Making Microsoft Teams Great on Mac, iPad and iPhone with Microsoft Engineering

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu, Partner Group Engineering Manager, and Avinash Prasad, Partner Director of Engineering, both at Microsoft, talk through the importance of the Apple Platforms, user experience and new features.

• How the team “sim‑ships” features across platforms while embracing earned, Mac‑native integrations like Menu Bar Extras, AirPods support, and native screen sharing.
• Why day‑zero readiness for new macOS releases matters, and how close collaboration with Apple plus early beta testing protects reliability and performance.
• The update stance: older Teams clients are actively blocked after three versions, with visibility and remediation via the Teams Client Health dashboard for IT admins.
• Advances on iPad including dedicated multi‑window for chats and channels, external monitor support, and keyboard workflows.
• CarPlay improvements for safer commutes: hands‑free replies, notifications that respect system focus modes, and a continued push toward voice‑first experiences as the platform evolves.

Thanks to Crestron, this episode’s sponsor, for their continued support of Empowering.Cloud.

Transcript

Avinash Prasad: We do some prioritisation based on the value that a feature will bring to the user. A lot of ROI discussions happen every time we do our backlog planning. What we try to do is ensure anything important, such as threading or the left adaptive rail, is prioritised. The feature teams are responsible for testing all those.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: Where we come in as the Mac team is to provide perspectives or feedback early on, looking at whether a feature fits into the whole ecosystem of the Mac app. We share what we are seeing and how it works.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we are going deep on Teams for Mac and Teams for iOS—both mobile and iPad. It's such an important platform for Microsoft, and it's interesting to see where Microsoft decides to do custom things for those platforms versus staying the same as the Windows client. It's a really interesting conversation with Hari and Avinash from the Microsoft team. Thanks to Crestron for sponsoring this podcast. On with the show.

Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. I'm really excited to talk about this one. Something that doesn't get enough visibility is the amount of features and innovation happening on the Mac and Apple side. Mac OS, iPad, iOS, CarPlay—there's a lot going on. We've got the right people to talk to here. Hari, could you introduce yourself first?

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: Thank you very much for this opportunity, Tom. I'm Hari Krishna. I work in Microsoft Teams, and my team owns Teams clients on both Windows and Mac. I'm excited to talk about the work the team has done and is doing, and what we'll be doing on the Teams Mac client going forward. I'll share some behind-the-scenes insights.

Tom Arbuthnot: Avinash, thanks for joining. Could you give us a bit of background and your role? I know you look after the mobile clients.

Avinash Prasad: I'm Avinash. I've been at Microsoft for around 20 years, with a lot of experience in the mobile area across many platforms. I now lead the engineering efforts on mobile clients for both iOS and Android. As discussed earlier, we'll talk about some of the cool innovations we're bringing to mobile platforms, especially iPad and iOS.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hari, could you give us a little bit of background, since you've been working with the team for a while? Your Microsoft background would be interesting to hear.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: I joined Microsoft out of college. It's been 19 years at Microsoft. It's been a great journey. I've worked across the stack in Windows, Windows operating systems, the good old Windows phone, built frameworks, built applications on top of it, OneNote Mobile as an example, and then moved on to the office applications. I've done some Windows updates and CXE side of it, working with customers, fixing Windows issues they were facing, asset update delivery team, and then had a great opportunity to work on the first version of Teams as an architect, both in the client on Electron. We saw the whole COVID surge, great growth, the rocket ship growth of Teams, and I was able to see it and understand how customers are using Teams. It's been exciting to see that growth. Now we have moved on to the next stack, which has been serving, secure, and reliable. You have seen the performance improvements from classic Teams to new Teams in the last couple of years. It's been phenomenal to see that growth and change in the architecture and how users have given us feedback. Now we are onto this next journey of understanding our customers better, making sure customer feedback is addressed quickly, and making Teams one of the best products out there based on the feedback and innovation we want to bring.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's really interesting because in the Skype for Business days, it was very Windows-driven. We had to wait a long time for the iOS client to come out, and then there was a lot of forking—this worked on this client but not on that client. I remember back in the early Teams days, it was about keeping things as uniform as possible, so there weren't massive disparities between Android, Windows Mobile, and iOS. It feels like that's been broadly true across platforms. As we talk about Mac now, I'd love to know—Microsoft is Windows, but Mac is a really important platform to a lot of businesses. Where do you choose to customise for Mac because of native capabilities?

