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

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and Teams admins supporting mixed Windows/Mac estates, and anyone managing client update compliance or mobile and iPad user experience for executives.

Guest: Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu and Avinash Prasad — Partner Group Engineering Manager (Teams Windows and Mac clients) and Partner Director of Engineering (Teams mobile clients), Microsoft

Hari Krishna Reddy Juturu and Avinash Prasad lead the Microsoft engineering teams behind the Teams desktop clients and the iOS/Android mobile clients respectively. They cover which Mac and iPad experiences justify diverging from Windows, how day-zero readiness for new Apple OS releases is achieved, the three-version client blocking policy and admin tooling, and performance work for older devices.

Many thanks to Crestron, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Recent Mac-native work includes AirPods integration for seamless mute/unmute in calls and meetings, menu bar extras so users can start a chat or open settings without bringing the app to the foreground, and a rebuilt presenter toolbar and multi-monitor screen sharing that no longer glitches. ▶ 6:11
• Teams engineering works with Apple engineering weekly and tests against developer builds as they arrive, so that Teams is validated on day zero of a new macOS GA — macOS 26 shipped in September with Teams ready. ▶ 7:14
• The day-zero requirement exists because Mac users upgrade at Apple's pace, unlike Windows enterprise fleets where admins deliberately slow patching — so there is no buffer to fix OS-driven regressions after release. ▶ 9:19
• The default is sim-ship and unified functionality — threads, channels, multiple reactions, saved messages all land on Windows and Mac together; platform differences have to be 'earned', such as AirPods, menu bar extras, dock icon behaviour and platform-appropriate notification and call handling. ▶ 11:52
• Feature rollouts are staged through early IT admin/TAP rings, then public preview, then the general population ramping to 100%, with feedback collected at each stage; most users see a new feature within roughly a month, which explains why colleagues see features at different times. ▶ 14:54
• Any Teams client more than three versions behind is actively blocked, with in-app banners warning users beforehand; the Teams client health dashboard in Teams Admin Center gives admins per-user and per-tenant version data plus app start failure and crash information so they can push updates or find the blocker (often something like a misbehaving proxy). ▶ 21:02
• On iPad the investment is multi-window with keyboard support and external monitor support, using iPadOS 26 window creation and centring so popping a chat out into a smaller window does not lose the original context — positioned as a 'junior brother' to the desktop client for execs using iPad Pro as a primary device. ▶ 27:16
• Performance tuning is done by device class: devices are categorised and animations, layouts and the order of operations are varied accordingly, with the worst case being older devices holding large amounts of account data — optimisations are rolling out for chat notification handling and unified chat list load time, with numbers to be published in a later blog. ▶ 37:29

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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