Microsoft Teams

Carried between desks

Hardly anybody picks Teams. It arrives with the job, and the Android app is the part of it you carry away from the computer, so the only fair question is whether it keeps you in touch with work while you’re not at one. Mostly it does, with friction all the way.

Chats and channels keep pace

Direct messages and channel conversations sync properly, files attach and open without drama, and your status carries over from the desktop client. Muting individual channels becomes essential once you belong to twenty of them, and that control is at least there.

Joining a meeting from a corridor

Tapping into a call while walking is reliable, audio holds up on an ordinary connection, and a shared screen arrives legible rather than as a smear. Opening a document inside the call, without leaving the call, is the bit rival tools handle clumsily.

A desktop app folded into a phone

This is where the score sits. The layout was designed for a wide screen and the phone version wears it badly. Everything is dense, and getting from a chat to a team to the call you’re already late for takes more taps than it should. Mute is the example everyone meets. You’re in a meeting, a dog starts barking downstairs, and the control you need has tucked itself behind a collapsed bar that takes a tap to reveal and a moment to locate, all of it broadcast to the room. Long video calls also drain the battery hard enough that a charger stops being optional on a travel day.

Notifications that pick their moments

Channel messages sometimes turn up late or not at all, while mentions come through loudly and instantly, which is precisely the wrong way round for anyone trying to follow a busy channel from a phone.

Fair only inside the ecosystem

If the organisation already runs on Microsoft, this is the mobile client, and the annoyances stay annoyances rather than turning into reasons to escape. Chosen fresh, on the strength of the phone experience alone, it wouldn’t win against simpler rivals. That’s the honest shape of it.