Pretty much no one who uses Slack, chooses Slack. The companies we work for do. I despise Slack, yet I use it all day, every week day. It's quite the predicament.
Having tried Rocket, Riot, and Mattermost before, it's of my opinion as well as everyone that I work with that Discord blows them away. It's so much more polished.
I absolutely don't understand why chat is such a lucrative market. All the products are nearly identical. All the most useful features of Slack were available in IRC.
Does anyone know why Slack would have done this? I can certainly understand Slack not providing a specific mobile-web experience, but that is not what is going on here. The user specifically switched their mobile browser to "Desktop Site" (one of my favorite features of Android Chrome by the way for sites that mysteriously provide dumbed down versions for mobile that are missing all the content I actually need - looking at you, Square), so the server should just serve them desktop-optimized content. Slack has to go out of their way to prevent this. Why would they care? It has to be a very small portion of their users in any case.
"Does anyone know why Slack would have done this?"
"App installs" is a key metric driving valuations for SaaS/PaaS/etc. businesses.
Trading a useful product for dollars isn't that interesting. Collecting an open-ended, continuous stream of intel on a large population is fascinating - at least until it become generally accepted that this "intel", and the levers for manipulating people based on it, are really not that useful or effective (which is my own prediction).
Slack has the attention today, but the real poster child for this kind of behavior is Sonos - nowhere do you see such a stark juxtaposition between an actually useful product that people pay premium dollars for and pivoting the business model towards shady, sneaky, anti-customer patterns.
* customers might have complained that the site didn't work on mobile when the desktop site was requested; this may have led to a burden on their support team, and a manager might have decided to block usage instead of fielding support requests
* a team internally might have been spending a lot of time chasing down bugs for desktop on mobile, and a manager decided to officially not support desktop on mobile; instead of just stopping support or carefully triaging tickets (e.g. distinguishing desktop on mobile from desktop), they just decided to block desktop on mobile access
* a team might have been burdened by being required to fix all bugs that came in; instead of dealing with the problem properly (e.g. continuing to allow desktop on mobile but not officially supporting it), they officially killed support to avoid having to work on it
* there could be some KPM to reduce bug reports over some period of time; they killed access to the non-supported use-case of desktop on mobile to make numbers look better
Not really a smart decision in any of these cases, kind of stupid, honestly; but not really nefarious either and the kind of decision that can be made sometimes at a larger place with politics.
Benefit of the dobut Reasoning: Engineering determined that the cost of supporting a mobile site outweighs the benefit given they have a great mobile app. Then, someone decided to disable mobile access, because it better communicates that they don't support mobile web; cusutomers may still use the broken, unsupported experience, and then they'll complain about it to their support. Thus, raising the cost of maintenance while lowering customer experience.
Keeping mobile web but adding a banner that the experience isn't supported: Doesn't Work. Most people are total idiots when it comes to tech; this is 250% more true in the B2B space; this is a further 250% more true in a bottom-up corporate sales model like what Slack deploys. Unsurprisingly, but likely; many of their workspaces are shadow-IT operations created by some do-gooder who knows Excel and thus he's a "tech expert", on an isolated team within a large company who's IT department really wishes everyone would just use Teams and Sharepoint. This person is going to dodge the company's frontline IT support with any issues they run into. This person probably has a company-issued phone and thus doesn't want to, or can't, install the app.
Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
> Yet another service that forces you to use the app for no reason
For sure there is a reason behind. It's just not a user-focused reason but a business one instead. One guess would be that the browser is a environment the user can kind of control, so they can block tracking and so on. When you're using the app, you don't have the same control anymore, so the business can receive more metrics from people that they wouldn't before.
Not saying this is good/bad, just that there is most probably a reason behind the choices they make.
Apps have been turned into a disease. So many different services keep obnoxiously pushing their app. Delivery services are extra annoying. I tried searching for a service that delivers alcohol, and found a few, but some are app-only and I couldn't type in my address to see if I was within their delivery area. Why would I download an app, and probably create an account, only to find that they won't even deliver to me?
This is a bad move, especially given the constraints of their mobile app.
For example, their iOS app requires iOS 11 or later which means people with a 5c, 5, 4s and iPad 4th gen will not be able to use Slack. These may be deemed 'older devices' by the tech forward folks like those on here but you would be shocked how many are out there still today. It only presents more resistance to adopt the app at team scale, as they will probably realize soon.
