Slack for Android – release notes

Slack 21.01.20

25 January 2021

Bug fixes

Fixed: An obscure, odd, out-of-left-field crash. If you’ve ever tried editing your profile while also rotating your phone, you may have seen this crash. Now, you won’t.

Slack 21.01.11

21 January 2021

Bug fixes

We’ve tuned the engine and given the interior a thorough clean. Everything is now running smoothly again.

Slack 21.01.10

11 January 2021

Bug fixes

Fixed: Sometimes, the Slack app would crash when launched in landscape mode on a tablet device. Things have been turned right-side-up, and the app should start normally in both landscape and portrait mode.

Slack 20.12.10

14 December 2020

What’s new

Previously, the keyboard would appear and disappear in a way that felt inelegant – or even choppy. We’re happy to report that the appearance and disappearance of keyboards has been smoothed out for Android 11 and newer.

Bug fixes

Fixed: Stick with me; this one’s a doozy. Before now, it was possible to crash Slack by viewing a channel that contained a message with an audio attachment, but only if your language was set to Korean. Slack no longer crashes in this surprisingly particular way.

Slack 20.11.20

30 November 2020

What’s new

Noble adventurer, your ‘slash command’ skill has been upgraded. You now have access to the /expand and /collapse commands, and the power to expand or collapse inline images and video courses through your veins.

Bug fixes

Fixed: On phones with a ‘notch’ (you’ll know it if you’ve got it), some content was hidden beneath the notch when viewing images in full screen. Slack is now aware of – and respects – the notch.

Slack 20.11.10

9 November 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: adding a new line to a block quote or code block used to make Slack crash. That was then. Now, we won’t be blocking you from building your blocks however you want to.

Slack 20.10.20

26 October 2020

What’s new

We do these releases every week to keep on top of performance… but sometimes there's nothing specific to tell you. So let's talk about some things that we should have been better about telling you about in the first place. Like, did you know that you can long-press on a message on mobile to set it to ‘unread’, so it's there waiting for you when you get to your desk? Or set a reminder to look at it later? Oh, you did? Never mind, then. Carry on.

Slack 20.10.10

12 October 2020

What’s new

Slack is now available in Korean, which means you can finally DM your favorite BTS member! That was a joke, please do not do that.

Bug fixes

Time may be a construct, but you shouldn’t have to do math to know what hour it is. Now, we match your device's preferences when we display times. If you use a 24-hour clock, you’ll see it reflected when you set a custom status that expires or when you snooze a notification.

Slack 20.09.20

28 September 2020

What’s new

Maybe you’ve heard of Slack Connect, which reduces countless back-and-forth emails by letting you add partners, clients or vendors to a channel. Now, if your organization allows it, you can add another company to a new channel straightaway in the mobile app.

Bug fixes

Fixed: We get it. Sometimes you just have to go back. Previously, repeated tapping of the back button caused the screen to behave poorly. This was our fault, and has been fixed. Back you go, run along now.

Slack 20.09.10

14 September 2020

What’s new

Bugs were squished, performance was improved, work was done, and the result was good. Please enjoy Slack responsibly.

Slack 20.08.30

31 August 2020

What’s new

Sometimes, we make improvements that are important, but invisible. This is one of those times. You shouldn’t notice anything different, and that’s the idea — Slack should just keep working like you expect it to.

Slack 20.08.20

17 August 2020

What’s new

Sometimes we release a new version of our app with improvements and bug fixes so intricate and unseen they can’t be conveyed by a collection of words. So instead of something new, and speaking of collections of words… have you tried keyword notifications — a nifty way to stay tuned in to topics you care about? Set or see your keywords by tapping You > Settings > My keywords. They’re very good.

Slack 20.08.10

3 August 2020

What’s new

New: For something you’ve read but need to come back to later, you can now mark a thread as unread. Long-press on the message you’d like to start from, and then select the option to mark unread from the menu. Yes, you’ve been able to do it with channel messages for a long time, but now, you can do it in threads too. Useful!

Slack 20.07.20

20 July 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: A few people noticed that you could select “Also send to channel” by tapping the blank space next to the checkbox in a threaded reply. We’ve tightened up that space so your replies only appear outside the thread when you want them to.

Slack 20.07.10

6 July 2020

What’s new

You can now customize your notification preferences on a per-day basis, which is a fancy way of saying that you can now pause interruptions with Do Not Disturb down to the day. (Looking for a feature to pause interruptions from pets, kids, or package deliveries? We feel you.)

