Slack Reviews

The recent iPad App update misses the mark quite considerably. In some ways, it is almost as if this app doesn’t understand its users. No longer easy to see all unread messages in one place - which was a feature I regularly requested for the desktop app. Now, the iPad app has been turned to be quite bland. Seems like the “Dark Mode” folks won the design argument; as the new app no longer supports the desktop or web app color themes; which now makes the iPad app incredibly difficult to know at a glance which team you’re viewing. Also frustrating are the 3 or so “Unread Direct Messages” you can see, when you tap “Show All” it takes you to the “Direct Messages” sidebar that sorts in its own way, with unreads strewn about. Also, Direct message addresses are much harder to read; too much text all clumped together. Unfortunate for the iPad app, this app has taken a once very useful version (preferred as a second screen in some cases over the desktop app) and made it into a giant iPhone app. The iPhone app now also suffers from this Direct Message unread messages “Show All” problem. The only way to return some of the missing sort and see all DMs on the iPad app is to select the sort option of “by recent” but it does not group unreads. 7 years using this app, and this is by far the most disappointing iPad app “upgrade.” Repackage the desktop app for the iPad and call it “this app Pro” for iPad Pro users who use their iPad in place of a laptop.

I love this app. I started using this app in January for my job, as our communications channel, between team members. Slack has never caused me any problems. It’s NEVER: crashed, logged me out unexpectedly, had any technical problems, deleted any of my channels, failed in posting, or any other problems.

Slack is reliable, always functioning, never disappoints with the reactions and features to customize for your job specific needs, and in all ways shapes and form been hands down 100% real time. I love how i can change my profile picture, name, workplace info, choose privacy and notification settings, can set myself as away, and all my notifications come in once I’m active, have a dark mode enabled (this saves my tired eyes first thing in the morning) and an all the way around fun place to communicate with others.

I don’t leave many reviews, and this is one of the only ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ reviews I’ve left. Thank you for everything your team and developers have done to streamline our success. You’re amazing!

Look, I love/d this app. I’ve been using it as my internal business communication tool for the past five years. I’ve also noticed in those past five years, this app has barely innovated and as of recently, especially during 2020 when most applications like zoom, Google meet, and Microsoft teams have been booming with innovation in new ways of interacting in this new work from home work life. Now with the acquisition from salesforce, I truly feel like this app is going to go down the drain and what was once the industry leader in communication has sat back on the couch, slacking, watching everybody else move forward. As of today, we are looking into other platforms outside of this app due to the lack of innovation and buy out from sales force. An example of what I think is easy innovative feedback, we’ve been asking for voice clips to send both privately and in channels up to 2 to 5 minutes long so managers can leave a status update or important message or daily briefing first thing in the morning without having to type it all out and can do it on the go; nothing. It was nice while it lasted, this app. 👋

Overall Slack works quite well. Some things are big misses for me though, especially notifications. Putting a lot of detail in hopes it is read by developers as I do want to love Slack .

Searching for users when trying to start a DM doesn’t prioritize users you’ve talked to before. I work at a company with thousands of employees, so if I search for someone with a common first name and I don’t know their last name, I have to go through a list of 30 people when I’ve talked to them before and I’d expect them to just come up first.

Messages you read on web or on Slack don’t dismiss notifications. I have to go dismiss them all one at a time even though Slack should know I’ve read them. Big failing for me compared to something like FB messenger which will know to clear them.

There are no different snooze settings for different days of the week. I don’t work 7 days a week. Why would I want the same snooze settings?

There is no granularity on getting alerts for channels besides give me everything all the time, and give me nothing. If a conversation is happening I want to know about it, but I also don’t want my phone to completely blow up with 50 notifications beeping at me in 10 minutes. It would be much less distracting / annoying to group the messages and notify on configurable intervals

Lastly, if I get a message while snoozed I am not told about it once the snooze ends. This can lead to me not noticing a message for days

New video system is really bad on iOS, iPadOS and macOS. It’s chunky, glitchy and hard to use, trying to reduce size of the video while playing, as result it takes more time than download 3-4mb high resolution video and play it. Also scrubbing on mac is horrible. Old system was much better and convinced.

