6 ms·

Slack should develop native apps now as they are no longer a lean startup and can afford to build native apps.

brimble 5y ago
Slack should at least bridge to an open protocol, if not use one outright, so I can use any client I want. Like they used to.
- smazga 5y ago
  The gloss of Slack was lost to me when they took down the irc and xmpp bridges. I really liked the freedom to do it my way. Then it became just another crappy messaging app.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    If all you want is messaging, use irc, matrix or an xmpp system. The real value of slack is all the integrations and ecosystem built on top of it. That is much harder to integrate with an arbitrary client. It could be done, they could publish "enriched messaging" standards or similar and breakout capabilities that clients could support, but just supporting vanilla messaging at this point would be a severe degradation of slack's capabilities.
- temp0826 5y ago
  Ripcord [0] supports slack, but probably lacks a few features. It's very fast. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
  - elldoubleyew 5y ago
    Friendly reminder that using third party clients is against Discord ToS and under certain circumstances can get your account banned[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/anno0770/status/1349187069793460225 https://twitter.com/anno0770/status/1349187069793460225
72deluxe 5y ago
I can't work out why you wouldn't develop a native app anyway - all this scaffolding in a Web UI to imitate native controls (like menus) seems completely backwards to me. Seems just lazy, but in an odd way because writing native apps isn't rocket science or difficult. It's not like they're implementing thousands of native controls or user interface components - a listview with an edit box at the bottom...
- bananabiscuit 5y ago
  I am a fan of native apps but I do have to admit it is nice that slack is -exactly- the same on any platform you access it from and that will continue to be the case without any effort from their developers. Different ports of native apps invariably start drifting unless lots of care is taken to make sure they don’t, and that does not happen to always be a priority for companies.
  - yurishimo 5y ago
    This is true and a valid use case I think. Slack has abstracted enough of their UI to be re-usable cross platform that any re-write would likely be a regression. Look at 1Password and the amount of shit they get on HN with the beta version. Rewrites are hard and they take a tooooooon of time to do correctly and require a lot of engineering work to keep the product consistent across platforms. Do I wish that electron apps were better optimized? Yes, however, I also can accept the tradeoff for apps that need to work "everywhere". For the most part, Slack works just fine. Their problems are less the UI/UX and more to do with infrastructure. Slack rewriting to a native app would have a tiny (if any) effect on these outages.
- zild3d 5y ago
  > I can't work out why you wouldn't develop a native app anyway Really? One code base, one language, write features once. I think it's more about eng resourcing (headcount, onboarding, roadmap parity / feature drift, etc) than whether making a native app is hard. Anecdotal, but I feel like the React Natives and Electrons have made it so you see less "Sorry we're only on Mac", and "We're only on Android, iOS coming soon!" from apps
theandrewbailey 5y ago
Salesforce bought Slack last year. They can afford to build native apps, but that might go against the whole cloud computing thing they've got going. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/salesforce-slack-deal-close/ https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/sa...
noahtallen 5y ago
It’s also important to remember that writing native apps doesn’t inherently inherently give you a big performance boost. With the type of app Slack has, I would expect the default implementation in a native app to be pretty slow as well. You’d have to do a significant amount of further optimization to make it competitive, imo. And to be honest, I imagine if someone applied that same amount of optimization and effort to the electron app, they could make the performance much better there as well.

Slack should at least bridge to an open protocol, if not use one outright, so I can use any client I want. Like they used to.

smazga 5y ago
The gloss of Slack was lost to me when they took down the irc and xmpp bridges. I really liked the freedom to do it my way. Then it became just another crappy messaging app.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  If all you want is messaging, use irc, matrix or an xmpp system. The real value of slack is all the integrations and ecosystem built on top of it. That is much harder to integrate with an arbitrary client. It could be done, they could publish "enriched messaging" standards or similar and breakout capabilities that clients could support, but just supporting vanilla messaging at this point would be a severe degradation of slack's capabilities.
temp0826 5y ago
Ripcord [0] supports slack, but probably lacks a few features. It's very fast. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
- elldoubleyew 5y ago
  Friendly reminder that using third party clients is against Discord ToS and under certain circumstances can get your account banned[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/anno0770/status/1349187069793460225 https://twitter.com/anno0770/status/1349187069793460225

72deluxe 5y ago

I can't work out why you wouldn't develop a native app anyway - all this scaffolding in a Web UI to imitate native controls (like menus) seems completely backwards to me. Seems just lazy, but in an odd way because writing native apps isn't rocket science or difficult. It's not like they're implementing thousands of native controls or user interface components - a listview with an edit box at the bottom...

bananabiscuit 5y ago
I am a fan of native apps but I do have to admit it is nice that slack is -exactly- the same on any platform you access it from and that will continue to be the case without any effort from their developers. Different ports of native apps invariably start drifting unless lots of care is taken to make sure they don’t, and that does not happen to always be a priority for companies.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  This is true and a valid use case I think. Slack has abstracted enough of their UI to be re-usable cross platform that any re-write would likely be a regression. Look at 1Password and the amount of shit they get on HN with the beta version. Rewrites are hard and they take a tooooooon of time to do correctly and require a lot of engineering work to keep the product consistent across platforms. Do I wish that electron apps were better optimized? Yes, however, I also can accept the tradeoff for apps that need to work "everywhere". For the most part, Slack works just fine. Their problems are less the UI/UX and more to do with infrastructure. Slack rewriting to a native app would have a tiny (if any) effect on these outages.
zild3d 5y ago
> I can't work out why you wouldn't develop a native app anyway Really? One code base, one language, write features once. I think it's more about eng resourcing (headcount, onboarding, roadmap parity / feature drift, etc) than whether making a native app is hard. Anecdotal, but I feel like the React Natives and Electrons have made it so you see less "Sorry we're only on Mac", and "We're only on Android, iOS coming soon!" from apps

theandrewbailey 5y ago

Salesforce bought Slack last year. They can afford to build native apps, but that might go against the whole cloud computing thing they've got going. https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/salesforce-slack-deal-close/ https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/sa...

noahtallen 5y ago

It’s also important to remember that writing native apps doesn’t inherently inherently give you a big performance boost. With the type of app Slack has, I would expect the default implementation in a native app to be pretty slow as well. You’d have to do a significant amount of further optimization to make it competitive, imo. And to be honest, I imagine if someone applied that same amount of optimization and effort to the electron app, they could make the performance much better there as well.