While Skype has been around for a very long time, it feels that the chat app is lacking features that many other chat apps launched after it have since included. For example read receipts were only recently added, and for an app that was initially marketed for making calls over the internet, call recording was a feature that was only added last month.
Now it looks like Skype is about to get yet another long overdue feature in the form of message archiving. According to Microsoft’s website, the feature is only available to those part of the Skype Insider program (essentially beta testers). This means that the feature won’t be available to the general public yet, but it is expected to be released in a future update.
It seems that the feature is still in the somewhat early stages of development as Microsoft is seeking feedback from Insiders on certain aspects of it. For example Microsoft wants to know if users prefer the term “archive” versus “hide” when it comes to storing chats. They are also asking if users would prefer if chats are automatically unarchived when they are reopened, or if it should be done manually.
That being said, the rest of the archiving feature is pretty much as the name suggests and is rather straightforward in nature, so we doubt that there will be any surprises when the feature does eventually go live, which is expected to be applicable for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.