Also,
When I got notifications about messages I got it on all my devices: - Mac - iPhone - iPad When I open this app on any 1 of these devices, let’s say on iPad, and then read that message from notification I just got in chat group, so that message will be marked as was read - that message is still shown as on my Notifications view on iPhone and this app icon is still have 1 red circle, so like some new message is waiting for me. This should work as for example in Telegram app. In it, when I got notification it will be shown in Notifications view on iPhone and iPad and Mac. But then, if I open Telegram on any of these devices and read that message - notification from Notifications view will disappear on all other devices and icon on Slack will be without red 1.

this app is an indispensable tool at my company, and I generally enjoy using it. However, recent updates changed the behavior of unread messages in a way that makes it extremely aggravating to use. Until recently, I could go to my Home view and see all unread messages grouped together at the top. This was so wonderful and intuitive! Now I only see 3 unread messages with a link to show the rest. Unfortunately, when you tap the link to “show all x” it takes you to the DMs screen where messages are in chronological order. This means my unread messages are scattered all over the place, and as a result I no longer have a way to just see all my unread messages grouped together. Either bring back the original view that was there FOREVER, have the “show all x” link expand to see them all from Home, or allow me to group unread messages at the top of the DMs page. I’m supportive of adding things to a product, but don’t take away a key viewing experience that leaves a huge gap in the product.

The this app service is great but the ios app needs either a better thoughtout navigation system or more customizations. There’s so many little things that could be slightly tweaked to make this a better experience.

For instance, all unread channels and 1:1 conversations are automatically moved to the top of the list, which means the list is constantly shifting around, making it very difficult to find the channel I need or go back to the previous channel after switching briefly to see a new message. And when I look for a particular conversation or channel, I have to check two places. The desktop this app app (thankfully) offers an option to turn this off, but not the mobile app.

Settings for the whole app are buried inside channels/conversations. Settings for channels, at least to some degree, are only available on the desktop app. It’s a mess.

And editing a message requires a long press and then a quick tap on a menu that’s partially covered by the home indicator on the iPhone X/11.

Sometimes my workflow is interrupted by a not-so-helpful on-screen tip, like the one showing me how to swipe horizontally. (I already knew that, and I have work to do.) There’s no way to turn these off or quickly dismiss them, so I must complete each exercise before I’m allowed to use Slack .

The list goes on. The updates to Slack are frequent but sadly its shortcomings get less priority than silly things like an entire screen to choose Slack icon.

When I first started using this app back in Feb 2019, IIRC, I was thinking I’d definitely want to use Slack for when I launch my own business. During this time, I’ve noticed this app’s issues more and more, basically the ones you can read in the other reviews, namely the lack of synchronization between desktop and iOS apps—meaning you’ll have to read everything again on the mobile app to make their unread status go away. BUT, they’ve never been a dealbreaker, even though they were inconvenient and annoying at times.

Now, they’ve discontinued support for any OS below iOS 13.3, and quite frankly, I find it a very ridiculous notion to ask a user to change a very well working device (iPhone 6) just for the sake of an app. I’m going to delete it from my phone since it’s no longer functional. If I didn’t have to use it on desktop for work—a major inconvenience since I don’t carry a laptop everywhere I go—I’d have discontinued my use of their services.

