I’ll let Skype do the talking: Russ Shaw, General Manager of Skype’s mobile business in December 2009: Many of you have also been asking when we’ll release a version which allows you to make calls over 3G – the holy grail of Skype on the mobile, if you like. We’ve had a 3G-capable version ready for some time now, but Apple’s current restrictions mean that they won’t allow us to make it available on the App Store for the moment. Apple, of course, lifted this restriction last month when vendors such as Fring released 3G versions of the Skype client. AT&T lifted any restrictions on VoIP apps last year. Nothing from Skype. Push Notification requests flood our comments and those of Skype every time they make an iPhone announcement. They clearly know this is the first (and often only) feature request people have yet they’ve failed to address this at every update. Let’s not pretend Skype is a mom and pop shop and need some help figuring out this Push notification thing either. Skype has over half a Billion user accounts. That’s almost two accounts for every man, woman and child in the US. They had revenues of $185 million in the last quarter on 27.7 billion Skype-In minutes and 3.1 billion Skype-Out minutes. Skype is the world’s largest international voice carrier, bigger than Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon or anyone else. They have versions of Skype for just about every platform imaginable: Symbian, Maemo, Linux, Windows, Mac, WinMob, Blackberry, Java phones of all shapes and sizes, etc. Skype for iPhone was a smash hit. They had a million downloads in two days. It is one of the most popular apps on the iPhone. So after all of that let me get this straight: Skype hasn’t been able to get 3G and Push Notifications working on the iPhone why? The only reason besides complete ineptitude that would possibly make sense is that they threw that into the Verizon deal. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd9hNq4ZIqU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
