Unified Grid: How we re-architected Slack for our largest customers

All I know is they rearchitected Slack recently so that now the mobile app feels asynchronous, in a bad way. Like, you tap on things and they don’t get marked read — in the local app! — for <i>seconds</i>. Also, the unread count badge doesn’t match what you see when you open the app.<p>Slack used to be a really impressive user experience, but it has degraded significantly, not in UX design (though that’s also highly arguable) but in flakiness.

They put in all this engineering effort, but as a user in multiple workspaces in a large enterprise grid, this unified grid rework has been a strictly worse user experience.<p>In a large org, if I am in multiple workspaces, that often means they are completely separate contexts and unifying them makes it harder to look at exactly what I want.

So this solves the problem of when each department in an enterprise creates a workspace and the CEO wants to unify the departments. What happens when each department in an enterprise creates its own org grid and the CEO wants to unify the departments?

I&#x27;d like to be more positive about this change but it was extremely disruptive to existing workflow. Oh that channel that had third party people? It&#x27;s now in the ether. That project that only existed in one workspace? Mixed right on with your everyday channels. Want to context switch? Too bad! Impossible to prioritize that stack of notifications at a glance. The limited clarity I was able to build around is now a fog. Its making me find email as the best communication path since nobody else is using it.

We&#x27;re probably the end of life phase for slack. Is there a new IRC-but-pretty already in place that will be great until a little while after it goes public for billions?<p>edit: I was reasonably impressed with Zulip recently

Now that this work is complete, maybe they will finally fix Slack&#x27;s input box so that Home and End keys work properly

Now make the app suck less. It has turned into a needlessly complex experience where I have to expend more mental energy than should be required to find what I’m looking for.

Does that architecture will empower that small organization to support their app on iOS versions older than 2 years?