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To be fair to the devs at slack, it does actually cost them something to re-enable this.

every change to the code base has to be checked on mobile web or things will eventually break. at that point will we see an angry tweet about not fixing that?

i develop on a web based system and we don’t support mobile on most of our site because we don’t have the resources to. if we started getting bug reports about this more frequently than we do, we may do the same. It makes our product look bad when we let someone do something we don’t QA for. We pride ourselves on rapid response to our clients requests, with this we build goodwill. we explicitly state we do not support mobile except for specific modules. even with that prior information, users sometimes try anyway and run into bugs. this experience + being told we won’t fix the bug because it’s not a supported platform causes us to lose the goodwill we’ve worked hard to build.

in my local neighborhood there are a ton of wholesale shops that even though there are maybe one or two customers a day (ie the shops are dead most of the time) they refuse to sell non wholesale. it’s not packaging, most things are easily sellable one-off. there are no regulations or laws. they choose not to sell to one class of buyers. if they allowed one-off sales, they would then have to start running their business to support doing that correctly- this means having small change, more personnel, probably introduce some security to watch the now increased traffic in their shops etc.

if slack does mobile web, they’ll have to do it like they do everything else, the “slack” way.




The problem is these products lure you in with false promises, in this case "it works fine in the browser, no need to install, just try".

Once they have enough users, this changes.


>”mobile web browsers do not provide the best experience; you really should download our app!”

Put a message like that up instead of disabling it altogether.


we do this. we still have users get mad when we explain we don’t support it :(




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