Slack for iOS – release notes

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

Bug fixes

• Tapping the “Tap to expand image” button was sometimes not, wait for it… expanding the image. It will now do the thing it promises. No more, no less.
• Using two-factor authentication, which is a brilliant idea in general for all things, was occasionally not working if multiple types of authentication had been enabled (app, SMS, etc). Let nothing dissuade the security-minded: it now works seamlessly once more.

Slack 20.03.10

2 March 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Sometimes, when sharing a file to Slack, some usernames appeared, very unhelpfully, as blanks in the list of direct messages, identifying your colleagues as “@“, instead of say, “@jane”. This is now fixed.
• Fixed: Sometimes an app or bot would send a long message containing beautiful formatting and links. And sometimes, the formatting didn’t render correctly or the links were untappable and that, we feared, risked angering the bots, as well as not being very helpful for the user. Now, the formatting is honoured, tapping the links works perfectly and the bots are, for now, placated.

Slack 20.02.20

17 February 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Sending a “/me” command that contains an emoji made things crash. /me had no idea this was a thing but is glad that it’s fixed :relieved:

Slack 20.02.10

3 February 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed: While on a call, people using bluetooth sometimes heard a loud noise not generated by the other people on their call. This was not a ghost, it was a bug (and is now fixed).
• Fixed: the /msg and /dm commands that were not acting as they should, now work as expected. For those who didn’t know they existed or worked in the first place, they do, and weren’t, but now are.
• Fixed: When uploading an image or file from your camera roll to a channel, multiple channels appeared to be selected. Then you couldn’t deselect them. These shenanigans have been shut down and sharing works as it should.

Slack 20.01.20

20 January 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed: @mentioning a user in some languages caused that mention to appear twice. In any language, one mention per message is enough.
• Fixed: Translations for @channel and @here were broken in non-English languages. They now work once more in those languages and continue to work in English. Just remember, everyone – if you’re going to @channel, please @channel responsibly.
• Fixed: Attempting to send a message that exceeded the character limit would show an error and then delete all of the entered text. This was both hard to trigger (those limits are high!) but very frustrating. The limits still exist, but we now no longer clear everything in the message box.
• Fixed: After leaving a workspace, some users were unable to convince that workspace to leave their sidebar. It will now, gracefully, take its leave when asked to.
• Fixed: Trying to sign up with a password too similar to your email address resulted in a message that simply read “Error joining team”. We still want you to have a good password… but that error message will now be clearer to point that out.
• Fixed: It came to pass that typing, pasting or otherwise entering a large amount of text into the app (the app in this case meaning “the Slack app”, hereinafter referred to as “the app”) on occasion caused that app to undergo issues that would take on the appearance of disappearance or dissolution or, in common parlance, it would appear to crash and need to be restarted. This abdication of our sworn responsibility to take messages of differing length, from the very shortest (e.g. “k”) to the very longest (albeit with an error explaining the imposed character limits of messages and the need to curtail said message), was careless, if not derelict, in our duty, and we have thereby rectified it with an application of technological code that will forthwith allow the entering of large amounts of written matter in the message box of Slack, the app, without risk of unexpected app closure, thus giving free rein to the celebrated verbosity and eloquence of our users in allowing them to enter as large an amount of text as their heart desires, albeit with the expectation that one too long may result in the error message listed several items (perhaps screens?) above this one. Tl;dr: The app was sometimes crashing before as though we had some kind of problem with long pieces of text. We don’t at all.

Slack 20.01.10

6 January 2020

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Workspaces were sometimes showing a default workspace icon (a letter on a coloured background) instead of the nice custom icon they had been given. Behold: they are beautiful once more. Or, at the very least, correct. Which is sometimes all we can aspire to.
• Fixed: Some complex URLs were being incorrectly treated like email addresses. They will now be treated… wait for it… like URLs.
• 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

• Fixed: When loading messages containing a lot of custom emoji, the app was sometimes getting overexcited to the point of paralysis. We have calmed the app down and this should no longer happen. Emoji away.
• Saving a file from Slack and then attempting to open it from the Files app was occasionally causing the app to crash (which was bad). It is now causing the file to open (which is better).

