Microsoft is shutting down Skype on May 5, 2025. The most obvious way to deal with it is to simply switch to their Teams service instead. With its free “home” account, you can have a call up to an hour at a time. Not ideal, but workable.
So there’s that, but isn’t there a better alternative? I do not like Teams’ time limit. “7 open source alternatives to Skype | Opensource.com” lists some.
I’ve been using Jitsi Meet for public seminars because I hate the time limit imposed on Zoom’s free accounts. Works fine, but the problem is that it is just for conferencing. It is not meant to be used to chatting.
Jami appealed to me because of its P2P architecture, i.e., no servers necessary. However, such info as the one on “Has anyone actually got Jami to work reliably? – Generic topics – Jami Forum” worries me. The fact it does not have a Web-only app is a minus… wait, there seems to be one. The calling feature is marked experimental for the desktop client and screen/window sharing seems to work only on Linux. These are serious drawbacks for my use cases. As far as I can tell at this time, there’s no API to interact with the service.
I’ve been eyeing Matrix for years. Matrix is a federated IM system; multiple servers work together. They provide matrix.org for the default server, but someone advises strongly against using matrix.org. He also lists some free servers and there is another list, but none is in Japan or even in Asia. I have no idea how good and reliable these free servers are.
Matrix used to rely on Jitsi Meet for video/audio calls, but I believe it can handle it on its own. I did a little test — Audio and video works and screensharing from a Web element app also works. Recording is not provided out of the box.
Incidentally, SMS Gateway for Android
would be useful to combine with Matrix. But Beeper seems to have used Android SMS, which is based on GitHub – mautrix/imessage: A Matrix-iMessage puppeting bridge, but for Android SMSes, the author now recommends mautrix/gmessages: A Matrix-Google Messages puppeting bridge. If you need RCS, then mautrix/gmessages should be the way to go. I do not know if it supports dual SIMs, though. SMS Gateway for Android does.
So if I were to pick one at this time, it would be Matrix.
I wrongly thought Beeper would be a good choice. Beeper, a Matrix-based service, is free for now, although we can certainly expect them to start charging at some point. But the big deal breaker is that Beeper only handles messages, not calls.