So, remember when Microsoft bought Skype back in May? The Android and iOS communities all buzzed with rumors that Skype’s development may slow down or even disappear on other mobile platforms, favoring integration with their own Windows Phone products instead. Thankfully that wasn’t the case, as Skype has released numerous updates for other platforms since then and now offers splendid performance on both iOS and Android, complete with video chat. In fact, it almost seems as if Skype skipped over their new parent company’s mobile OS entirely. Enter the new beta of Skype for Windows Phone, released with a full version planned for sometime in April. Expect all the features we’ve come to know and love, including voice, text and video chat. One feature absent from this release? Background tasking.
Microsoft appears to have shot itself in the foot with this one. You see, background tasks are the bread and butter of a multitasking experience, something that Windows Mobile was famous for until Microsoft changed everything with version 7. In an effort to make their platform more popular with consumers, Microsoft has simplified the UI and built it around the Zune interface, rather than the desktop-like Pocket PC interface that it has been using for over a decade. While the Zune UI (also known as Metro) is undoubtedly more user friendly than Pocket PC, it also completely discarded the ability to run more than one thing at a time.
Not to draw any obvious references here, but Microsoft’s competitor Apple also built a phone around a consumer-oriented media player that also lacked multitasking at first. If anyone can prove that cut-paste and multitasking aren’t necessary recipes for a blockbuster phone, Apple can. But perhaps Microsoft missed the memo that Apple was already reversing many of their initial limitations and now offers full multitasking support in iOS.
Windows Phone 7 can get around all this by utilizing notifications (doesn’t that also sound familiar?) in most situations. A notification can invoke an inactive app and bring it back to the foreground, where it can continue where it left off. That model doesn’t work well with Skype, apparently.
According to a report from The Verge, when the Skype app is sent to the background, you can’t receive calls or even remain connected to a current one. It simply shuts off the app until you bring it back to the foreground again. Skype’s official response is that this was a limitation to the platform in general, and this behavior won’t change in the foreseeable future. That’s perhaps a bit ironic, because Android and iOS versions of Skype as well as the version for Microsoft’s own obsolete Windows Mobile 6.5, did this just fine.
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