Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

"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.

You mean forcing upgrades and showing in app ads for new speakers I don't need?

Not ads, but rather using downloads as a measure of growth internally or when raising money.

That’s such a good point, especially when competitors like Microsoft are gaining on them (https://blog.appfigures.com/microsoft-teams-dethrones-slack-... ) and Discord is growing even faster.

Seeing those numbers, I can absolutely see this happening!

Board probably ordered devs to quickly increase app installs and this is what they could come up.

I wonder how the "Microsoft is gaining on Slack" narrative would be changed if we had metrics on Lync/Skype for Business users that switched to Slack or Teams.

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.

Eh, web traffic can be measured too. App installs aren't all that interesting if people install the app and never use it. Therefore, valuation metrics should be driven by usage (regardless of platform).

I think companies want you to install their app for a couple reasons:

- 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.

A big reason many companies push for app installs is because it gets them out if the business of having to pay a very high Google tax for traffic. If a hotel company can convince you to download their app, the hope is that the next time you search for a hotel you go straight to their app, instead of going to Google where the hotel chain would have to pay out the nose for very competitive AdWords.

But that doesn't really apply in Slack's case.

None of which are good reasons. I can bookmark a web page, I can add it to my home screen, and if I use it frequently, it appears on my new tab page.

I'm not saying you're wrong that that's why they're doing it, just that they should stop. :)

You forgot the most important reason: telemetry. An app can exfiltrate an order of magnitude more kinds of interesting data on you than a webpage ever could.

And the second most important reason: push notifications.

But... when the app is on device it’s easier to engage with push notifications.

Some possibilities:

* 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.

I actually think all these problems could actually be fixed more easily but just showing a "we really think you should download our app" banner in this case. Let the user know they're going off the reservation but don't explicitly block them.

As mentioned above, this has to be a very small number of users who are sophisticated enough to bother instructing chrome to request the desktop site. So the bug burden would be small on an absolute scale, and could be ignored entirely by simply telling these advanced users the desktop-on-mobile was "as is" and not supported.

The site I work on has hundreds of millions of visitors a month. A double digit percentage of our overall traffic uses our desktop site on mobile. It’s not the same use case as Slack but I’d bet it’s bigger than you think.

Also, bug burden shouldn’t be an excuse if your market cap exceeds $10bn.

Aren't you agreeing with me? The important thing is that, as a fraction of users, the number of people asking for this is small. Therefore, given the size of the company, the resources devoted to it are relatively small.

No. I think when you are big enough, a feature with even 1% usage is big enough to dedicate resources to. Slack made $168M last quarter. 1% of that deserves at least 1 eng and 1 QA full time.

Where do you think we disagree? I am arguing that bug-fixing costs are not a good justification for Slack to ignore requests for the desktop website from mobile devices.

As someone who once used Slack's website on mobile, I can assure you they didn't have a team spending a lot of time chasing down bugs with that configuration.

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.

But that is the logic on Slacks side. It’s not user friendly

The issue isn't about a mobile site. It's about desktop site. Mobile browsers like Chrome and Firefox have a "request desktop site" switch that makes them fetch the site meant for desktops. It introduces zero support burden if you're already supporting a desktop site, and you have to go out of your way to break this feature.

if you give them the benefit of the doubt, then it's possible that the desktop version on a mobile form-factor sucks and causes people to complain.

I'm past giving them the benefit of the doubt. Also, such issue can be resolved by saying in a clear and unambiguous way that "the site is not supported on mobile, proceed at your own risk", but not actually blocking it.

That doesn’t really acknowledge the point above. Tech confuses people. You can put a banner that says “this won’t work” and people will close it, then ask why it doesn’t work.

You may also simply not want to allow people to use a version of your software that doesn’t work.

So let them complain. You can't please everyone.

Complaining is a valid form of exerting market pressure.

Valid or not, in this case it pushes the devs into the wrong direction. The customers are complaining about their own error here after all.

Oh so I guess by blocking it nobody has complained, job well done then!

Data and stickiness.

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.

> Does anyone know why Slack would have done this?

Mobile apps let you collect more of your users' private data than a web browser does.

What are they doing with this data? Or is this simply the “they are bad people who hate user privacy” hypothesis?

Given that the hypothesis is true for vast majority of Android apps, including the vast majority of popular ones, including well-known vendors like Google and Microsoft, it's a really good default hypothesis.

> What are they doing with this data? Or is this simply the “they are bad people who hate user privacy” hypothesis?

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.

So... you don't have an answer?

It would potentially allow them to forgo the need to limit their UI to phone based with desktop upscaling. Make an app for the "best" small screen experience and the web site for the "best" large screen experience.

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.

This is the argument that I don't think is valid, though. When folks switch on "Desktop Site" in an Android browser, they expect that things will be squished, and that the site isn't optimized for the screen size. They just do it (or rather I just do it) because I want the full set of features, even if I need to do a bunch of zooming and scrolling around.

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.

Yep. And it annoys me that desktop sites are usually more usable on mobile, even with that extra burden.

Semi related, it’s always bothered me that the Facebook mobile app won’t support landscape view, but the mobile web app gives it to you “for free”.

It’s probably bigger than you think.

Depending on the company, you may not want to install an app that accesses corporate data in your phone.

Might be that this client configuration draws a disproportionate share of account takeover attempts?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com