Pre-Microsoft Skype suffered from connection issues, poor call quality, and dropped contact lists.

Post-Microsoft Skype suffers from connection issues, poor call quality, dropped contact lists, impossible to find options, and a user interface designed to be Snapchat.

Calling my mom's phone, which is at the top of my address book, takes like 6 touches, and that's because I do it often enough that muscle memory overrides UI confusion.

It was poorly-functioning, but all the alternatives were far worse. Just the fact that Skype would always connect despite double-NAT and broken UDP and god knows what seemed magic at the time.

Now Skype has gotten even worse (their "Snapchat" UI is completely unusable), and the alternatives have gotten better.

Yes, it was horribly buggy, the Android app in particular. It would only occasionally notify you of new messages.

In the last year or two I've found it to be much more reliable, and the reviews seem to concur.

Average rating of 3.8 in 2012:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120422145525/https://play.googl...

Average rating of 4.1 today:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skype.raid...

There are lots of anecdotal reports in these threads and in the article, but the objective evidence seems to show that people like it better today than they did in 2012.

Skype was always a little bit iffy on message delivery when it was peer to peer.