Skype update for Windows Phone 8 removes People Hub integration

The latest update for Microsoft’s Skype app on Windows Phone 8 has removed the People Hub functionality, a post on the developer blog has revealed.

The change means when you look at a contact card in the People Hub you can no longer see that contact’s Skype details, which according to the developer blog post were removed due to ‘issues with device stability.’

‘We are working with the Windows Phone team to resolve the issue and to enable the integration again in a future release,’ said the development team statement.

It’s important to stress that this is still officially a preliminary build, dubbed ‘Preview 2.1’, so it’s not entirely surprising there are still some teething problems requiring this kind of attention.

However, Skype integration at the contact level was something Microsoft drew attention to ahead of launch and then made everyone wait a bit after release, so to then withdraw that functionality is surely going to sting for some users and is a bit of a loss of face for Microsoft to say the very least.

Still, while the new update removes some functionality it also adds some new stuff in too. As well as a few bugfixes the Skype team has improved the keyboard input for text chat with autocomplete and autocorrect, added support for Windows Live buddies in the contacts list and there are some tweaks to the pop-up ‘Toast’ notifications.