[brettwilcox]

Yes, I'm doing a custom react client integration. AA has to prepare for black swan events from every angle and this is a perfect example of one.

When you have 100,000+ employees, it's not trivial to just switch up communication platforms.

[StavrosK]

If you need to prepare for Black Swan events, doesn't it make sense to have your own channel to distribute APKs to all devices? Why would you rely on the Play Store at all?

[beowulfey]

that’s a lot of tooling to build for a single application—plus not everyone is tech savvy and installing from non-standard locations requires more user support

[exikyut]

A 100K-sized company is going to have a BYOD or corporate device issuance program with tie-in to MDM, which effectively functions as a private appstore (the DPC (device policy controller) (itself an app) can silently install apps (as in, download APK from $anywhere, hand to PackageManager) without confirmation, etc).

MDM infra is big bu$ine$$, but DPCs are quite simple to write.

(Psst. They also let you read CPU usage on Android 7+ (sadly not per task, but at least with per-core granularity). The catch? Installing a DPC requires a factory reset. xD)

[e12e]

> A 100K-sized company is going to have a BYOD or corporate device issuance program

Some will, some might run a more open org, with a lot of rather independent contractors, focusing on providing services on standard platforms (email, chat, wiki, bugtracker etc).

[corty]

Not every device is under MDM in a big corp. Often you have people like external consultants bringing their own devices, who need to participate in (semi-)internal communications. You cannot just MDM those and you cannot just issue bigcorp devices to them, so you need something like the normal appstore to distribute the software. Maybe you even have BYOD for internal people, so MDM could be hairy from a GDPR/employee rights/liability standpoint. And maybe you even have customers and partners who you want to communicate with, whom you have to provide with a viable option of communicating. You can (maybe) separate those into an internal and an external communication tool. But then you just have two different tools, one of which will have the exact same problem about needing installation via commonly available appstores.

[vvillena]

It's easier to simply ensure that the apps you need are present in multiple stores.

[GlennS]

I take your meaning, but pedantically I think the idea of black swan is that you couldn't ever see it coming, so the only way to prepare for it is some sort of general robustness (which to be fair Matrix does have).

[volta83]

Let each user pick among any of the multiple clients available. Don't design your system / process to only support one client.

[brettwilcox]

It puts too much pressure on Helpdesk to provide the support needed when you don't have a common path.

[jancsika]

This reality should be yelled by a death metal band singer 24/7 at every FOSS developer.

[hutzlibu]

I laughed hard ... but actually no.

That should be yelled at every FOSS evangelist, those people who claim everywhere that no one needs Windows, because Linux has everything Windows has, just better, etc.

We FOSS developers are free to do what we want. Most of us develope mainly for pleasure, not to ease the workload of some corporate helpdesk.

[jancsika]

I'm arguing against the hidden premise that "having a dozen different client thingies" is a potentially good thing for users. It nearly never is, and the fact that a dozen devs derived pleasure from creating them doesn't change that.

I'll go even further and claim that "user choice" is code for, "warning: nobody in this space is competent enough in UI/UX to derive pleasure from working on it." In fact in mastodon's design, it's not even code-- the "choice" of servers by topic is literally a limitation imposed on the user before even signing up. So the very first part of the UX has a circular dependency-- choose a server to try out the service and discover which server most suits your interests. It'd be like Google redesigning search so that you have to type subreddit-style topic into the URL before searching.

Additionally, this "choice" meme seems to conveniently disappear for software that has a thoughtful UI. I don't see anyone talking about the downside of Krita not having multiple other half-baked UI's than very impressive one it ships with.