Skype for iPhone forum on Skype.com. After you download the new Skype for iPhone 3.0. The video commercial, then the highlights, first look, screenshots and walkthroughs to follow.
From the iTunes site:
Improvements:
Make Skype to Skype video calls on Wi-Fi and 3G* (*Additional Data charges may apply)
Call Skype desktop users (Mac OS X or Windows) and other iPhone users.
Two-way video calls supported on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 4th gen.
Receive only video supported on iPad and iPod touch 3rd gen, with no camera.
Join the Skype 6.X Text Chat Room