
Slack have blocked using the website on mobile - Marazan
https://twitter.com/twitonatrain/status/1210908608898256896
======
cosmojg
There exist plenty of equivalent-or-better alternatives that don't pull shady
shit like this. Your tools should serve you, not the other way around.

Zulip: [https://zulipchat.com/](https://zulipchat.com/)

Rocket: [https://rocket.chat/](https://rocket.chat/)

Riot: [https://about.riot.im/](https://about.riot.im/)

Mattermost: [https://mattermost.org/](https://mattermost.org/)

~~~
city41
Pretty much no one who uses Slack, chooses Slack. The companies we work for
do. I despise Slack, yet I use it all day, every week day. It's quite the
predicament.

~~~
ljm
Yep, basically don't have a choice and discussing alternatives is hopeless. We
had better, once. Now we have this, in a full-blown browser runtime that
doesn't integrate with the OS very well.

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).

~~~
brianpgordon
Were you using the same HipChat that I was? I recall the engineers at my
employer (including me) clamoring to get off HipChat and onto Slack. Search
was terrible, integrations/automation were clunky, and it was difficult to
post code into chat. Slack was a breath of fresh air when we switched.

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.

~~~
ljm
We didn't need an all-in-one hub for realtime chat. Hipchat worked great for
us, we had a separate WhatsApp group (with the founders and everyone else in
there) for the social stuff. We all mingled but if you didn't want to, they'd
find the preferred way to talk to you.

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.

------
hn_throwaway_99
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.

~~~
rsync
"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.

~~~
arielm
That’s such a good point, especially when competitors like Microsoft are
gaining on them ([https://blog.appfigures.com/microsoft-teams-dethrones-
slack-...](https://blog.appfigures.com/microsoft-teams-dethrones-slack-
becomes-most-downloaded-business-chat-app/) ) and Discord is growing even
faster.

~~~
unlinked_dll
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.

------
jbindel
This and the WYSIWYG debacle indicate that Slack [or their product managers]
have stopped caring about a significant portion of their users.

~~~
peterlk
Warning: pure speculation ahead.

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.

~~~
Aperocky
I see a common pattern among utility providing IT companies, that despite the
core functionality can be supported by tens of people, it goes ahead and hires
thousand anyways, which give raise to features that are neither core nor that
anyone wanted. The company then go under as the business can’t generate enough
revenue to feed the thousands of developer and management that has been
brought in.

If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both
technically and organizationally.

~~~
kelnos
Patreon comes to mind. They're essentially a members-only blog subscription
company. It's beyond me what they need all those employees for. The only
difficult problem they should have: dealing with fraud.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm guessing sales & marketing (and the usual O(log n) amount of management
and administrative positions to support that).

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.

------
agluszak
Yet another service that forces you to use the app for no reason (FB
Messenger, Instagram, Reddit), yet another reason to stop using it

~~~
diggan
> Yet another service that forces you to use the app for no reason

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.

~~~
bitexploder
Not trying to be too glib here, but we get it. That’s the problem. HN is
pretty tuned in to the trend of walled gardens and creeping control popular
apps and platforms exert on their users. It’s kind of the point of this
article. Of course it’s helpful for the business for many reasons.

~~~
kordlessagain
This is the result of the VC market models and the near universal buy-in to
the idea limited partner's money (and "advice" that comes with it) is required
for starting software companies. Nothing more.

Bootstrapping is pain, but at least you and your customers retain control long
term.

------
chirau
This is a bad move, especially given the constraints of their mobile app.

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.

~~~
gruez
>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.

AFAIK App Store allows you to download an older version if the current one
isn't supported by your OS.

~~~
bonzini
Sometimes old APIs are dropped server-side and thus older versions of the apps
stop working. I have an old iPad at home where I can watch YouTube from the
browser but not from the app (though Safari is so old that I don't really
trust that device for anything that requires any kind of security).

------
mellosouls
Presumably all the commenters here have tested the claim?

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.

~~~
Marazan
100% does not work for me. Tried the various things suggested in the twitter
thread and I always end back at the "get the app" page.

~~~
mellosouls
Thanks for confirming. I was more responding to the title claim, which seems
incorrect - the desktop site option clearly still works for others. It may be
a bug, or a new policy but time will tell.

------
diminish
In 2019 I got sick of mobile websites offering me their apps again and again.
Facebook, LinkedIn and endless others. Stop it.

