The Skype team has taken to their blog to announce an update to the Skype app for Android, which brings the app to version 6.11 and introduces an updated UI along with some new features for managing conversations and sharing files.
Specifically, the app’s UI now closely follows Google’s Material design guidelines, with one context-sensitive button floating at the lower-right corner in the main view. Users can now long-press a contact or chat in the Recent tab to bring up options to delete, mark as read, or mute notifications. Saving video messages has also been made easier, requiring only a tap to save them to the phone’s photo gallery. You can now also search for conversation content from the search bar, in addition to contacts and groups.
Sharing photos directly from the phone gallery to a group chat has finally arrived, along with the ability to forward files from one group chat to another contact or group. Forwarding now also works with Mojis, Skype’s recently-introduced special set of moving emojis; they will also not play automatically when forwarded, requiring a tap to activate.
Overall, Skype is coming along nicely on non-Microsoft mobile platforms, though there’s still some work to be done to make it as convenient as the more popular options like Facebook’s Messenger.
