Slack have blocked using the website on mobile
twitter.com
twitter.com
Zulip: https://zulipchat.com/
Rocket: https://rocket.chat/
Riot: https://about.riot.im/
Mattermost: https://mattermost.org/
https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ (native slack client)
https://www.irccloud.com/ (cloud irc client, they have slack integration if you pay for premium)
The deal breaker ultimately was that I didn't receive all of my notifications which was a problem for work. But I would love to try it again if they solve that problem.
Edit: The hotkeys and the lightweight feel to it was also amazing BTW.
But if you have any lead on a way to show that notifications aren't being displayed, that would be really useful information.
I've heard of some people using Ripcord on Windows 10 having some kind of automatic suppression of notifications occur at the the OS level. Probably some automated anti-user-spam thing. In which case, the notifications would only be listed internally within Ripcord, but not in the OS notifications list. Is that the case, or were they also not visible within Ripcord's own notifications list? (This one isn't relevant if you're using Mac or Linux.)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/wintouch/wind...
I'm guessing this is what needs to be handled. I wonder if Qt is already interacting with this system, and I'm handling it improperly on Win32. Does scrolling with touch gestures work for you in other types of scrollable views, such as the sidebar, or the workspace files list?
There's also this, an open 5 year old bug report. https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-40461
Oh, and since I have you here: would it be possible for you to look into the group DM handling? We run plenty of group DMs at work, and I have two problems with them: one, they tend to randomly disappear from the sidebar, and two, there seems to be no way to start a group DM from Ripcord.
Also, again, thank you for your hard work.
I didn’t know about ripcord until it was mentioned here and I’m about to pull out my credit card to buy a license just so that I might have an option for a slack client that’s not slack.
Closed source is a bit of a downer, but FWIW, I did some preliminary inspection with GlassWire; Ripcord seems to stay true to its word: no telemetry.
TL;DR: If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack. Come get involved and help :)
Assuming it goes dormant and unused (which it may not, but often does), do you have a policy for stale / unused username deletion or reclamation?
We're looking at fixing this in future via https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/rav/proposal/r....
Meanwhile, if you want echelon as a username, go register a domain name, run a matrix server on it, and you can have @echelon:echelon.xyz or wherever. Try not to get sued by five eyes though ;P
1) your "hey nice strong password" tooltip parks itself directly over the confirm password field so you (I) don't get to see it at all.
2) google captcha? ...really?
Yeah, that's not how it works, and you know it.
You are also implying that something changing and adding new features fast is good, and that's not true, either.
>If Linux can obsolete Solaris, Riot can obsolete Discord/Slack.
Jabber was also going to obsolete many things, and look at it.
- Have a bot invite everyone in the group to every room and kicks them out if they leave (noisy, not everyone needs to be in every room)
- Have everyone in the group use the same homeserver, make rooms public and non-federated (defeats much of the purpose of Matrix, doesn't let you invite people from outside the org as one-offs)
I think some of the future plans for communities would solve this?
Anyway, Matrix right now is great for both small private chats and FOSS projects; in the former case you can just handle access ad-hoc, and in the latter case the rooms are public anyway. It just seems a bit lacking at the moment for organizations that need private rooms.
- Message threads
- Ability to share screens when multiple people are in audio conference
- ability to "draw" over the screen while sharing
One thing I wish slack or others had that discord has is ability to select FPS for screen share: when I'm sharing the screen or camera (showing a whiteboard) I usually care more that the image looks with better detail even if it refreshes once every 20 seconds. Almost all screen sharing always introduce compression artifacts.
100% agree on the other two, though. Encouraging people to make channels as needed helps the first, but for ephemeral discussions you wind up deciding between deleting the chat log, or living with a lot of "retired" channels. And being default opt-in for notifications makes Discord _way_ more noisy than Slack could ever be.
It's not ideal, but shipping a mobile and desktop client that are literally incapable of displaying the same channels in the same order is also not ideal.
It was very strange because they had no idea what Teams was used for. They shared some literature that says the features are the same, but when asked to do simple tasks like use teams to coordinate the rollout, they didn’t know how to do it.
Kind of weird. My hope is that Microsoft eventually makes it usable since it’s basically free with other purchases. But then, Microsoft killed yammer and Skype.