My dev team has been leaving this app more and more since everyone now works from home, and the viewing of someone else’s screen share does not work on iPad. Many of our team are mobile, and while the developers themselves are most always at a desktop, managers and attendees on calls are not - and are unable to view and follow along on the product and issue demos. Because of this, meetings are now scheduled outside this app on other services like MS teams and GoToMeeting which support viewing from iPad. Once meetings started to move from this app, more communications continue to move out. Our use case makes sharing from iOS a very very low priority, but viewing other presenters shared screen is a must have. Without this feature, I find I must only give this app 3 stars. Otherwise, notifications work well, and messages are solid other than missing multiple levels of bullet indents to make readable lists.

this app is like a giant meat pie of an entire organizations communications. Why is this company entrusted with so much sensitive data? Why is this company worth billions? It offers modest boosts in communications but at the expense of constant nagging at all hours to participate in the always-on business “culture.”
If you’re going to use this app, set up your own boundaries, and work to limit the application’s reach into your life. Otherwise you’ll be sucked up like another strand of spaghetti in this app’s “value proposition.” Yikes!
Boundaries are healthy, people. “Always on work culture” is a sign of simplistic, juvenile notions of how to lash as many people as possible into the heaving, soul-crushed masses of American suckers who think they have no other option than to just give their lives away to the job market. Yikes! Boundaries! Cultivate good boundaries! Then maybe this app will actually start to show some value.
/end rant.

Updated Review: Dev team responded and the newest version does include a fix for the active/away bug. Updated rating; however, Dev team should test builds before rolling out to the public especially for important features such as your presence status.

Original Review: Switching between active and away no longer works since the last release. When the selection is chosen it just highlights it but doesn’t change the status. Force closing Slack and immediately changing the status works only sometimes. I’ve already tried uninstalling and reinstalling Slack and the problem still persists. Based upon the reviews in Slack Store it appears that this problem is not isolated to me. Hopefully the dev team can fix in the next release

I AM able to open links on the Desktop site from my Saved Items. But not in the mobile app or from my iPad. In fact, I had to open this app in a mobile browser in order to even open a Saved Item. How does that make sense????????

If I try on my ipad- I have to go to my profile, whereas on the dekstop “Saved Items” are found on the lefthand column with everything else- makes sense. On a mobile device, there’s these additional steps. Doesn’t make sense. Anyway, once in my Profile, I click on the dots in the upper right hand corner. I click on Saved Items. My Saved Items populate. Okay, great. Finally. I click on the link in the Saved Item I want. Nothing. The Saved Items menu disappears and I’m just looking at my Profile. I try again. Same thing. Try again. Same thing. I long press the link. Slack completely closes out altogether. 😒

As a UX designer, if you guys can’t see or understand the frustration I have with this simple feature that should be easy...lol. And yes my app is up to date. Please fix. Apparently I can do this from my laptop and my phone, but I use my iPad for school and Zoom meetings since everything is virtual. And the Zoom meeting is saved on this app for the classroom.

I shouldn’t have to go into a mobile browser because the link won’t work in Slack itself.

My school has a this app license and I use it for classes, but whenever I try to join a workspace, it makes me login with the email I have associated with my school but then it creates a new user profile with the same email instead of using the existing one. Earlier today I literally joined a workspace using my existing email address and profile and it, instead of using the existing account,
created a new profile. Why does it do this??? It's unnecessary.

Also earlier today I got a URL invite to a this app workspace and tried to join that workspace using my existing account (like literally every other workspace-like service allows) but it wouldn't let me join by URL, and instead only showed me the workspaces I had already joined (but not logged into on desktop app I guess). I know this was doable before, as one of my classes a few years ago had people join via a URL, so what happened?!

I’ve been using this app for a year now with work, classes, and organizations. It has a really nice setup and I enjoy the fast communication. But something that I think could be changed is the do not disturb - I think there should not be a default automatically turned on and people should instead receive a suggestion to change this themselves in settings, many people don’t pay attention to this and I have a lot of messages that end up not being seen. The big thing is that after the do not disturb period ends, you don’t get notified of the messages that you received within that time period. So many people end up not seeing those messages until much later, or not at all. I think this app should notify you immediately after the do not disturb period ends so you can respond to those messages in a timely fashion. This seems like a big thing to overlook.

