Not GP, but Teams on Windows 10 is a great example of how Electron apps can be terrible. It is sluggish, uses a lot of RAM and causes other Chromium based apps to run out of memory, crashes every so often, has serious issues with logging in after a password change, is not really feature rich, its User Voice forum for voting on issues and feature requests has many that have been asked for years by a lot of people but not prioritized and so on.

I have reinstalled MS Teams many times, cleared all its cache folders many times, removed all Office and other credentials from Credential Manager many times, made registry changes, logged out explicitly and logged in many times. These are routine activities I have to do just to use it because my organization has a subscription and won’t use any other tool (Skype for Business was abandoned after it reached some amount of stability over several years).

In summary, MS Teams is a dysfunctional tool that reflects the dysfunctional organization behind it. I can’t think of any other reason why it should be so badly maintained.

Every time I think of Windows and other MS applications like Teams, I can’t help but wonder what big productivity and time suckers these are. They seem to be the lowest common denominator in the IT world.

The 3 biggest problems I have with it are search, history, and stability. Scrolling back in time past a few weeks will frequently just crash Teams for me. The search Teams has is beyond basic and genuinely unhelpful most of the time, and I frequently just don't get my alerts despite being available and someone directly @ing me. Then there are tons of small problems like Teams automatically setting me as away if I don't touch my mouse for 15 minutes or sometimes I'll have Teams on a second monitor while working in a primary monitor and Teams will have set me as away for no reason. Also Teams threads are literally the worst UX I have ever had. I am not exaggerating

On MacOS there’s some phantom window object that gets created so that you cannot CTLR-<TAB> back to the Teams app. I believe the MacOS window bar indicates it’s “Teams Notifications” or some such thing. Basically these Electron apps are just incredibly poorly integrated in the OS.

Then there’s the painful markup capabilities when messaging. Oh if I paste in an IP address or something and then I want to style it as code, the backticks are ineffective since and pasted text somehow carries its own styling which apparently cannot be overridden. So the backticks just show up as literals.

Pasting large console output generally sucks as well. Out teams tends to switch over to Slack to paste big text dumps.

The UI is so ugly. The use of contrast between elements is so half-assed that it’s hard to find basic buttons like send, attach, end call.

They mess with the Windows audio driver somehow, so even though I have an audio interface that works with Windows for Ableton and Zoom browser calls, Teams will not permit it to be used in calls. It will start the call and then every time you speak say “This microphone isn’t compatible with Teams”, so it is detecting sound and choosing not to pass it. There’s no reason for the application to do anything other than refer to the default audio device but for some reason it doesn’t do that.

I use Teams for education. I spend a lot of time spelunking through online resources. Unlike file browsers or browsers where you can open documents in new windows or tabs, Teams can only do one thing at a time. The back button is not predictable. Together this makes it several steps behind poking through a public ftp server.

I find teams to be buggy, confusing, and unresponsive. It also enables fairly undiscoverable and frustrating experiences like those sites within tabs. Then there's the notification overload and strange threading/discussions. I've gotten used to slack, hip chat, and old skype for business, but I have not yet got used to teams even after years is usage.

It just doesn't work? I've tried multiple times on various projects, but "using" Teams on Linux or Mac is a sure way to loose contact with your team. Skype works much better (or at all I guess for me).

Teams have the ugliest ux of any chat app