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: Slack’s mobile apps have always bravely tried to replicate the desktop and web experience with a single home screen and relying on swipe navigation and cumbersome menus. But a new update that the company is rolling out to its Android beta channel is introducing a “simpler, more organized” Slack with major visual and UI changes.
The most important new feature of the update is the navigation bar at the bottom which now allows you to easily jump to various sections of the application without having to swipe, touch a small icon or scan a sometimes difficult to read text menu.
The bar includes a home screen to lay out all of your channels, and from there, you can swipe right to access other workspaces or left to return to the last channel you were watching. Next to the home tab there is now a dedicated DM to access private messages, and after that there is a mentions tab that more clearly organizes what used to be hidden in the activities section of the app, which is only You can access it by swiping right and tapping the button below your profile. At the far right is a new “You” tab that opens your profile to configure your status and access settings. There is now also a compose button to start a new DM that floats in the lower right corner of the other three tabs.
It’s set to be a major upgrade over the current version of Slack on Android, which tends to bury features and access vital parts of the app under annoying touches of icons and drop-down menus.
In the current public version of Slack, quick access to the channel panel requires you to tap the workspace icon in the upper left corner or swipe from the left. But swiping only works if you’re not using the new Android Q gesture system, which reassigned that gesture to a universal back button. Features like accessing the dedicated direct messages tab or viewing your workspaces are hidden in the home screen menu and only after swiping to expose it. (Navigation and ease of use in Slack for mobile devices have only been slightly improved in iOS, which does not have a navigation bar but has more robust swipe options to access various parts of the application with a single finger and without pressing buttons).
In other words, the new Slack should be much faster and easier to use than what we have now, once people get used to how it works. It is unclear when Slack intends to implement this in the public version of its Android app or if there are any other changes it intends to make before doing so. But you can access the latest beta version here through the Play Store.
