[brettwilcox]

Yes, I'm doing a custom react client integration. AA has to prepare for black swan events from every angle and this is a perfect example of one.

When you have 100,000+ employees, it's not trivial to just switch up communication platforms.

[StavrosK]

If you need to prepare for Black Swan events, doesn't it make sense to have your own channel to distribute APKs to all devices? Why would you rely on the Play Store at all?

[beowulfey]

that’s a lot of tooling to build for a single application—plus not everyone is tech savvy and installing from non-standard locations requires more user support

[corty]

Not every device is under MDM in a big corp. Often you have people like external consultants bringing their own devices, who need to participate in (semi-)internal communications. You cannot just MDM those and you cannot just issue bigcorp devices to them, so you need something like the normal appstore to distribute the software. Maybe you even have BYOD for internal people, so MDM could be hairy from a GDPR/employee rights/liability standpoint. And maybe you even have customers and partners who you want to communicate with, whom you have to provide with a viable option of communicating. You can (maybe) separate those into an internal and an external communication tool. But then you just have two different tools, one of which will have the exact same problem about needing installation via commonly available appstores.

[vvillena]

It's easier to simply ensure that the apps you need are present in multiple stores.

[GlennS]

I take your meaning, but pedantically I think the idea of black swan is that you couldn't ever see it coming, so the only way to prepare for it is some sort of general robustness (which to be fair Matrix does have).

[volta83]

Let each user pick among any of the multiple clients available. Don't design your system / process to only support one client.

[brettwilcox]

It puts too much pressure on Helpdesk to provide the support needed when you don't have a common path.