I'd be interested to see a study of how many users actually use those features. The company I work for mostly switched from using Skype for chat to Slack and I don't think I've ever done anything with it except send and receive plain text a sentence or two at a time.

The only reason we are trying to switch from Skype is for the persistent and searchable history. I say "trying to switch" because about half the company prefers Skype messaging and so now we have to have two clients installed.

My team built a couple bots that help us keep track of issues we are working on, schedule releases, etc. We also do all of our meetings on Slack; when you're on a call it automatically updates your Slack status to reflect so, that way your teammates know you are busy.

Whether people use all of Slack's potential or not it's a different discussion, but I'd rather have the ability to do more if I wanted to than having to look for yet another tool to solve a small problem.

Don't get me wrong - I'm 100% in favor of extensibility through plugins and bots.

I don't think that means that the default client can't be lean and efficient.

Messages.app does all of those and uses a tenth of the RAM.

There're IRC clients that do half of that (unless IRC got audio and video support at some point) using < 1% of RAM or CPU...

Interestingly, Messages.app on macOS actually is a webview (well, the chat log portion of the window).

do you have a source?

A quick glance at the view hierarchy (Accessibility Inspector.app can do this) shows that the chat view is just a web view.

Interesting! Thanks :)

Yeah, but it doesn't run on my PC, or my phone, or in a browser.

I don't need it to run in a browser or PC, and it works on my phone since I have an iPhone. You needs may vary, in which case you might just stick to SMS which is cross-platform and lightweight.

You can control people's screens through Messages? And you can write simple webhooks and bots with a few lines of Ruby? Please send me some links, I'd love to do that.

Screen sharing w/ control: https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/screen-sharing-icht...

As to web hooks and bots, if you really think that necessitates having it be a bloated Electron app, I don't know what to say.

AppleScript is still a thing, right?

Yeah, it is, but I definitely wouldn't call it a webhook / bot alternative. Having used AS with Messages.app before, it definitely isn't very useful for anything but very basic stuff.

> video Chat, audio chat, screen sharing, screen takeover, file uploading.

All of these are dormant features.

> 3rd party integrations

Which are processed on the server.

The complaint is that Slack uses an ungodly amount of resources when they're just sitting idle consuming new messages.

does video always on? This is just WebRTC and it is not using 500mb of RAM while idle. Integrations? They all are constantly keep something in memory? Most of this logic is done on the server and app is just a mirror of a server state.