From a cost-benefit point of view there’s nothing in it for slack. They’d have to rewrite and maintain three separate versions of the same app they already have, and what would the payoff be? It would mildly please a handful of bellyachers, who would then immediately move on to the next grievance. For the majority of users it would be wasted money and effort.
My argument is that this is not actually all that much effort, and it would make far more people happy than you’d realize. While not everyone can verbalize their complaints about Slack, I’m sure many feel the performance issues; and they would certainly notice if Slack happened to load five seconds faster or their computer’s battery lasted a couple of hours longer.
> I think you’re underestimating the work involved
This was the amount of work necessary for me to ditch running Slack in a Safari tab, and basically consists of being able to talk to people and send them attachments–the things I do 99% of the time. If I need something advanced like voice calling I’m more than happy to fire up actual Slack. Assuming libslack (or whatever it is called) handles the core protocol and communication layer, I don’t see why it would be difficult to write a bit of Cocoa code around it; I could even pull some of this straight from the iOS app.
> switching from electron to native won’t make people’s battery last hours longer
It does, though. Opening Slack on my computer reduces the battery life by around two hours; a well made native app will have a reduction that can be measured in minutes. Native apps are just better at idling and using fewer resources when they are in active use.
Which application as complicated as slack do you run 24x7 on your computer, with a persistent connection to a server updating the ui that only reduces your battery by a few minutes versus two hours with slack?
Using caps isn’t a substitute for having a point, nor is it a refutation of the effort involved to make three separate native apps instead of one. Also you’re not supposed to use caps here.
I don’t think it sucks, most users don’t think it sucks. You represent a tiny, vocal minority.
