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Honestly, I don't think you can point to any actual business reason for a native client. Slack makes majority of their revenue from large organisations buying t
by BukhariH 9y ago
Honestly, I don't think you can point to any actual business reason for a native client. Slack makes majority of their revenue from large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go and a native desktop client is sadly not a huge selling point for the sales team.
At the end of the day Slack has to optimize for growth and there's a huge list of features that will bring more ROI than native clients which will require trebling the size of the code base.
- snuxoll 9y agoFine, if they don't have any business reason for a native client they should just can the slack desktop app because it provides 0 benefits over the web app then. If you're going to do something do it right or don't do it at all.
- johannes1234321 9y agoThe desktop app allows them to Mark the checkbox of having a "native" app when selling ... And in my environment quite a few folks prefer the election app over the browser. I don't know why, though.
- always_good 9y agoI prefer a dedicate app because I can alt-tab through a relatively limited number of apps compared to the dozens of tabs I may have open. For example, the desktop app will show notification count in the dock. Imagine if all of your apps had a browser version and you could always pick between a tabbed version vs standalone version. To use the tabbed version of everything would be like using an AOL app back in those days where you alt-tab to the AOL virtual window and then find the app you want within it while wishing you could just use the OS' window manager system.
- johannes1234321 9y agoI simply have it in a browser window in a specific part on my desktop which I manage via i3wm. But, well, everybody has their preferences.
- dman 9y agoKilling battery life of their users isnt a business reason?
- arvinsim 9y agoIf doesn't affect their bottomline, then why will they bother?
- dman 9y agoCustomers are fickle beasts, they mutter and keep on using a product until they dont.
- gruez 9y agoyet there's no slack competitor that has "better battery life" or "native apps" as one of its selling points.
- cyphar 9y agoMatrix has native clients[1], as well as a weechat plugin. [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/quaternion.html https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/quaternion.html
- salvar 9y agoSo rewriting all their clients would be a more sensible approach to user retention compared to keeping the current Electron client that most users seem quite happy with?
- pjmlp 9y agoThe profit from "large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go" can surely pay a couple of devs to write native apps.