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: Teams on Mac is used by some of our best critics—decision makers and developers, people with strong opinions. Mac users need everything to be pixel perfect, which drives us to make Teams even better on Mac. In the last six months, we've worked on AirPod integration for calling and meetings, allowing mute/unmute seamlessly. We've done Mac mini bar extra integration, so you can quickly start a chat or go into settings from the top right, even before opening the Teams app. The presented toolbar and screen sharing with multiple monitors are now glitch-free and less distracting. We're listening to feedback and fixing issues quickly. Every time Apple ships a new OS, Teams engineering ensures the Teams app works well, gets SDK updates, and has no reliability or crash issues. We're shifting left to test and validate developer builds as they come in. We've established a rhythm with Apple engineering and marketing teams to solve issues together, so by day zero of GA for Mac OS 26, released in September, Teams is ready.

Tom Arbuthnot: They're moving to a yearly cadence, aren't they? Accelerating their release schedule.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: Yes, and we're making sure the day zero release and experience of Teams on new Mac OS versions is rock solid, with no degraded experiences due to OS changes. Our Teams users on Mac have a continued, reliable experience.

Tom Arbuthnot: Mac users can be creative and business users, and the expectation and bar are high. On iOS, you don't see enterprise admins rushing to patch Windows, but Mac users run at the same speed as Apple and hit new OS versions quickly. You need to be ready day zero, correct?

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: That's right. Working with Apple Engineering weekly helps us get to issues quickly, doing internal validations and testing across the Teams ecosystem. We'll continue that effort as new Mac versions release.

Tom Arbuthnot: For those unfamiliar, Microsoft is huge, but there are teams whose entire job is Mac client and Mac devices and iOS. It's an important platform, not an afterthought.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: That's right. There's a dedicated team working on both Mac and iOS applications, making sure experiences are great and building features like AirPod and Mac mini bar extra. There are upcoming features we'll announce at Ignite, which I'm excited about.

Tom Arbuthnot: This recording will come out just before Ignite, so stay tuned. Not revealing any features, but how do you decide when to make a feature slightly different for Mac because of native OS capabilities versus keeping it the same as Windows?

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: If you look at Teams across Windows and Mac, we want to ship features so the experience is unified, with the right quality across both. That's been our motto for eight or nine years of Teams. All features we've released—threads, channels, multiple reactions, saved messages—are unified across the product. For some features, based on strong feedback, they need to be native to Mac, like AirPods integration, Mac mini bar extra, docking icon, menu bars, and calling/meetings scenarios with audio/video quality. The UX treatment is about earned differences. The design team is particular about the craft, ensuring notifications and calls are handled appropriately for each platform.

Tom Arbuthnot: The simultaneous shipping is important for user adoption. Is the team developing the feature for both clients at the same time, integrating and testing together?

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: Correct. The feature teams test across endpoints—web, Mac, and Windows—at the same time. Rollouts are staged and gradual, starting with early IT admin rings, then public preview, then general population, and ramping to 100%. Feedback is collected throughout. Everyone sees the feature within about a month. Roadmaps are published to keep people aware. Feature teams are responsible for testing, and the Mac team provides feedback early to ensure features fit the Mac ecosystem.

Tom Arbuthnot: How does customer feedback get back to you and your teams? There are many customers and different ways for feedback to reach you.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: We take customer feedback seriously, from Teams leadership to every IC. We look at feedback from IT admin channels, surveys, Microsoft Answers, Reddit, tap rings, and bugs. We categorise feedback and ensure the right people see it. We adjust the roadmap based on feedback themes. For new feature rollouts, if something isn't working for customers, we adjust delivery based on feedback volume and verbatim comments.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's good to hear that feedback is taken seriously. There's direct product feedback and telemetry to know how features are used.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: We look at verbatim feedback and tie it to Teams telemetry to understand issues—whether it's P95 or P99 metrics, chat switch speed, app launch speed, or feature load times.

Tom Arbuthnot: There's been a lot of work on keeping Teams clients up to date. Can you talk about what's going on there?

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: As part of the Teams service agreement, Teams is a hybrid application built on services that need to be up to date. Teams clients also need to be up to date. Any Teams app running three versions older is blocked. We show banners to users to update, and if it's beyond three versions, we block them. For IT admins, there's a Teams client health dashboard showing version information for users and tenants, so they can quickly mitigate by pushing updates. Most customers are used to cloud clients updating, but some traditional enterprises want control. We ask everyone to keep Teams up to date using Microsoft Update or other tools.

