Sure, as long as an Apple user is initiating.
Wife does a lot of video call meetings with courts and clients and doesn't use iPhone or Mac. They almost always use Zoom.
My company uses Teams for everything.
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Skype Shuts Down After 22 Years, Ending an Era of Internet Calling
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Sure, as long as an Apple user is initiating.
Wife does a lot of video call meetings with courts and clients and doesn't use iPhone or Mac. They almost always use Zoom.
My company uses Teams for everything.
Shoot... I think I still have a balance created when there was a charge for placing an international phone call. Oh well. Skype changed things so much in its early days re: international comms. Did for me a least -- pretty sure I was using it shortly after its 2003 beta release (prior to eBay/Msft takeovers). Thx Skype.
I'm near 100% certain you're wrong...
It'd be an enormous deal if these different services operated with each other. I'm not sure why I have even the faintest doubt that you could be right... it would be so exciting for you to be right. But it took a lot of pressure from the Chinese government for Apple to support something as simple as RCS - there is no video messaging standard to adopt in the first place, and AFAIK nobody is so much as looking into it.
Huh?
Facetime to a non-Apple user has been a thing for a while...since 2021. The non-Apple user get emailed/messaged a link that opens a Browser window that enables Facetime; it's not a standard. Is that what you are talking about?
Never used it, but my brother did with my parents while he was deployed.
Join a FaceTime call from an Android or Windows device - Apple Support
Got an Android or Windows device? With FaceTime links in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, anyone can join a FaceTime call from their web browser.
App still works. (Yes, I'm one of those forlorn 10% remaining users.) Rumors of death exaggerated?
Funny people has been talking about moving over from Skype to something else without mentioning Discord – that's what made me jump ship. 
But I have good memories of Skype overall. Remember using the feature to buy credits for calling landlines was handy a few times and the chat functionality worked well overall I think. I know some people was upset when they moved over to a one window design removing the ability to have chats in separate windows. I can understand that.
Oh, well – bye Skype, it was good knowing you!
But I have good memories of Skype overall. Remember using the feature to buy credits for calling landlines was handy a few times and the chat functionality worked well overall I think. I know some people was upset when they moved over to a one window design removing the ability to have chats in separate windows. I can understand that.
Oh, well – bye Skype, it was good knowing you!
Skype was doomed as soon as it fell on Microsoft hands. Even the original developers regretted selling it to them and said Google would have been a more appropriate choice.
You said it was quickly outpaced by the competition, and it was, but at the time of Microsoft purchase Skype dominated a huge portion of the VoIP market, the demise is on Microsoft solely.
Me too, but the app doesn't work anymore - at least here in Germany.
See screenshot:
There is only a hint to using Teams.
I wonder if this only happens if you perform the latest update (as I did on my Mac).
On my phone I'm on 8.138.0.213 and it's still working fine.
I do have another £6-7 credit left, not sure if that makes any difference.
Buying Skype was almost surely great value for what MS paid, even at three times the initial estimated value (I believe there was a bidding war with Google that drove up the price).
It allowed MS to begin integrating Skype's technology into the Windows OS (users needed better communications options that MS could never gain traction on) - fast forward to 2025 where MS Teams is a major player in video conferencing, enhancing MS's user subscription value in the corporate world. I believe Teams is still using some of Skype's core tech 14 years later.
it’s not exactly the same tune, but it’s very similar (same key, same “instrument”)
I'll be honest I very rarely use this when I had it. I felt like the competition just hopscotch over them. Never really fully got integrated into it. I remember when Facebook started allowing calls videos or direct calling I knew Skype was over.
I've been using Skype for years to call my parents land-line in Scotland from my mobile phone here in the US. At only pennies a minute, my credit lasted forever. Now they've migrated my credits to Skype Dial Pad to allow me to us up what I have left, but it looks like once their gone, there gone. No option to reload that I can find. At least I can use what's left. I wonder if the rates are the same?
VoIP was all the rage in the tech literature as the "next big thing" by the mid-1990s - everyone saw it coming. But having a good user interface and simplifying ease of use ARE the most important thing for extending usage. When I was a grad student at Berkeley, a linguist friend was in Vienna for two years on a Fulbright to work on his PhD. Poor grad students with no money, some computer science friends taught him to go to the computer lab at Universität Wien and they would open a command line link between the two terminals (ours was a via a modem and my Mac Plus, as we all huddled around the 9" screen).
So we were doing real time, free international texting (slowly watching each letter appear, lol) back in 1988. I suspect the hardcore scientists had been doing this for decades. Could I call this an early version of IM, seven years before the www was invented? Maybe, but this was surely not user friendly in ANY universe.
Oh yea. The iconic “uh oh” ICQ notification sound is forever burned into my brain.
If Microsoft wanted to keep Skype going they would have put resources into it. Instead they let it dwindle away into obsolescence. Skype would still be a top contender if Microsoft had not bought it.
People talk about Yolla for international calls - haven't used it (I have Ooma) but it looks like it's about 6 cents a minute to a landline.
Doesn't one of your folks have a mobile phone? You can do an audio Zoom call (free users limited to 45 minutes), or use WhatsApp, if you can walk them through downloading and installing an app. Then you can text them and set up a time to chat if they are not too tech savvy - "Mom, I'll call you later on WhatsApp at 3pm - have the app open on your phone."