I generally like my Apple Watch, though for what I use it for, it’s overpriced.

I generally like Slack, but we were also using HipChat, and before that I’ve been an active user of XMPP and friends, and before that it was all about IRC. So let’s just say that I get it, and I’m not all wowed by a pretty GUI on top of 20+ year old tech.

I installed Slack on my phone because my boss uses it a lot, and I’m not always in front of my computer (contrary to popular belief). I’m also not always with my phone, so I thought it would be great to install Slack onto my Apple Watch, so that at least if I’m away from my phone, I can get an alert and come back to it.

That was short-lived. Within a day, I had uninstalled it, and here’s why:

1. Slack’s idea of “idle” is “window not in foreground,” so any time any message comes to me on the computer, even if I’m here, it’s considered “unread” (despite popping up a notification). Most of my messages in Slack are alerts from monitoring systems, Jenkins, Gitlab, and other stuff that needs no response - seeing the alert is enough for me. Slack doesn’t know that, though.
2. Having popped up an alert on the computer, it then pops up an alert on the phone. I don’t know if Slack on the phone gets the messages in real-time, but it probably does, since it’s just another client.
3. Since my phone screen is off, the phone forwards the message to my watch.

The result is that while sitting in front of my computer, I receive three copies of every message, two with audio alerts and one with a haptic alert.

Talk about vomit.

I could probably close the Slack app on my phone, but then I’d have to remember to turn it on when not at my computer.

Everyone knows how I feel about remembering things.

HipChat, for all its shortcomings, handled this better. I had to actually be “away” (computer screen saver on or manually set) in order for stuff to happen. If I was “online” in one client, I was online in all of them, and no notifications appeared on the phone.

Is Slack so arrogant that they expect people to keep their window in the foreground 100% of the time, and if it’s not in the foreground, they must be away?

How Uber.