In this article I’m going to discuss Skype analogs. Fortunately, there are great options available and Skype is not a monopolist on this market anymore.
What should a good communication app have to fully replace Skype?
There should be a few options:
- This app must be popular all over the world, a lot of people should be familiar with it.
- This app must be available for all platforms - Android, iPhone and Windows-based desktop computer.
- The Skype analog should be functional: it should allow text chat, voice and video calls, sharing photos and files.
- It should be user-friendly.
Good Skype replacing apps:
Google Hangouts (perhaps the best Skype analog):

All good Skype analogues meet all the above mentioned requirements. Therefore, to win the first place there should be something special. Hangouts is great because it gets installed by default for all users of Android operating system. There are more Android-based mobile devices owners than any other OS users in the world nowadays. Therefore, most likely, almost all of your friends have Hangouts preinstalled and it would be easy for them to start using it. Hangouts can be downloaded in any app store of your operating system (for Android it is installed by default).
WhatsApp and Viber (really good things):

These are excellent apps for messaging and sharing photos and videos. These two are very popular all over the world (including Russia). Choose the one that is more convenient for you and your friends. You can use several at once.
Telegram:

The most prominent advantage of this messenger is its high level of security. Serious data encryption is used, so you can be sure your messages won’t be read by any stranger. Also Telegram offers special “self-destructing” messages option to delete the message as soon as it was read by the recipient.
Bad Skype replaces apps:
There are also a great number of applications that are not recommended to use instead of Skype as some of them are outdated and don’t offer necessary functionality. For these applications we would add the legendary ICQ.
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