Slack 20.06.20

22 June 2020

What’s new

This is the last version of Slack that will work on Android 5.0. To get updates in the future, you’ll need to update your device to Android 6.0 (or newer).

Bug fixes

Fixed: If you drafted a reply to a thread, and then that thread was deleted, you were unable to open the draft you’d drafted. This was bad, but now it’s better: you can open, copy, and delete those drafts.

Slack 20.06.10

8 June 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: When viewing the channel list, the ‘+’ buttons that let you browse channels or start a new direct message sometimes, well, didn’t. Now they do, every time.

Slack 20.05.21

2 June 2020

Bug fixes

We’ve tinkered with the internal workings and polished some rough edges. The app is now better than it was.

Slack 20.05.20

25 May 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: When tapping the button to add an image to a channel or DM, the screen of images to choose from was loading far too slowly for our liking. It now loads much quicker.
When long-pressing a message, the menu option to “start a thread” had gone missing, which meant that anyone wanting to start one hit a snag. We hadn’t pulled the thread option, it had just got loose. We’ve now tucked it back into the menu where it belongs.

Slack 20.05.10

11 May 2020

TL;DR: We’ve redesigned the layout of the app. Read more about the improvements on our blog at SlackHQ.com or in our help center. Here though, we’ll stick to what’s new, and what has been fixed.

What’s new

What’s new? Most things. We changed almost all of the things. So many things! Much change.

Bug fixes

Previously, it was complicated to get to the four main things people do on mobile. We’ve fixed this with a new nifty navigation bar at the bottom of the app containing: a Home view for your sidebar, DMs, (still listed most recent first), Mentions (for quickly catching up), and You (because you’re great) (and also because setting your status/preferences on mobile needed to be easier).
The quickswitcher on the desktop app is wonderful, but we discovered an issue where people weren’t using it as much on mobile. So we made the Jump To box more prominent (and smarter) to fix this. Fingers crossed!
It seemed bizarrely hard to create a new message in a channel or DM without finding that precise location first. With an application of logic, software engineering, and a new “Compose” button in the bottom right corner, this has been rectified.
Our apologies to people who have been wanting to easily set reminders, start workflows or access favourite apps in channels and conversations — it was hard to work out how to do that on the move. A new lightning bolt under the message box now gives quick access to shortcuts, and thereby solves this age-old problem.
And finally, it came to pass, as time went by, that in the old version of the app, there was a lot of swiping back and forth to get places. We’ve simplified that: Now, swiping right will reveal your workspace and preferences, and swiping left will get you back to the last conversation you were in. With this change in behavior, we hope to give you the powers of both omniscience and time travel. nbd.
And yes. We know. Change is hard! All our fingers have all built up muscle memory, but after continually adding features and functionality over the years, we needed to step back and make sure things made sense. You can find more about these improvements in our blog post, and as always, we welcome your feedback. Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom. We appreciate it, and you.

Slack 20.04.20

27 April 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: On some devices, the text input area sometimes wouldn’t be visible after changing channels. It hadn’t disappeared, it had just scrolled off the bottom of the screen. Cheeky. It is now once again possible to send messages without playing hide and seek with the message box.

Slack 20.04.10

13 April 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: Some users who are required to use a passcode when accessing Slack were experiencing a crash when entering that passcode. Entering the passcode will now cause you to experience the app. Which, we hope, is better.

Slack 20.03.30

30 March 2020

What’s new

Minor improvements have been made, and bug fixes taken place, but they’re the kind that are out of sight, behind closed doors, and quietly just doing their job, deep in the inner workings of the app, making things just a little bit better.

Slack 20.03.20

16 March 2020

What’s new

While you might not be able to see that anything’s changed, we’ve been hard at work keeping things ticking over. It’s all going swimmingly.

Slack 20.03.10

2 March 2020

What’s new

What’s new? Nothing and everything. Or rather, it’s an update that makes things better but is all invisible to the human eye or not something you could, as a user, put your finger on. Literally. So, in other words: “Bug fixes and minor improvements”.

Slack 20.02.20

17 February 2020

What’s new

The Android app has been looking after itself since New Year’s and as a result, it’s now a smaller download, with faster performance to boot.