There seems to be a lot of angry nerds in here, and that basically describes me too. Hoping I can get a response from somebody with a broader perspective:
I'm in a position to switch my company over to one of the many alternatives mentioned in this thread. Has anybody here actually done that, and if I do it how angry is that likely to make my non-technical staff? If I don't want my marketing guy and my customer support team to hate me, can I still switch my company over to riot.im or mattermost?
Every growth-oriented startup with a popular product eventually ruins that product in the name of growth, which eventually kills the company and encourages somebody to start a new startup to build a product half as good as the original. The Silicon Valley circle of life.
This is a shame for mobile developers as well. Deep linking from one app to another can be tricky to get right. Loading slack from the Android emulator browser was an easy way to test various deep links. Not sure why they would care.
Slack is absolutely _unusable_ on a slow connection. It's not even just a matter of being patient, it flat out breaks with everything timing out.
I used to use the IRC gateway to maintain contact with some friends, and basically lost access to that social group when they closed down the IRC gateway.
IRC is far more inclusive, plus it's open and federated if you're into that.
I wonder for enterprise licenses if there is specific mention of which clients on which form factors are covered in the license. I expect and hope that customers will get a lot more specific about what they are paying for so that companies can't just turn off functionality that has been paid for.
I understand why people don't like this change (limiting options, etc), but I can see slack's POV from a business perspective. The mobile web usage might be so low that maintaining it costs more than forcing people to switch to the app. And mobile web might be a bad experience anyway (because slack is focused on standalone desktop app, mobile app, desktop browser instead), so it turns new users off with the crappy experience. But I don't have the numbers or any other insight, so it could be more simple: "we want more app usage". And even if you decide to just leave it alone, is anything truly maintenance free? (possibly)
This won't be the last thing to turn off mobile web to force-guide users to the app. And luckily for actual mobile web users, there seem to be alternatives.
The OP had a browser on the mobile device capable of rendering a "Desktop experience" and requested it. Slack went out of their way do discover that and block that user intent, rather than serve the Desktop UI that they test already in a desktop browser. The user knows they will be getting a desktop UI crammed into a mobile device, they asked for it.
That's besides the point. Why block users from using it if they want to so? If it works without any extra maintenance, great. Which, apparently, it did.
Unless Slack has material amounts of support due to mobile users trying to use its web app, which I'm very skeptical about given that the app is a dumb wrapper around a web view anyway, there's no sensible reason to actively prevent those users from using it.
What likely happened instead is that someone at Slack is trying to growth hack app download numbers.
It is not possible to access your workspace from your mobile browser, we're afraid.
This isn't the first time I've seen a thinly-veiled-fuck-you attitude from them, and it's something that definitely won't make me want to start using Slack.
Maybe, but... Twitter actually has a mobile website. You can argue - and I would agree - that "request desktop site" should give you what you asked for, but there's still a difference between "here is the mobile web UI" and "here is a link to download an app": namely, one still allows you to use the site if you can't or won't install a native app.
Slack is actively locking folks out of their site here, a service that folks have paid for even... That is a significant departure from what folks might've seen in the recent past with mobile device detection.
[+] [-] cosmojg|6 years ago|reply
Zulip: https://zulipchat.com/
Rocket: https://rocket.chat/
Riot: https://about.riot.im/
Mattermost: https://mattermost.org/
[+] [-] city41|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KMnO4|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|6 years ago|reply
... until investors/"the market"/whatever else forces them to also pull shady shit like this.
[+] [-] alexott|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|6 years ago|reply
"App installs" is a key metric driving valuations for SaaS/PaaS/etc. businesses.
Trading a useful product for dollars isn't that interesting. Collecting an open-ended, continuous stream of intel on a large population is fascinating - at least until it become generally accepted that this "intel", and the levers for manipulating people based on it, are really not that useful or effective (which is my own prediction).
Slack has the attention today, but the real poster child for this kind of behavior is Sonos - nowhere do you see such a stark juxtaposition between an actually useful product that people pay premium dollars for and pivoting the business model towards shady, sneaky, anti-customer patterns.
[+] [-] leoh|6 years ago|reply
* customers might have complained that the site didn't work on mobile when the desktop site was requested; this may have led to a burden on their support team, and a manager might have decided to block usage instead of fielding support requests
* a team internally might have been spending a lot of time chasing down bugs for desktop on mobile, and a manager decided to officially not support desktop on mobile; instead of just stopping support or carefully triaging tickets (e.g. distinguishing desktop on mobile from desktop), they just decided to block desktop on mobile access
* a team might have been burdened by being required to fix all bugs that came in; instead of dealing with the problem properly (e.g. continuing to allow desktop on mobile but not officially supporting it), they officially killed support to avoid having to work on it
* there could be some KPM to reduce bug reports over some period of time; they killed access to the non-supported use-case of desktop on mobile to make numbers look better
Not really a smart decision in any of these cases, kind of stupid, honestly; but not really nefarious either and the kind of decision that can be made sometimes at a larger place with politics.