Tom Arbuthnot: Bannering users before it stops working gives a warning, and admins have tooling to know what's going on. The client health dashboard is a good insight. Sometimes it's just a weird proxy stopping updates.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: That's right. It's all part of the Teams Admin Center. There's a tab on the left with more insights coming. If users are hitting app start or crashes, it shows that information, which IT admins can help solve.

Tom Arbuthnot: Avinash, let's talk about the mobile side. Teams was born in a mobile-first world, and mobile clients are so important now. How do you think about shipping features natively on Android versus iOS and iPad?

Avinash Prasad: The native look and feel is why we ship native clients on iOS and Android. It defines the experience for users differently than desktop. We aim for simultaneous shipping of important features across all platforms. Anything important, like threading or the left adaptive rail, unified chat and channel experience, ships on all platforms together. Users should have a continuous experience between desktop and mobile. You can organise content in folders and use unified mode on both. We allow customisability—unified on desktop, split on mobile if preferred. We also allow a recent mode on mobile for catching up on chats. Mobile-specific enhancements help users stay in their flow—coming into the app and leaving quickly. We've optimised the experience across platforms and added customisation for mobile use.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's interesting how functionality is the same but optimised. I'm a heavy mobile user, and bringing chats and channels together has helped me triage on the road. Users expect the same capabilities, but not always the same UI.

Avinash Prasad: That's how we approach features—start with the core Teams base, then think about how customers use the product on the move and optimise for that.

Tom Arbuthnot: Mobile devices are so powerful now. Previously, desktop had more horsepower, but now mobiles can do almost everything.

Avinash Prasad: That's a great segue into multitasking on iPad. We're investing in making the iPad experience better, with keyboard multi-windowing and external monitor support. You can use your iPad as a travel companion.

Tom Arbuthnot: Even external camera support on iPad now. It's like a mini computer, and many execs use iPad Pros as their primary device.

Avinash Prasad: We've had a lot of feedback from exec customers who want these capabilities to shine on iPad. Multi-window is a big part of it—everyone multitasks now. We're enhancing capabilities for these scenarios on iPad, making it a junior brother to the desktop offering.

Tom Arbuthnot: Apple is pushing powerful iPad OS options, especially multi-window experience.

Avinash Prasad: We're adding enhancements to utilise iOS 26 features, allowing more customisability in window creation and centring, so your context isn't lost. You can pop out chats into new windows, track them, and create smaller windows to keep your original context.

Tom Arbuthnot: Let's watch the demo video of the experience. You can drag and drop—it's getting powerful.

Avinash Prasad: With the new paradigm for closing and resizing windows, it's helpful for customers to get the right layout.

Tom Arbuthnot: There's been a lot of effort on CarPlay experience.

Avinash Prasad: We've improved the experience for customers commuting, focusing on safety. Users can respond hands-free to messages and calls, send quick messages, or attend meetings. CarPlay is a good match for Teams. You can choose notification modes, and we integrate fully with Apple capabilities for safety.

Tom Arbuthnot: Voice control with Siri and AI tools is getting easier. The potential for Copilot and audio recaps is exciting.

Avinash Prasad: We're exploring voice-first experiences, benefiting from Siri enhancements for name resolution and intent detection. We'll continue to innovate as the platform evolves and gen AI experiences are absorbed.

Tom Arbuthnot: There's more coming we can't talk about yet, but a lot of time goes into fundamentals and platform security.

Avinash Prasad: That's a key focus every semester. We want the experience to stay up to date with new capabilities and device spread. We watch performance across devices and geographies. Different markets have different generations of devices, and verticals vary. iPads have a longer life than iOS devices. We support older devices, but performance must stay up as features increase. We tweak animations, layouts, and operation order based on device capabilities, categorising devices and scaling experiences accordingly.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's a big landscape with hundreds of millions of users and devices. Optimising across platforms is a challenge.

Avinash Prasad: A lot of effort goes into improving experience for users on older devices with lots of data. That's where performance work is most needed. We're rolling out enhancements to address big loads and delays, especially for chat notifications and unified chat list load. Optimisations will bring more consistent experience from launch to launch. We'll share numbers in a future blog as enhancements roll out.

Tom Arbuthnot: Thanks for the insight, Avinash. It's great to highlight new features and behind-the-scenes work. There's more coming, so stay tuned.

Avinash Prasad: It was a pleasure talking with you, Tom.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hari, thanks for the insight into how the Mac platform comes together for Teams. For listeners, stay tuned for Ignite—there will be exciting Mac-specific announcements.

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu: Thanks, Tom. This has been a great talk. I enjoyed sharing Teams engineering insights for the Mac platform. Thank you for your time, and I hope everyone enjoys the podcast.