Slack 20.02.10

3 February 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: People who use Chrome OS and an external keyboard were finding that some messages would post twice if they used the enter button on the keyboard. It will now return to the amount of times you wanted that message sent (assuming that amount was “once”).
Fixed: Pasting a chunk of text and then editing it to add formatting (such as italics), was inexplicably causing a crash. You can now once again add a little something to your pasted paragraph. Go ahead: Be bold (or italic, or whatever else works for you).

Slack 20.01.20

21 January 2020

What’s new

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make sure everything is polished, well-oiled and running as it should be. If you notice anything to the contrary, as always, let us know!

Slack 20.01.10

6 January 2020

Bug fixes

Fixed: In a message from a bot, buttons and menus configured to respond to a user’s actions weren’t actually doing that. This was not the first stage in a robot uprising: it was merely a bug. And is no more.

Slack 19.12.10

9 December 2019

What’s new

For those who love to format their messages on the move, good news, you can now get that done in a few clicks using the new formatting tool in the message field.

Bug fixes

If, by some chance, you rotated your device immediately after sending a message, a copy of that message would sometimes remain in the input field (as well as being sent). Why? Who knows! Technology is weird. But at least it’s now weird and fixed.

Slack 19.11.20

18 November 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: Sending the /rename command to rename a channel without any other text no longer causes a crash. The /crash command, meanwhile, is still not working at all, so if you were using /rename to get that effect, apologies for the inconvenience to your workflow.

Slack 19.11.10

4 November 2019

What’s new

Nothing to see here… just plenty of tinkering behind the scenes to make room for other features (and bugs, of course) to come.

Slack 19.10.20

21 October 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: The “Aubergine Classic” theme was using the color scheme for the new, (perhaps future-classic) Aubergine theme. We have reverted to classic-classic.
Fixed: Sometimes, when we tried to show a long message in a dialog window, it would show a blank window instead, which is basically the opposite. Sometimes things are said best when one says nothing at all. This, however, was not one of those times. So we fixed it.

Slack 19.10.11

11 October 2019

Bug fixes

We tweaked some things too small to notice or too difficult to explain. We’ll return you to your regular, more interesting types of release next time (we hope).

Slack 19.10.10

7 October 2019

What’s new

Users of dark mode will now find they have three options: On (which switches it on), Off (the same, but off) or an option to honour the system default, which does just that. Users of Android 9 and earlier, on the other hand, can choose for the app to go dark when the device enters Battery Saver mode. Either way, it works!
All default sidebar themes are now also supported in dark mode – so when you shift into dark mode, whichever of our default themes you use will subtly shift to complement it.
In accordance with the unstoppable march of time, updates will only be available to devices running Android 5.0 (aka Lollipop) or later.

Bug fixes

Fixed: The “Connecting” and “Offline” banners are now a little lighter in dark mode (and so easier to read).
Fixed: Sometimes the horizontal list of “quick reaction emoji” would contain too many emoji, causing them to overlap. Unfortunately, this visual omnishambles made reacting slower, so we’ve fixed it.

Slack 19.09.20

23 September 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: In the Threads screen, it wasn’t possible to add other reactions after removing a reaction. If you want to change your mind or your emoji, that’s up to you, and you’re now once again free to indulge in that.

Slack 19.09.10

9 September 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: Sometimes, if you checked the box in a thread to post your reply in channel as well, the reply would look like it had been sent twice in the thread… until you closed the thread and reopened it. It only ever posted once, but now it looks that way too. Apologies for the confusion.

Slack 19.08.20

26 August 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: A crash that sometimes occurred after sending a message while offline and then coming back online no longer occurs. The app stays up and the message is sent. Everyone wins.
Fixed: For those using Slack in UK English, the “Join channel” button displayed at the bottom of a channel you had not yet joined was reading “Join %1$s”. It has been pointed out to us that this is not how Brits spell “channel”, so we changed it. Awfully sorry about that.

Slack 19.08.10

12 August 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: Sometimes outgoing messages to a channel looked like they had been sent twice.
Fixed: Sometimes outgoing messages to a channel looked like they had been sent twice. This has now been fixed. Yes, we know. We’ve used this joke before. See what we did? We sent the same thing twice then said it was fixed the second time to hammer home the point. Joking aside, there are really only so many ways that software bugs can manifest. And it turns out “things appearing to post twice when they’ve actually only been posted once” is a repeat offender. We will strive to ensure that this bug never occurs again, or at least until we think of a brilliant new way of writing about it. In the meantime, we will push for either no bugs at all or far more ridiculous ones. On your behalf, we hope it’s the former.