~~~
xtracto
This makes me think something intereating:

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.

~~~
Multicomp
> 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.

------
notatoad
There seems to be a lot of angry nerds in here, and that basically describes
me too. Hoping I can get a response from somebody with a broader perspective:

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?

~~~
it33
Mattermost CEO here, to the extent it's helpful, here's a demo video of how it
looks and feels importing a Slack team into Mattermost from 2017:
[https://youtu.be/AKqHWqrAgpk?t=249](https://youtu.be/AKqHWqrAgpk?t=249)

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/](https://mattermost.com/blog/category/releases/)

------
ravenstine
I just don't have faith anymore. Every piece of software I find myself liking
ends up becoming hostile after 5 years of success.

~~~
chapium
This is why I try to use old software. It has much less feature creep and will
stay relevant for the long run. If you can compile it yourself, even better.

------
lightedman
Stupidest move ever by Slack, so much so that one of my bosses is making the
decision to close all Slack-related stuff for the business.

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.

~~~
progman32
Desktop slack will keep working on desktop OSes. This is just them blocking
desktop mode access from phone browsers.

~~~
lightedman
Does not work with our Chromebooks, which is what comprises the majority of
our work systems.

~~~
progman32
Oh they count Chromebooks too... Wonder if that's intentional.

~~~
lightedman
Chromebooks are essentially running a mobile-focused OS, based in the browser.
Makes sense they'd count that as a mobile platform.

------
wdb
Yet another service not to use on a mobile then. I don’t mind not looking at
work Slack channels on my personal phone

~~~
agluszak
But they are taking away the _choice_ you could have

~~~
eddieroger
The choice is to use Slack or not. It's their service to offer how they wish,
and your choice to use it or not. Tesla doesn't have to make a manual
transmission (equivalent) car just because I'd rather drive stick, but I just
won't drive a Tesla then.

------
znpy
"Slack continues the war against its own users" somebody will say.

~~~
hnarn
And they will be right. The arrogance of market leaders is more or less a
universal constant.

------
dreamcompiler
Every growth-oriented startup with a popular product eventually ruins that
product in the name of growth, which eventually kills the company and
encourages somebody to start a new startup to build a product half as good as
the original. The Silicon Valley circle of life.

------
gboss
This is a shame for mobile developers as well. Deep linking from one app to
another can be tricky to get right. Loading slack from the Android emulator
browser was an easy way to test various deep links. Not sure why they would
care.

------
newnewpdro
Slack is absolutely _unusable_ on a slow connection. It's not even just a
matter of being patient, it flat out breaks with everything timing out.

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.

~~~
zzo38computer
Yes, IRC is much better, and is something I use. (IRC even works without
specialized software, although it works better if you do have it (which isn't
too complicated to write).)

------
itronitron
I wonder for enterprise licenses if there is specific mention of which clients
on which form factors are covered in the license. I expect and hope that
customers will get a lot more specific about what they are paying for so that
companies can't just turn off functionality that has been paid for.

------
ydnaclementine
I understand why people don't like this change (limiting options, etc), but I
can see slack's POV from a business perspective. The mobile web usage might be
so low that maintaining it costs more than forcing people to switch to the
app. And mobile web might be a bad experience anyway (because slack is focused
on standalone desktop app, mobile app, desktop browser instead), so it turns
new users off with the crappy experience. But I don't have the numbers or any
other insight, so it could be more simple: "we want more app usage". And even
if you decide to just leave it alone, is anything truly maintenance free?
(possibly)

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.

~~~
jasonjayr
The OP had a browser on the mobile device capable of rendering a "Desktop
experience" and requested it. Slack went out of their way do discover that and
block that user intent, rather than serve the Desktop UI that they test
already in a desktop browser. The user knows they will be getting a desktop UI
crammed into a mobile device, they asked for it.

~~~
cddotdotslash
And the OP is probably the exact profile of person who will request the
desktop page and then open support tickets with Slack when some features
break, causing them to spend hours debugging the issue.

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.

