Keybase is a little like "Linux on the desktop". I love it, I use it. With my help, even my dad can use it. The underlying architecture is righteous, it's open-source, and I want it to be good enough so that everybody can use it... but it's just not. Too many basic things that "normal people" want to do just don't work well enough.
Keybase's desktop and mobile apps sometimes hang while decrypting old messages, and until you force quit, the messages won't load.
The Mac app gets into this mode where it can't be hidden, and just insists on staying on the screen.
It doesn't work at all, for any reasonable value of work, on the iPad (it shows a tiny little phone-sized window that fills about 25% of the screen, and doesn't support rotate so it's rotated 90 degrees if you try to type into it with the keyboard).
Etc.
OTOH, the underlying platform seems well-designed and that's obviously where most of the effort is going — it's been a steady march of new and valuable features. They only added the chat feature itself 3 years ago. Keybase git, Stellar wallet, Keybase SSH, the awesome new bot architecture...
While I too wish the apps were smooth and polished, Keybase might be right to focus on the platform first. Making a good app using cross-platform UI toolkits is hard.
Those toolkits are evolving fast, too. It's not inconceivable that in another 3 years, the apps they have today will have been completely replaced by new ones based on a next-generation UI library that runs on top of Tauri[1] or whatever the new hotness is in 2023, and maybe those will be smoother and more polished due to general advances in cross-platform app cores and UI libraries, and if that happens we might end up being glad that the Keybase people spent their energy on building out this reliable crypto platform instead of trying to fix Electron's window layering bugs or whatever.
But yeah, in 2020, I agree the Keybase app's aren't even close to being polished enough to replace Slack for most people. (And Slack itself is pretty awful!)
Keybase's desktop and mobile apps sometimes hang while decrypting old messages, and until you force quit, the messages won't load.
The Mac app gets into this mode where it can't be hidden, and just insists on staying on the screen.
It doesn't work at all, for any reasonable value of work, on the iPad (it shows a tiny little phone-sized window that fills about 25% of the screen, and doesn't support rotate so it's rotated 90 degrees if you try to type into it with the keyboard).
Etc.
OTOH, the underlying platform seems well-designed and that's obviously where most of the effort is going — it's been a steady march of new and valuable features. They only added the chat feature itself 3 years ago. Keybase git, Stellar wallet, Keybase SSH, the awesome new bot architecture...
While I too wish the apps were smooth and polished, Keybase might be right to focus on the platform first. Making a good app using cross-platform UI toolkits is hard.
Those toolkits are evolving fast, too. It's not inconceivable that in another 3 years, the apps they have today will have been completely replaced by new ones based on a next-generation UI library that runs on top of Tauri[1] or whatever the new hotness is in 2023, and maybe those will be smoother and more polished due to general advances in cross-platform app cores and UI libraries, and if that happens we might end up being glad that the Keybase people spent their energy on building out this reliable crypto platform instead of trying to fix Electron's window layering bugs or whatever.
But yeah, in 2020, I agree the Keybase app's aren't even close to being polished enough to replace Slack for most people. (And Slack itself is pretty awful!)
[1] https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri (no idea if that will take off, it's just an example)