Slack for Desktop 4+

Good chat app, just a few annoying things

Overall Slack is a good messaging/chat/sharing app. Plenty of useful things within the threads or PMs. Nice feature to delete messages and it archives shared images and docs automatically.
One annoying bit is the lack of a dark theme for the main message area. Seriously, how hard is it to adjust the style sheet? I’ve read that Slack is just a glorified Chrome app. Older versions of slack could be hacked to display better, why not the latest? Seriously, this looks like amateur hour. Update: Slack got back to me stating this is on their radar. Yeah, far as I know it’s been “on the radar” for years. Come on guys, just do it.
Second is the channel ordering on the sidebar. The “scienfific” ordering bears absolutely no resemblance to how I use the channels. All I want is the channels I use most frequently at the top. And those with unread or tagged messages filtered higher to the top. Right now the placement seems random. My most common channel usually makes it to position 1 or 2, but the rest are all over the list, Channels I have never posted to show up higher than ones I use most every day. If I reply to a message in a channel it usually drops to the bottom of the list.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback. We do not have an ETA to share, but we do have dark mode on our radar. So sorry it’s taken so long! With regards to channel sorting, apologies that the scientific method is not reflecting how you use Slack. Perhaps starring these most used channels could help. You can read more about that here: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201331016-Star-channels-messages-or-files#star-a-channel-or-dm.

Good product, calling and screen sharing not reliable

I still remember back before Screen Hero or whatever it was called was discontinued. I swear it worked better as a separate product.

Calling in Slack in my biggest complaint, I wish it was more reliable when it comes to the screensharing portion of things. More often than not the screenshare will freeze requiring the meeting to restart or sometimes requiring the toggle of just the screenshare component. It also uses up an extremely high amount of system resources causing the fans in my MacBook Pro 16" Core i9 to go crazy. A little optimization would be nice.

I am writing this review today though as I continue to be annoyed by these problems that haven't been solved for years. Google Meet and Zoom don't have issues like this.

One last thing, your "cool" app update messages in the AppStore change log aren't very cool. Why not actually tell customers what you are fixing instead of trying to be so creative while avoiding the disclosure of information. I feel like transparency is a little warranted in today's climate to help build trust in our industry. I for one would like to know what you are fixing so maybe I can feel better about the platform as a whole in case I have encountered or been affected by problems that may have been fixed.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your candid feedback, we very much appreciate it. We will take your comments onboard as we look to the future of screen sharing and calling in Slack. We also appreciate your comments about update notes, and we'll give this some thought. Thanks again for being so open with us.

Priceless tool

This is a game changer for my digital marketing agency. We use it every day and a lot of my clients are now using it too. I love all the free features it comes with but it be great if I have more privacy features for my team and clients. Because each user has a profile with contact details, it prevents me from mixing my teams together with other teams and clients. I have to create several Slack accounts for different teams/clients. I don't need my clients contacting everyone directly or vise versa. For paid, because I work with such a large team it would be too expensive to upgrade. But if I could pay a flat fee $20 up $50 a month just for that feature (ideally $25) I would pay to keep my team's contact details private and limit use of DM between each other and clients so I can add clients and team members to one channel and limit what my clients can do and DM. To pay per account is not realistiic, it's way too many people. Please add this feature it would be so great and I would pay a flat fee for it! :) I'm still giving 5 stars because the value deserves it. This would just take it to the next level.