* Can't leave a channel (without custom bot shenanigans, which doesn't scale well to having a lot of channels).
* No control of notification sounds on mobile. All notifications get the same sound and there's no option to deliver quietly.
* No threading.
* Can't collapse embeds.
* No back/forward navigation. The closest it gets is in the quickswitcher it offers the last channel you were in, but that's it.
* Their support is awful. Everything except extremely obvious bugs get the response "please vote it up at feedback.discordapp.com", and even bugs often get that response.
* No "do not disturb" settings. If notifications are on, they're on 24 hours a day.
Some photos, docs, code snippets? Most companies do use those features to some extent, but it should be fairly ephemeral. If you're using pinned messages as a WIKI, then you are really using the tool incorrectly.
Channels and memberships? If you made all of my company's channels disappear tomorrow, you'd be doing us a favor. We'd re-create the ones that matter within a few hours, and the other 90% didn't really need to exist anyway.
The only really true "sticky" part of Slack are webhook integrations. Some companies really do setup some degree of workflow automation around those things. But most of the time, it's just bot-spam. The CEO wants everyone to belong to a #wins channel, which gets a spam alert whenever a sales guy qualifies a lead, etc.
In many cases, all of it.
Data retention laws require many companies retain copies of certain types of internal company communications for extended time periods. This is why some companies have policies that discussions about topics such as company finances or government contracts have to be done via more easily archived channels. But if your company doesn't have those policies and you just use Slack for everything, then everything in Slack has to be retained on the off chance that someone discussed an upcoming earnings report in your company Slack.
... until investors/"the market"/whatever else forces them to also pull shady shit like this.
Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.
Lets' talk about search and history. How about synchronised history and search across devices? Mobile? Available to new clients that just connected?
At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).
> Keyword: most. So: not all of them. So, there will be a mismatch and a mish-mash between features.
You can't judge a protocol by the subset of UI features supported by all of its clients. That's unfair to all open protocols.
If you want to talk about UI, you should evaluate each client independently.
> At this point someone on HN suggests IRCCloud... which is exactly the same as Slack (proprietary chat-as-a-service).
Except IRCCloud still uses the open protocol, so it's easier for users to switch to a different client. (Which, hopefully, is also an insentive for IRCCloud to not fuck up things too much in the future.)
That's the main reason IRC and XMPP more-or-less lost the chat wars (and they lost the mobile specifically due to protocols).
1. If you are logged out you miss the history of conversations
2. Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.
It's not just non-technical people who expect good UX.
I communicated via IRC with a lot of non-technical people in the '90s and 2000s. Most people just used mIRC and connected to the default IRC server and went from there.
In a number of companies / assignments, Slack was introduced "from the trenches" and adopted officially later on. You don't get a tool to rise up from the trenches if it doesn't fulfill a need - that other, comparable tools also fill, especially now that a number of good competitors have jumped on the wagon.
Slack has become the new corporate mandated unusable messaging application.
It's officially adopted making it the incumbent. Now the company can stop to pretend caring about quality and start digging moats. Predictably, the proprietary workaround becomes proprietary garbage. And no problem was solved after all.
Will we ever learn?
Slack is not the end solution. It's a step in the direction to being less terrible in the realm of corporate communication, and will be replaced by something else that does better in the future. For now it'll hold on whilst it still can.
It’s weird how difficult to use their slack competitor is. Hard to search within teams and across channels. There’s a weird interaction between itself and OneDrive/SharePoint that I don’t get the mental model.
I used to hate Slack’s UX a lot until I started to use Teams.
This. I was told MSFT has switched to Teams. They don't use Skype. Both my current and soon to be new employer (company bought) use Skype for business.
Skype is terrible in many ways.
Teams has a slicker UI. But it brings the horror to a whole new level. Someone mentions you passing in a group. You get a notification in email. But hey, if you aren't signed into that group, you can't see it. And you can only see like 4-5 groups at a time. So you really can't track conversations in real time.
The whole multi-teams experience ... is not well thought out. I have to switch between at least two different company teams multiple times per day, to do my work over the last 4 months.