I really want to like it. But I’m 25 and Slack makes me feel like I’m 80 and using technology for the first time. There are all these videos and pages to teach you how to use it but I don’t have time to “study” to use an app in between studying medicine. Idk. Maybe it’s just me. But people have been DMing me and I don’t know what it’s in response to. I can’t figure out which posts are unread or how to subscribe to the subgroups I’m interested in. When I try to comment on a thread it seems like I have to tag the person so they know I’ve replied. But to tag someone you can’t just click reply like in Facebook. You have to search though everyone’s name as you type it. I tried to have it tell me every time a post with “neurological” comes up but instead it just highlights all the spaces in random posts. The content in these groups have been really interesting but Slack /platform is so stressful and confusing I think I’ll leave the group. Sorry devs :/

So far, Slack hasn’t done anything bad per se. It gets the job done, just a basic app for work. However, I wish you could choose what kind of messages will send you a notification. If you just downloaded Slack, be wary about notifications. From what I know, this app only notifies you if you/the channel is tagged/mentioned, so anything else sent in the channels you will not receive a notification for, which is kind of annoying. For example, when I or someone else has a question, that does not need the whole channels attention, but is not directed at a specific person, no one will be notified of the message. Which means that it can take a while for someone to get back to you.

I wanted to ask if you could create the option to have a virtual whiteboard that stayed at the top of the this app channel. We have thousands of people where I work and use this app A TON and it’s a great tool. If we had the ability to do something like that where a whiteboard could be added at the top of a channel and stay there if desired it’d be huge for us. And have the ability to format the whiteboard however you wanted so to speak like an excel sheet with checkboxes. Or even if it just had a message at the top people could add to it and there’s only a certain amount of lines as determined by the creator of the channel. And people could add emojis to a row of more emojis or something to that effect.

Seriously, it sounds like I own it, but I’m just a user. Caveat, I’m not an “at work” user, but I’m an avid user and part of 7 active groups, largest having 2000 members, give or take. I’m not saying it’s the best, but it is the one I know, and haven’t found myself wishing it Qs better, and it improved my life by a ton.
So, that’s it for any group of people organized around any mission or for any reason, from a club, to a political cause. And even to stay in touch with friends abroad, whatever. It will be useful, at no cost on any level (not Facebook “free”) it’s a great tool for people to operate and communicate in a democratic way and keep it all together... this WILL be of value to all.

Using this app is easy, it’s convenient and I recommend it. The ONE thing that I wish were different is the DMs. I’m in THREE separate workspaces with overlapping members in the group. Sending a DM to one person in one workspace means not seeing the private message thread when sending a DM to the SAME person in another workspace. We have a workspace for the village in which our Burning Man camp lives to communicate with the village leads. We have a camp message to chat amongst us as camp members. Some of us in that camp are involved in an art project that includes other people. There’s no good way to keep up the DMs with the people who also are in my same workspaces across all the workspace. As you can imagine, DMs are usually OT and all over. This is the one thing that could use a tweek, IMO.

I like the platform, but the UIs on the various platforms - and especially iOS / iPadOS - are getting worse, not better, with every update.

They are ultimately following the “cram every feature into it” model. The current iOS UI is far less useable because now I have groups which has reorganized everything making the UI require a smaller font on an already tiny screen (and my eyesight is not getting any better with age). I also have (horribly crappy) Facebook menu UI buttons at the bottom for Home, DMs, Mentions, and You. In the previous UI I didn’t need these because everything was already there.

Things which were easy like setting status are now buried multiple screens deep and searching for previous conversations is much harder.

Facebook is not the UI you want to model. It’s not intuitive, clunky, and archaic. Remember, people didn’t flock to this app because it looked and worked like Facebook. They flocked to this app because it was easy to use and intuitive and made sense and didn’t require a “here’s what is new and how to use it” every time something new came out (all stuff Facebook does).

