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It's absolutely \#1. I tried switching to Riot (Matrix), but the integration with Slack was painful. You can get it to work well, but what's to stop Slack from breaking/changing their API periodically to make your app stop working as reliably? If I'm going to put my resources into building a client for something, it's not going to be based on some closed source backed that could change at any time, it's going to be based on something open and forkable (worst case scenario, I can just maintain my own backend). Slack bills itself as a complete solution, not a piece to a larger puzzle, so third party clients and plugins will always take the backseat. Who is going to try to build a serious competitor when they can't really rely on the backend staying consistent? Building a decent frontend isn't particularly difficult. It's not trivial, but it has been done. For example, Pidgin, while a little ugly (I prefer "functional"), works well and has been around for years. I used weechat and irssi for IRC chat before we switched away from IRC, and it worked really well (didn't see pictures, but I think that's more a feature than anything, and links were more than sufficient). The problem is that business types prefer hosted, "batteries included" solutions, and those types tend to not be very friendly with third party add-ons. If I end up being able to use Matrix/Riot, maybe I'll try my hand at a native, cross platform client. But until then, I'm not going to throw my effort toward something that can change at any moment. |