Microsoft have decided to discontinue their service Skype as of May 5- 2025, for some enigmatic reason, and instead recommend Teams. Any suggestions for those of us who really, really, don’t like Teams ?
Zoom is pretty much the standard nowadays. Facetime if you’re in the Apple ecosystem. Android and Windows users can join a Facetime call with a link but can not initiate one.
Edit: I should probably add that “standard” seems to be quite regional. Here in the US it’s Zoom and Facetime, but elsewhere it may very well be WhatsApp and Telegram.
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Zoom has a limit of 40 minutes. I never liked Facetime. You can use the app which has been in the news in the last 2 weeks: Signal. However, the audio quality is not as good as with Skype.
The way I use Skype is more like a combined phone, message service, a delivery service of small files, and for screen sharing. It’s always on, like a phone, where you just press a button to get an instant contact. I can send and receive messages and documents to and from my partners, call when needed, use video calls when that is practical, or do two way screen sharing to explain things. It’s virtually like sitting next to the college’s even though they are very far away. Somehow, Zoom and Teams does not live up that directness at all.
Besides this, having a time limit is insanely annoying. You spend a lot of time keeping track of time instead of focusing on the problem at hand. Tried Teams yesterday, and predictably, it stopped working in the middle of a key discussion. Sigh!
Google Meet?
Meta Messenger?
Slack is pretty good too, and they have good clients for almost every platform.
We switched to Slack years ago as Microsoft kept chasing the kids that just weren’t interested. If you liked those changes though, Discord is an option too. Not an option I’d recommend… but an option.
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