Please fire those UI devs and PMs which you hired from Facebook and go back to what you had before. It was better and it worked.

We use in our small law office. We had to write some of our own "best practice rules" (like phone message channels only get phone messages, no gifs in general, snooze when you aren't answering) but it's been a great tool for our office. Easy way to be sure you're keeping up with your team without getting in to email all the time. We love it because if person a has a question for person b, a send the question and b gets to answer when they have the time in their day. Minimize interruptions while also allowing the person with a question to say it when they're thinking about it. We love this app. It's AOL instant messenger for professionals. I do wish it was easier to upload images etc without the comments being a weird title.

First, my rant (feel free to skip):
I was not pleased when Microsoft purchased Skype, and my fears were increasingly justified as I saw version release after version release further thrash GUI conventions (if Microsoft made light switches, down would turn the light on and up would turn it off...). Finally, the family decided to stop using Skype for our domestic and international communications needs. We switched to this app...

Second, my review:
It took some getting used to, but this app is now our family communication hub... we’ve got channels for making travel plans, sharing recipes, and even communicating while playing Minecraft (yes, I know, Microsoft...).

this app has not only replaced Skype, but is quickly replacing our need to use generic texting and e-mail. I’m still very fond of Discord, but who knows...!?

I highly recommend this app. Delve into it. Learn it well, and perhaps you too will adopt it as your one comm app to rule them all!

5-stars. Hands down.
this app people: promise me you’ll never sell this to Microsoft when Team simply doesn’t grab enough market share, and they come knocking. Pretty please...

The notifications are so quiet that even on full volume, I almost never hear them, which makes Slack nearly useless. This is my biggest irritation.

Second, it sometimes literally takes days for Slack to recognize going from a dead zone to WiFi. During this time, I’ll get notifications, but they won’t load because I’m “offline.” I also can’t change my status during these times, so if I’ve been on vacation, or away for any other reason, I can’t change the status to say that I’m back in town. I’ve tried restarting Slack , my phone, turning WiFi off and using data instead...nothing has worked. Since this app is the only app that has this problem, I’m inclined to believe it’s Slack and not the phone.

If these things could be changed, I would happily write a new and improved review.

Slack a great tool that I have used many times in many companies. I work as a contracted graphic designer for multiple companies so it can get a bit hectic. When I am working, I use an iMac and I get my notifications immediately, which is great. I also have Slack for my iPhone 6, which would be a nice convenience, yet my notifications almost always never come through on time, if at all.

When I step away from my computer, I would expect the same immediacy that I get from my computer. Sometimes I will sit back down at my computer, only to realize I had multiple messages sent to me that I never received in an alert on my phone.

Sometimes I will be away from my computer, and my phone will start dinging like a grandfather clock at noon with 5, 10, 15+ notifications that came through all at once. I will say my internet connection is great, and rarely have issues.

I have no idea what the issue is which phone notifications, but it’s beyond terrible. I constantly restart Slack and my phone. Nothing seems to fix this issue and it makes me want to pull my hair out. I just wish this app could fix this notification issue with phones. It would make my life so much easier.

So awesome!! It’d be better though is this app didn’t auto delete messages and hide them behind a paywall and would also be better if we had the ability to edit/delete messages a regardless of how much time has passed and free video/voice chat. If you don’t wanna spend money on video/voice chat or Spence money getting extra storage of messages, just use discord. It’s basically the same thing with a few slight differences like direct responses to a single text but like each text is a post and the replies could be comments on that message, for example. Again awesome app, loving the new dark mode and businesses, Slack is perfect for you!!

Slack is pretty awesome for on the go use. I like that Slack has not lost hardly any functionality from the desktop version and has even added a few cool features. For example the ability to swipe on the contacts list to bring up previous conversations is really cool and intuitive.
I do agree with other users that it is entirely time consuming and has led to me having almost no time for other work. I would not say it has increase my productivity. That’s not really this app’s fault, though. I just turn it completely off any time I want to do actual work.

