The company has finally addressed an issue that has been around for months

Aug 21, 2014 06:06 GMT  ·  By

If you’re using Skype on multiple devices, you most likely know that, in some cases, when talking to a friend on a laptop, both the phone and smartphone are buzzing every time you receive a new message. The same is happening on pretty much every device where you are logged in with your Skype username and password.

Contrary to what some people believed, this is actually a critical bug, and although plenty of users had reported it already, Microsoft apparently needed quite a lot of time to repair it.

Today the company has introduced what it calls active endpoint, a new feature “designed to only deliver chat notifications to the device that you’re currently using.”

While Microsoft doesn’t call it a bug fix, but rather a new feature, active endpoint finally solves a problem that has been extremely annoying for avid Skype users, especially when chatting with friends on a regular basis.

Microsoft says that, when you stop chatting with someone on Skype, all the other devices will start buzzing again when receiving a new message “to make sure you never miss anything important.” Of course, once you read the message on one of the devices where you’re logged in, all the others are automatically switched to silent mode.

“If you are signed in to Skype on multiple devices (a laptop, tablet and a smartphone) and you are sending chat messages to a group of friends from your tablet,” the company explains.

“Skype will only send new message notifications to your tablet and not to any of your other devices. All of your other devices will remain blissfully silent. You can continue to focus on the most important thing, your conversations, without being disturbed by the bleeping and buzzing from all of your other devices.”

This feature does not affect chat history, as the whole conversation that you have on one device is automatically synchronized to all the other devices where Skype is logged in. This way, you can continue from where you left off, as long as the latest version of Skype is installed.

And speaking of versions, Microsoft says that it’s absolutely mandatory to run the very latest update to make sure that you’re benefitting from these improvements, so go ahead and download Skype right now to get active endpoint too.

“To make sure that you get the full active endpoint experience, please make sure that all of your devices are running the most up-to-date versions of Skype,” it says.