Slack 19.07.31

6 August 2019

Bug fixes

We’ve tuned the engine and given the interior a thorough clean. Everything is now running smoothly again.

Slack 19.07.30

29 July 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: It was very difficult (fine, it was basically impossible) to read code blocks in dark mode. We're sorry about that and we'll continue to iterate and make all these things better.
Fixed: A crash, that mysteriously (and very rarely) occurred when scrolling through search results if one of the results contained a message with a file attached, crashes no more.
Fixed: The buttons that appeared after @-mentioning a user in a channel (“Invite to a channel” and “Share a link”) weren’t performing those actions, which didn’t make much sense. If you experienced this and questioned whether you’d ever pushed the button at all, it wasn’t you going doolally, it was our fault. It’s now fixed.

Slack 19.07.20

15 July 2019

Bug fixes

We tweaked some things too small to notice or too difficult to explain. We’ll return you to your regular, more interesting types of release next time (we hope).

Slack 19.07.10

1 July 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: Sometimes after tapping an image to view it in full screen, it would disappear, which is the opposite of full screen. It now does the opposite of the opposite, i.e. what it was meant to all along.
Fixed: @-mentioning or searching for users with names containing Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters now works as it should.
Fixed: When trying to add a workspace, some users were experiencing an error claiming that something had gone wrong and that they should try again. We’ve fixed this, by making sure nothing can go wrong. So now trying again is surplus to requirements, because it just works.

Slack 19.06.20

17 June 2019

Bug fixes

We tweaked some things too small to notice or too difficult to explain. We’ll return you to your regular, more interesting types of release next time (we hope).

Slack 19.06.10

3 June 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: Every now and again, images that had been sent to a channel wouldn’t appear. Not all images – not all the time, only sometimes – and for no apparent reason. Turns out there was a reason! It was “computers being weird”. So we’ve fixed it and images should now appear properly again.
Fixed: In some cases, when attempting to upload animated GIFs and WebM files, non-animated versions would be uploaded instead, which defeated the object. This has been fixed.

Slack 19.05.20

20 May 2019

What’s new

When selecting an image to upload, you can now give the thumbnail a light tippity-tap to preview it or a long pressity-press (technical terms) to edit the title.

Bug fixes

Fixed: Rotating your phone from portrait to landscape view sometimes mysteriously crashed the app. It now doesn’t. Or, to look at it another way, you now can.
Fixed: On some devices with physical keyboards, the message input field was preventing the Send button from appearing, which rather defeated the object. It now appears.
Fixed: @-mentioning users with characters from RTL (right-to-left) languages now works even when typing out their full name, as is right and proper.

Slack 19.5.1

6 May 2019

Bug fixes

Fixed: When long-pressing on a message to perform an action – such as marking unread, setting a reminder or sharing – some of the message actions were overlapping unattractively. They’re much more attractive now.

Slack 19.4.2

22 April 2019

What’s new

Olá, hola and nice to see you (to see you nice). From today, Slack supports three new languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish and UK English. You can change this in the settings menu under, not unexpectedly, “Language”. Jolly good! Carry on, everyone.
Support for Google Smart Lock has been added, so if you’ve enabled Google Smart Lock on your device, you can now log into Slack with one single glorious tap.

Slack 19.4.1

8 April 2019

What’s new

Clicking the + button at the top of your list of channels always got you to a Channel Browser (true!) but that channel browser has been improved in lots of little ways. The fact it will now indicate which channels you're a member of is but one. Click it to find the others.

Bug fixes

Fixed: Animated gifs sometimes showed a “gif” overlay in the middle of the image. While both informative and accurate, this made it slightly — very slightly — harder to see the gifs. We cannot apologise enough. Please be assured, it is now rectified.

Slack 19.3.2

25 March 2019

What’s new

Your latest unread channels should now get highlighted and sorted to the top of your sidebar faster than before. Spiffing!

Bug fixes

Fixed: Externally-hosted files (such as those hosted on Google Drive) were showing a download button that looked great, but didn’t actually work. Now it looks great, also works, and everything opens as it used to.

Slack 19.3.1

11 March 2019

What’s new

Dark mode can now be switched on (or off) in the Settings menu. Yes, it’s been a long road, but there’s finally dark at the end of the tunnel. N.B. This is mobile-only for now, with desktop coming later – thank you for both bearing with us and for continuing to expect more of us.