Is it just me who intentionally reads the text that is sent along with new updates by this app devs to enjoy the great sense of humor? You guys nail that part. I have a feeling that you produce these many bugs for you to joke about them.
When someone deletes a message, it is not deleted from the notifications on the recipient’s side. My colleague told me that I sent him a message and he couldn't find it when he clicked on it. Little did he know, I deleted it. Could you please fix this issue, so that my colleague doesn't have to click on deleted messages. It is a kinda creepy issue. It is making him worried and he is thinking this app is haunted. Help my colleague.

this app is the bomb. I use it for all group messaging. It’s useful to see all of the history of every message went to join onto a new channel. I even enjoyed the podcast on this app from NPR‘s How I Built This. this app should be your one stop group messaging app for business, get together’s, collaboration, or just plain messaging. The interface is very user-friendly. And I would suggest Slack to anyone. I am giving Slack a five star rating, because it deserves it not because I am biased. I personally use it for messaging/collaborating with my colleagues. I personally have had no problems with Slack , and it runs very smoothly.

I’ve used this app in every company since started my professional career in the Silicon Valley. I find it very intuitive and like how you can control when and how to receive notifications; especially because I’ve always worked with teams offshore (India) and a lot of times I don’t want to be interrupted at night but once in a while I can check in for a task or when I’m on call rotation.

I’m color-blind, so their interface is awesome for me!

I just wish they were more strict with their third party apps/partners. Don’t let just any random app make it to the market without lots of validation.

I absolutely love Slack, but the only thing I would love to see is the ability to post polls for topics that don’t need to have an actual written response (both anonymous answering and not). It would also be phenomenal if there could be an option to designate that only one answer can be selected as well as an option for multiple answers and also allow for written in response (with the option to turn this off).

I hope that made sense, but it would just make things easier for making small decisions that don’t require a lot of feedback.

I use Slack to connect with Pokémon go players in my area so we can meet up for raids, etc. But every single time I open Slack , it freezes on the most recent messages of the last channel I viewed. I have to close and open Slack multiple times before it decides to work properly and sometimes (like right now) it's completely unusable because it stays frozen despite me reopening Slack , checking to make sure I didn't miss an update or something, or restarting my phone. I have mentioned this issue to other users and they say they often have the same problem. How am I supposed to use a product that I can't even get to open properly? Please fix this issue.

Our entire team has stopped writing notes on specific images because of the extra clicks it takes. Seems like it’s not a big deal but our whole team has said comments how much they hate it.

We should be able to write a note on a image or leave a emoji without clicking inside the image and then clicking start a new thread. If I start to write a comment and there are none there, it should automatically start a new thread. Why make us hit extra buttons?? It’s bad UX.

You had it right before. Add options but don’t drop the simple abilities in the process. Please fix or may leave this app. Also, need a simpler pricing structure for small companies with freelancers and scaling teams.

Everybody need a communications tool with their team. Coming to this app from Whatsapp feels like an upgrade, however it's easy to create too many chatting rooms, it's easy to start posting gifs and finally using Slack for everything but work. Like every tool worth using requires commitment by all the team and constant training. this app is awesome if you do this things, get everyone on board and teach the team constantly how to take advantage of this digital Swiss army knife. My advice is try the free tier first so you make sure this is for you, probably it is, but make sure you're willing to do the work required for this to work.

Been using this app for about 8 months. I absolutely love it. Communication is direct through channels, no losing emails in folders. No 3rd part has my this app info so no spam to clutter the communication. Great place to store files without hosting servers or uploading to Google Drive. Tons of apps to add on for better productivity / organization.
My only complaint (and could be user error) would be direct messages between 2 or 3 people at same time. I can’t seem to find a solution for that without having to create a channel. Other than that this is the BOMB!!