Skype is trying to gain attention from FaceTime with its new features. The company has announced that they will double the number of users who can participate at once in a group, with an audio or video call. The maximum number of users was 25, and after the update, Skype will support 50 users.
Thanks to this new feature, Skype will top other favorite messaging apps, like Instagram, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, because of the expanded support for more people. But, the competition is more directly with Zoom enterprise that offers calling solutions which support up from 100 to 1,000 users and has the feature to display 49 webcams in the gallery view. The application is somewhere between an enterprise platform and consumer apps.
Also, Skype is using the same one-ups like Facebook Messenger that allows 50 people to join in a chat, but the screen is limited, and it will show you only the speaker from the people that are joined. On the other hand, Skype is showing the participants in bubbles on top of the screen, and you can choose on which feed you want to focus on the multi-paned main window.
However, Skype’s update will overcome Apple’s FaceTime that now is supporting a limit of 32 users in a group call. Also, Group FaceTime had some issues after a security bug was discovered by a teenager who could eavesdrop before calls were picked up. Of course, Apple had fixed the bug, disable the feature, and re-enabled Group FaceTime with the iOS 12.14 release. Moreover, the update had changed some elements in the calling app. If you want to add a person in the group, you must have at least three users on the FaceTime call.
To sum up, with this new update of Skype, the user experience is much more comfortable. If your group is smaller than 25 participants, you can ring the group at the same time. Everything was tested in March, and today you can download the latest version of Skype.