[BukhariH]

Honestly, I don't think you can point to any actual business reason for a native client. Slack makes majority of their revenue from large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go and a native desktop client is sadly not a huge selling point for the sales team.

At the end of the day Slack has to optimize for growth and there's a huge list of features that will bring more ROI than native clients which will require trebling the size of the code base.

[dman]

Killing battery life of their users isnt a business reason?

[rhinoceraptor]

All enterprise desktop software is trash. Everyone has to put up with terrible AV, terrible VPN clients, terrible VOIP/video conferencing, etc. There's no incentive to make good software for your users when your users don't have a choice.

[arvinsim]

If doesn't affect their bottomline, then why will they bother?

[dman]

Customers are fickle beasts, they mutter and keep on using a product until they dont.

[raydev]

Sure, but it'll ultimately be because of a hot new UX or feature that Slack didn't think of, not battery life.

[gruez]

yet there's no slack competitor that has "better battery life" or "native apps" as one of its selling points.

[cyphar]

Matrix has native clients[1], as well as a weechat plugin.

[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/quaternion.html

[salvar]

So rewriting all their clients would be a more sensible approach to user retention compared to keeping the current Electron client that most users seem quite happy with?

[dman]

Nokia had users who were happy with the solid phones they were building.

[salvar]

So rewriting all their clients would be a more sensible approach to user retention compared to keeping the current Electron client that most users seem quite happy with?

[pjmlp]

The profit from "large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go" can surely pay a couple of devs to write native apps.

[snuxoll]

Fine, if they don't have any business reason for a native client they should just can the slack desktop app because it provides 0 benefits over the web app then.

If you're going to do something do it right or don't do it at all.

[johannes1234321]

The desktop app allows them to Mark the checkbox of having a "native" app when selling ... And in my environment quite a few folks prefer the election app over the browser. I don't know why, though.

[always_good]

I prefer a dedicate app because I can alt-tab through a relatively limited number of apps compared to the dozens of tabs I may have open.

For example, the desktop app will show notification count in the dock.

Imagine if all of your apps had a browser version and you could always pick between a tabbed version vs standalone version. To use the tabbed version of everything would be like using an AOL app back in those days where you alt-tab to the AOL virtual window and then find the app you want within it while wishing you could just use the OS' window manager system.

[johannes1234321]

I simply have it in a browser window in a specific part on my desktop which I manage via i3wm. But, well, everybody has their preferences.