At least, I had a problem with "video" calls. It's often too cumbersome and gives too much info about the visual aspect of myself when it's not necessary and when I don't want it to happen. (e.g., getting on a call with a stranger or clients.) Using the "voice" call, I won't worry over washing my face at 9am in the morning.

skype is so crappy that i usually call people in video, and then after some problems we are both disabling video to try to improve audio quality.

This.

I am actually waiting for a "video chat" application that allows me to choose between "having crappy video frames every second" or "having very high quality picture frames every 10~30 seconds".

It would be very useful if you could fix the picture quality at say, 640x480 and then the framerate dropped to get that quality. That way video conference could be very useful to share stuff like whiteboard drawings, among other things.

Yeah, meanwhile Skype is just removing features. The other day I had this Skype followup job interview and I realized I should change my display picture or better yet remove it because taking pictures of ones self is tedious. They removed the ability to remove your display pic. What the fuck?

Would love a proper open source Skype replacement. Something that meets all of the features in a similar or better interface, while also being pro-privacy pro-encryption. Kind of like the Firefox of communication clients. I don't think it's plausible any time soon as you can only Skype fellow skype users. People need a reason to switch and stay there, thus approaching Skype levels of a userbase. Maybe if Firefox itself integrated a powerful addon that could compete with Skype, which would allow for a huge userbase. Heh, one can hope.

I'm with you on the quality thing though. So. Many. Times. Have I had to deal with cumbersome upload speeds for either person thus degrading audio and video to the point where they look like blobs or I do. Sometimes it happens no matter what the user's connection is like. Then there's the whole auto background noise amplifier that kicks in when you're not speaking for a period, to conveniently transmit your TV or aircon at ear shattering volumes. And once again you can't turn that off!

It's just, like, these people developing apps like Skype don't care about making it a great application. How much does it really cost to put in a few critically useful features? Are the devs not passionate? Is there too much bureaucracy? Why is "it works" an acceptable standard? How the hell can you be a devloper for something that is literally used by so many millions of people and yet feel no urge to make that software the absolute finest possible?