Keeping your smartphone’s battery life up throughout the day is a struggle for just about everyone and battery-intensive applications do not help. Skype is updating its Android app in order to address this problem, stating that the new version will not cause battery drain even if Skype is running all day long.
The biggest change present in Skype version 4.7 is the removal of group message notifications. These are now turned off by default so that Skype requires less power in the background, thereby improving battery life.
Leave Skype running all day with no noticeable battery drain. To achieve these amazing savings, we’ve temporarily turned off push notification of group chat messages. – Skype
Skype also notes that this is not the only battery-centric update for the service and that more changes will be coming in the future in order to ensure that the Skype application does not ruin smartphone batteries.
We are introducing aggressive battery life savings that will allow most of our users to leave Skype running without noticeably affecting battery life, – Skype
If you do not care about the battery improvements or you happen to have your phone plugged in while using Skype, you can still turn on the notifications. In order to do this, you an enter settings, notifications, and then check “sync group messages.”
By doing this, the app will constantly be using more juice while it is active and while it is in the background.
A handful of bug fixes were also provided in 4.7. The update reportedly addresses the camera issues present on KitKat devices and the bug that caused both audio and video to be blocked in some scenarios.
Microsoft says that a similar change that addresses battery life will be released for the Kindle Fire version of Skype. This update is expected to come before the end of March.
Summary: Skype for Android has been updated in order to improve its impact on battery life. It now turns off group message notifications by default. A similar update for the Kindle Fire platform will be coming out before the end of this month.
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