Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Skype drops connection within about 20 seconds of initiating a call on MacOS

Is this happening to you? Well, I pain your feel! But do not worry, I figured it out. Simply kill Skype, remove your Skype application's user profile, and restart Skype. Then I was able to initiate a call over wifi, and it would not drop.  Specifically, this is what I did to fix the issue:
$ killall Skype
$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/
$ mv Skype ~/trash/Skype_01
$ mv Skype.app ~/trash/Skype.app_01
Then restarted Skype, and all was well with initiating calls. Here were the symptoms of what I was experiencing:
  1. If I initiated a call, it would drop within about 20 or 30 seconds of starting it. 
  2. If I was on a group call withe others, and I tried to share my screen ... it would silently fail and they would never see my screen share. 
  3. If someone else initiated the call, the call would procede normally, and it would not be dropped, so it makes you feel like you are the only one on the planet who ever sees this issue. 
  4. The problem crept in with a skype update within the last 6 months of 20161012, so some time after April of 2016. Installing Skype_7.37.178 did not help. 
  5. This was occurring on MacOS Yosemite and Sierra.
  6. Originally had Skype_6.17.60.477 installed and let Skype update itself from there.
I tried everything, nothing helped. Here were some of the things that failed to solve the issue:
  1. Basically, following most advice on this web site was useless.
  2. Specifically, these posts which came up first with google.
  3. There was this one post which I found after solving the issue which seemed to have an answer which was close to solving the issue on MacOS, but I basically had to google the solution in order to find this.
  4. Any posts which talked about adjusting Settings -> Energy Saver or using the "pmset" command to adjust power management settings or sleep settings ... these suggestions were useless.
  5. Upgrading to MacOS Sierra did not help.
Hope that helps.