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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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

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