Slack, for all its annoying mis-features, handles this workflow quite well. The UI, while somewhat simplistic, just works. Search and threading are terrible, but at least search works. Still have not figured out how to download conversations for transfer into tickets/etc.
I just want something that is simple, works well, allows me to search, to reliably enter code/screen caps/etc. Right now, though I don't like it, Slack comes close to working with some annoying misfeatures. Teams ... does not. Skype is best forgotten about.
The sad part is, Slack was better in the past. It's the "digging moats" part GP mentioned that makes software shit. Corporate or otherwise. Consider: once upon a time, they supported an IRC gateway. But that was just a lure to get techies on-board, and predictably (like e.g. Google before with XMPP), once they've reached critical mass, they've shut it off.
(And I'm part of the problem too. I don't complain much, because as long as Ripcord - the not shit third-party desktop client - works, I don't have to deal with Slack's web and Electron crap.)
And if your corporate IT wasn’t completely nightmarish about locking it down you had multiple client options on almost every platform.
Besides, there were tons of integrations, scripts already available, and it is super easy to write your own irrespective of what scripting language you know.
Technically it sucked in that it could, when used terribly, clog up an entire network (such as the infamous NHS mail chain reply fiasco from a few years ago), but I have no clue who decided Slack was better than emails for what emails did.
Slack is better than Lync and similar corporate messaging platform. But that’s not what people tried to sell it as, or for that matter, Slack advertising sells it as. They sell it as an alternative to email.
Asking myself this question everyday in an org that uses Skype for Business, Teams, Slack and...yes, there’s an island of engineers and ops people using IRC sneering at all of us from the horizon. Hell we still have people struggling to set up conference bridges and video calls and have resorted to buying their own solutions and expensing them back to payroll. I’ve been given expense reports for paid accounts for Zoom, LogMeIn and someone even tried expensing $3 after buying their own phone number and writing a single serving conferencing app on top of Twilio.
I found that last one especially creative and especially worrisome if these are the lengths people are going through.
I’ve sat through four all hands calls now where “unified communication” was brought up and “infra-departmental communication” was mentioned as the leading gripe on preceding employee satisfaction surveys.
Yet here we are.
Hilarious, when you consider we sell wholesale communications platforms and services.
(When is the next “who’s hiring”? Mid-level Product Manager shackled by golden handcuffs seeks short walks to happy hour and a 4 day work week, heh)
To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you."
"Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"
"Those are expensive. No."
So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. I called up a buddy who set up a private bridge on his asterisk box, and I gave that number to all my field techs. It was great, I could step away for a moment and come back to find one tech giving advice to another, and in the end my buddy made a few bucks on recip comp over the thousands of minutes we logged.
Did anyone else in the whole company know this was possible?
Okay. I’ll do it: it was Sprint wasn’t it? ;)
Actually triggers a good, 8-9 year old memory. Two places I worked at used to communicate through HipChat. It was simple, native, and did the job until Atlassian fucked it up with a massive rewrite. But even then it was still decent.
In both cases there was a massive bike shedding moment where the company engaged in a chat-war, with one half being solely devoted to Slack, and the rest of us holding back and saying why we need to switch. In both cases the Slack advocates went rogue and since they were also the loudest voices, people switched over just to get back into the conversation.
I have no idea what spell was cast on those people by Slack but, god damnit, it worked. It's just IRC in a walled garden and costing 10x as much, with shitty features you can't opt out of (like the new editor and threads, which birthed a whole cadre of slack micro-managers).
One other advantage of HipChat was that it‘s native Android client would run without requiring Play Services; Slack purposefully won't run without it.
Also, I think Slack's threads are useful. You can have channels where you just post a single message for your question/issue and then have people reply in a thread, so that messages are naturally grouped together by topic instead of being a firehose of interleaved messages. Combined with good search, this makes Slack more of a valuable knowledge store than just an ephemeral chat tool.
I don't want to name the exact place this happened but it was certainly a unique culture that I now miss. It was neither British or American.
It was the only place I've worked where I had easy and direct access to the founders, the C level, and the VPs, as a lowly senior engineer. And not because I brown-nosed my way up; we'd connect outside of work because we liked the same things.
A total tangent, but it's just to say that we never needed Slack in the first place. I doubt many places do.