[+] [-] 013a|6 years ago|reply
Keeping mobile web but adding a banner that the experience isn't supported: Doesn't Work. Most people are total idiots when it comes to tech; this is 250% more true in the B2B space; this is a further 250% more true in a bottom-up corporate sales model like what Slack deploys. Unsurprisingly, but likely; many of their workspaces are shadow-IT operations created by some do-gooder who knows Excel and thus he's a "tech expert", on an isolated team within a large company who's IT department really wishes everyone would just use Teams and Sharepoint. This person is going to dodge the company's frontline IT support with any issues they run into. This person probably has a company-issued phone and thus doesn't want to, or can't, install the app.
[+] [-] freeqaz|6 years ago|reply
You can scrape way more data from Android's APIs than you can from some cookies on a web page. Grabbing data like "other apps installed", for example.
And for stickiness, you can push notify a user to re-engage them. Plus they have to manually uninstall the app to completely "Unsubscribe".
It's a better position for a company if they can get you into the mobile app.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|6 years ago|reply
Mobile apps let you collect more of your users' private data than a web browser does.
[+] [-] jbindel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterlk|6 years ago|reply
Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
[+] [-] orf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joegahona|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimpenfish|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freewilly1040|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agluszak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diggan|6 years ago|reply
For sure there is a reason behind. It's just not a user-focused reason but a business one instead. One guess would be that the browser is a environment the user can kind of control, so they can block tracking and so on. When you're using the app, you don't have the same control anymore, so the business can receive more metrics from people that they wouldn't before.
Not saying this is good/bad, just that there is most probably a reason behind the choices they make.
[+] [-] lovehashbrowns|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AgentOrange1234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixhobbits|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootlooped|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eptcyka|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjburt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chirau|6 years ago|reply
For example, their iOS app requires iOS 11 or later which means people with a 5c, 5, 4s and iPad 4th gen will not be able to use Slack. These may be deemed 'older devices' by the tech forward folks like those on here but you would be shocked how many are out there still today. It only presents more resistance to adopt the app at team scale, as they will probably realize soon.
[+] [-] gruez|6 years ago|reply
AFAIK App Store allows you to download an older version if the current one isn't supported by your OS.
[+] [-] mellosouls|6 years ago|reply
Otherwise it appears to be premature or unresearched, or Slack have quickly backpedalled or fixed a bug.
There are reports in the Twitter thread of mobile browser access (using show desktop site), and I'm having no problems on mine.
[+] [-] diminish|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|6 years ago|reply
I'm in a position to switch my company over to one of the many alternatives mentioned in this thread. Has anybody here actually done that, and if I do it how angry is that likely to make my non-technical staff? If I don't want my marketing guy and my customer support team to hate me, can I still switch my company over to riot.im or mattermost?
[+] [-] ravenstine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lightedman|6 years ago|reply
We have a strict no phones policy, so those of us needing to use slack utilize our desktops. Well, no longer, I guess.
Sorry, Slack. You fucked up bigtime, and now I can't wait to watch you hemorrhage out that user base of yours.
[+] [-] wdb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znpy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gboss|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newnewpdro|6 years ago|reply
I used to use the IRC gateway to maintain contact with some friends, and basically lost access to that social group when they closed down the IRC gateway.
IRC is far more inclusive, plus it's open and federated if you're into that.
[+] [-] itronitron|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ydnaclementine|6 years ago|reply
This won't be the last thing to turn off mobile web to force-guide users to the app. And luckily for actual mobile web users, there seem to be alternatives.
[+] [-] jasonjayr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddebernardy|6 years ago|reply
Unless Slack has material amounts of support due to mobile users trying to use its web app, which I'm very skeptical about given that the app is a dumb wrapper around a web view anyway, there's no sensible reason to actively prevent those users from using it.
What likely happened instead is that someone at Slack is trying to growth hack app download numbers.
[+] [-] userbinator|6 years ago|reply
This isn't the first time I've seen a thinly-veiled-fuck-you attitude from them, and it's something that definitely won't make me want to start using Slack.
"Afraid of what? You broke it!"
[+] [-] Jestar342|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shog9|6 years ago|reply
Slack is actively locking folks out of their site here, a service that folks have paid for even... That is a significant departure from what folks might've seen in the recent past with mobile device detection.
[+] [-] wilg|6 years ago|reply