~~~
jasonjayr
At which point the support folks can close the ticket and say "We don't
support that platform, please use the mobile app, or ask your browser
developer to better support Desktop-on-Mobile". Not supporting the platform,
and actively preventing it are two different things. Especially with all the
invasive power mobile apps have on your device vs being contained in a
browser.

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).

------
userbinator
_It is not possible to access your workspace from your mobile browser, we 're
afraid._

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!_ "

~~~
marcosdumay
"I am sorry, Dave. I am afraid I can't let you do that."

------
Jestar342
There's a small irony that this complaint is on twitter, whom don't permit
desktop site on mobile either and haven't for a long time.

~~~
Shog9
Maybe, but... Twitter actually _has_ a mobile website. You can argue - and I
would agree - that "request desktop site" should give you what you asked for,
but there's still a difference between "here is the mobile web UI" and "here
is a link to download an app": namely, one still allows you to use the site if
you can't or won't install a native app.

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.

------
wilg
I still find it interesting how much people despise native apps. Surely that
is a big problem for, say, Apple.

------
tempsy
The sentiment around Slack has changed so much so fast. It was only a few
years ago when all anyone could do was rave about it. Maybe it was because on
the surface it was the rare decently designed piece of enterprise software.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Few years ago they had an IRC gateway, so they seemed like a user-friendly
startup, and not another exploitative walled garden.

------
ravenstine
This is why I believe that the user-agent header was a bad idea.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Is there an easy way of altering the user-agent header for my phone?

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.

~~~
ravenstine
If you have Android and have Firefox, there are extensions that can do it.
Otherwise, you would need something to intercept requests because Chrome and
Safari on mobile don't have extensions.

------
ashton314
Nit pick on the title: shouldn't this be "Slack _has_ blocked…" rather than
"Slack have blocked"? Is Slack plural?

~~~
sixhobbits
Both are acceptable as you can think of a company as a singular entity or as a
group or many parts.

There is a nice analysis at [0]

[0] [https://www.hallaminternet.com/google-trends-can-settle-
gram...](https://www.hallaminternet.com/google-trends-can-settle-grammatical-
debates/)

~~~
Angostura
Typically, in formal English, companies are singular.

~~~
chadlavi
Only in US. In the rest of the Anglophone world, it's always plural.

------
panpanna
Serious question: how is slack doing now that Microsoft is using all is
muscles to push Teams?

Maybe the slack board is in panic mode because of that?

------
ape4
Browsers are getting more powerful. Eg use local storage for scrolling back in
old comments. So even less need for apps now.

------
amursft
Slack continue to make product changes that speak loudly. Listen to what they
are saying.

------
Marazan
Ah ha!

Visited in an incognito tab and was finally able to get access to desktop site
on mobile it again.

~~~
Marazan
So I wonder if I clear cookies if it would work on a regular tab.

------
mcraiha
How does this work when Slack wants to open long code samples in your browser?

------
akerro
Facebook on mobile is only usable from Chrome

~~~
chiefalchemist
I use it via Firefox on Android. No major issues.

------
frankttr
I never use the slack app even on desktop. Always use web.

------
stryk
What's wrong with IRC? It still works a treat, and has ever since the early-
mid 90's.

~~~
Angostura
The main problem for me is - if you're not logged in, you've missed that part
of the conversation.

~~~
stryk
There are options for persistent connections, with logs and detachment, etc.
ZNC/PsyBNC/Quassel come to mind. ZNC, in particular, is extendable via Perl or
Python (or TCL if you're a masochist). I hear good things about Quassel as
well, but it's still early in development.

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).

------
ProAm
Slack is IRC for millennials. This is purely about gather device specific
metrics that are gathered via granted 'permissions' vs providing a service
users pay for.

~~~
namewasmypw
IRC is IRC for millenials, Slack came much much later

------
rileytg
To be fair to the devs at slack, it does actually cost them something to re-
enable this.

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.

~~~
egdod
>”mobile web browsers do not provide the best experience; you really should
download our app!”

Put a message like that up instead of disabling it altogether.

~~~
rileytg
we do this. we still have users get mad when we explain we don’t support it :(

