Slack

Team or group communication is quick and cleanly organized when you use slack. The extended feature set is nice, such as reminders, but mostly I use this for the basics. Search has gotten pretty good and notifications have been mostly reliable in recent years, though there are still occasional hiccups when you are both in the app and have a browser tab open, even if one is backgrounded. Best of all, the app is pretty low impact on battery life and system performance.

Slack was great at providing a team communication system. Unfortunately, like so many other great platforms that did one thing very well, they're now trying to do it all, and becoming less helpful, especially now, adding AI to do summaries of conversations. Attendees are taking fewer notes, attending less, and missing important details. Slack was nearly perfect. Now it tries to do too much.

It was extremely dificult to log into my work email on my mobile device, but once I got it to work, it runs smoothly. I hope Slack continues to take cybersecurity as a top priority, which is the most important thing. Update: Had to log in again with a new device. Login is SO BROKEN. Just takes you for a loop. Terrible design. If I ever log in, it will be fine. Currently the app is useless and my organization's IT dept is also frustrated.

So many bugs, issues with notification delivery, and crashes when editing messages. I posted a comment with a photo, but the photo rendered a preview that was just a horizontal line, and then rendered the image upside down, when the preview was clicked, so I deleted the photo, and tried to edit the comment, then Slack crashed. I can no longer edit that comment at all without Slack crashing. I had to resort to using the web app, on my phone to edit the post, but still couldn't update the photo.

The new ui puts every workspace at the same layer. Suddenly I have 7 channels all named "announcements," with no way to tell which one is which. This makes the app useless for my teams. We're already seeing usage dropping off dramatically. UPDATE: while you can isolate groups in both the desktop and mobile app, it doesn't make it easy to find and most of my students never find it. It also makes notifications bewildering. Most of the class gave up and moved off the system.