Ok, so Slack solved #2 I feel and formerly solved #3 (but has regressed significantly in recent months). Not sure gaining #2 was worth the new negatives we got.
This was 4 or 5 years ago. Now in my current company we also use Slack. It’s good, but not great either. Mostly because the UI is super slow when running in my desktop browser (Cliqz, Firefox-based). But it’s still better than Teams in my experience (I did not try the other alternatives).
The main failure of IT or computer science is the lack of open standards and federation. 40 year old Email was the last somewhat succesful one. You can use various clients like Emacs, Thunderbird, mutt, Gmail web UI and there is no need that sender and recipient share either provider or client.
In communism it was the central planning commission that decided what products consumers want to buy. Today it's Slack that decides how people do IM at work. And Google or Apple how people use mobile apps. Facebook how you interact with your friends. I hope that these monpolies/duopolies would share the fate of communism. How do we get there?
This strategy probably mitigates what might be a much more common complaint in the future that their "UI" sucks on mobile if they were to design for only larger screens.
That is, Slack should still focus on making the website for the best large screen experience, but they shouldn't go out of their way to do somewhat sneaky stuff to detect my "Desktop" browser is really coming from my phone.
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.
"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.
Board probably ordered devs to quickly increase app installs and this is what they could come up.
Basically I have enormous doubts about Microsoft's growth numbers in the space, since I can't fathom that anyone who wasn't already paying for MS products would choose to use teams, and I'm curious if they've made up the ground they lost to Slack in the first place.
- Sunk cost - I would guess people feel a lot more invested in a service after installing an app (and then being forced to make an account, in many cases)
- Mind share - Their logo will appear in your app drawer and they will be able to send you push notifications
It must be effective, because many companies push heavily for app installs. Check out mobile reddit, for instance. Although yes, I think that a lot of this is useless metric driven strategy.
But that doesn't really apply in Slack's case.
I'm not saying you're wrong that that's why they're doing it, just that they should stop. :)
And the second most important reason: push notifications.
* 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.
Also, bug burden shouldn’t be an excuse if your market cap exceeds $10bn.
Mobile apps let you collect more of your users' private data than a web browser does.
Please don't strawman my opinion when a simple Google search can sufficiently answer your question.
User data is valuable, both internally to the organization, and to the market on which it can be packaged and sold.
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.
You may also simply not want to allow people to use a version of your software that doesn’t work.
Depending on the company, you may not want to install an app that accesses corporate data in your phone.
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.
If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.
A platform like WhatsApp could evolve to cover the main things people are using Facebook for. History has shown that people are not too stuck on any platform.
5 seconds on google finds that adding a SnapChat stories clone is exactly where WhatsApp has gone now, just like Messenger and Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/01/whatsapp-stories/
Personally I’ve minimized social network use and don’t think every single app needs a status broadcast feature, but it’s popular. Not just a group chat app anymore though.
Stickers are new, I must have forgotten that because every other chat app I use has had them for ages. They are really an example of WhatsApp moving slowly compared to Telegram and Discord.
Group video chats are something that's probably motivated by rising mobile speeds? As bandwidth becomes more plentiful and smartphones have plenty of RAM and CPU power there's no reason to restrict video chats to one person.
It's one of those hidden costs of advertising being a zero-sum game. The waste only grows as you try to keep up with the competition that tries to keep up with you.
1. Successful software product that is beloved by its core users goes public.
2. The valuation expectations when the company goes public are based on widely optimistic growth projections where the company grows beyond its 'natural' user base (remember 'Twitter is the new Facebook' back in the day?)
3. In order to meet those widely optimistic, unrealistic projections, the company tries a whole host of "throw against the wall and see what sticks" features to attract users outside their core. This has the effect of pissing off their core users while not really attracting many new users in any case.
4. Eventually (hopefully) the company realizes it's not going to be the next world dominating superpower, learns to be content with just hundreds of millions of users instead of billions, and gets back to focusing on making its core users happy.
Maybe can also be called the Snap-Way??
No - I insist that we name this after Sonos, even though they were hardly the first (and certainly not the most widespread) abuser.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread:
"... 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."
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.
How could it not be bad to impose these restrictions for anyone other than the company? You can use the app if you want.
Bootstrapping is pain, but at least you and your customers retain control long term.
Someone in the twitter thread says it still works on firefox for android, which means it's really only broken on chrome. Chrome doesn't have adblock, so it's not like this move results in less of their telemetry getting blocked.
There is a seemingly persistent bug where reddit fails to remember preferences surrounding mobile/desktop and old/redesign. Sometimes you will click a link and the page it delivers you to will be on the mobile site, sometimes it will take you to the redesign. It's been going on for at least a year. I use reddit a lot and I run into it at least every week. Sometimes it sticks and I have to relog to get my preferences back.
Firefox for Android prevents such attempts by default. That, plus uBlock Origin with its integrated element picker to permanently block elements make reddit bearable.
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.
AFAIK App Store allows you to download an older version if the current one isn't supported by your OS.
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.
It doesn't block everything, but almost nothing is getting through for me.
Back in the late 1990s I used to have all sorts of software in my computer which I downloaded and installed. Some of it was purchased and other free or open source.
As the time passed, more and more services became "web based" including mail, music, calendar, note taking, etc.
I was part of a small group that did not like that. My reasoning was that there was no need to hack all that functionality in the web browser as it was highly inefficient. That it was better to code the network features into the desktop clients.
Web caught on and nowadays seldomly you get a client program in the desktop.
But now in mobile, we are returning to the clinet software first approach. And for some reason we resist the installation of client software and prefer browser based functionality.
IMO for any given program or 'app' today, the better it functions offline directly correlates with the desire I have to use it natively on a given platform, as opposed to web access.
Slack is just about useless offline, hence my strong preference to use it in the browser.
--
[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
You can reverse each of those statements for a current mobile app.
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?
Remember, you lose the ecosystem when you switch away, too. There are lots of plugins for slack that won’t be there on the alternatives. Even little things like seeing GitHub commits is nice.
Most of this is just transient outrage.
This is when we were largely just an open source project and before raising $70M in venture capital, which has been accelerating development: https://mattermost.com/blog/category/releases/
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.
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.
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 unfortunate reality is that it costs businesses money to support platforms. Blocking unsupported platforms probably results in an extremely small number of irritated users in exchange for saving thousands in support costs.
Too many apps stick their fingers into parts of the device that they don't belong. The well has been poisoned with so many apps abusing their privlege, so privacy conscious folks have to assume the worst when being pushed in that direction especially when the browser app worked without an issue (According to OP).
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.
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!"
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.
I would rather take the desktop site every time instead of being pidgeonholed into stupid m.-.com that forcefeeds me popups of how their mobile experience is so much better.
There is a nice analysis at [0]
[0] https://www.hallaminternet.com/google-trends-can-settle-gram...
>A company
The company is singular. It is one company. "A company is" vs. "A company are"
Maybe the slack board is in panic mode because of that?
Visited in an incognito tab and was finally able to get access to desktop site on mobile it again.
I get Android notifications if I'm detached from irssi in tmux and someone PMs, says my handle, or any number of custom triggers I set. All free & open source (other than the android phone).
every change to the code base has to be checked on mobile web or things will eventually break. at that point will we see an angry tweet about not fixing that?
i develop on a web based system and we don’t support mobile on most of our site because we don’t have the resources to. if we started getting bug reports about this more frequently than we do, we may do the same. It makes our product look bad when we let someone do something we don’t QA for. We pride ourselves on rapid response to our clients requests, with this we build goodwill. we explicitly state we do not support mobile except for specific modules. even with that prior information, users sometimes try anyway and run into bugs. this experience + being told we won’t fix the bug because it’s not a supported platform causes us to lose the goodwill we’ve worked hard to build.
in my local neighborhood there are a ton of wholesale shops that even though there are maybe one or two customers a day (ie the shops are dead most of the time) they refuse to sell non wholesale. it’s not packaging, most things are easily sellable one-off. there are no regulations or laws. they choose not to sell to one class of buyers. if they allowed one-off sales, they would then have to start running their business to support doing that correctly- this means having small change, more personnel, probably introduce some security to watch the now increased traffic in their shops etc.
if slack does mobile web, they’ll have to do it like they do everything else, the “slack” way.
Put a message like that up instead of disabling it altogether.
Once they have enough users, this changes.