Slack 19.11.20

18 November 2019

What’s new

• The size of text is now controlled in the Accessibility settings of your iOS device rather than inside Slack. We used to have a separate preference for it inside the app, but it makes a lot more sense that you would want to have the same size text whatever you’re reading.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Attempting to reorder your workspaces would occasionally result in them ending up in a completely different order than the one you put them in. The order in which you put them? Either way, they no longer belie your reasonable commands and will fall into line as requested, no longer out of order.

Slack 19.11.10

4 November 2019

What’s new

• A swish new icon in the top left-hand corner of the app will show the number of notifications you have in your current workspace, as well as taking you to the sidebar, where you can swipe between your channels and conversations, as before.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Sometimes, attempts to delete a message that had failed to send (due, usually, to low connectivity) were themselves failing. Doubling down on things is great – but not, perhaps, when that thing is “failure”. Now, when one thing doesn’t work, the other will.

Slack 19.10.20

21 October 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed: On smaller devices, the text on menu items in the “Advanced” menu was unfairly clipped. We love devices great and small: and our menus now reflect that (and make more sense).

Slack 19.10.10

7 October 2019

What’s new

• Dark mode users who launched the app for the first time were met with a bright white screen. That was less than ideal. Our sign-in screens now match the rest of the app.
• All the default sidebar themes are now dark mode compatible – so when you shift into dark mode, your default theme will subtly shift to complement it.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Uploading multiple files at the same time is now more reliable than it was.
• Fixed: In an act of overzealous ennui, sending “/shrug” without any text following it was causing the app to crash. Quite ridiculous. If there was ever a message that could stand alone, it was this. For the good of all humanity, it now works once more.

Slack 19.09.20

23 September 2019

What’s new

• The app now fully supports iOS 13. In particular, and most pleasingly, we now follow the system settings for dark mode, so the app will automatically “go dark” at the same time as your other apps. Good news in dark times.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Somewhat oddly, notifications were only clearing once you’d read *all* of your mentions. The ones you’ve read will now be the only ones cleared from the notification centre when you launch the app, leaving the ones you haven’t to be read at your leisure.

Slack 19.09.10

16 September 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Replying to a notification works much more often than it used to. 99% of the time, in fact, which is so close to 100% we can almost smell it.
• Fixed: Swiping between channels with two fingers now will now include the “Threads”view, but only, smartly, if you’ve used that view recently.
• Fixed: Custom emoji weren’t always rendering correctly in bots and attachments sent via the Slack API. Now? Emoji = :100:.

Slack 19.08.21

10 September 2019

Bug fixes

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

Slack 19.08.20

26 August 2019

What’s new

• If you, like all rational people, arrange your phone screens by colour, you’ll now be in quite the quandary, as we’ve added a couple of extra background hues for the app icon. You can find them under Settings -> App icon – just under Dark mode, which is useful, as the new shades work particularly well with that.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: When selecting a new profile picture, users were being asked to confirm that picture twice. We now respect your ability to recognise your own face the first time around and will not ask you again.
• Fixed: Uploading slow motion videos is now 100% more successful.
• Fixed: Custom emoji uploaded on desktop are now, vitally, transferred at lightning speed so that they're immediately available in the iOS app.

Slack 19.08.10

12 August 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed: When viewing your starred items, unstarring an item will now remove it from the view rather than making you close and reopen the list.
• Fixed: A crash that could occur when a message contained a highlight word, an @-mention and certain non-English characters. We’ve fixed it, completely.

Slack 19.07.30

29 July 2019

Bug fixes

• Occasionally, some users were unable to sign in. Given that that's the very first thing we want people to be able to do, we squished the bugs we knew about… but if you ever find more, let us know.
• Fixed: Many Slack apps that use BlockKit show confirmation dialogues to allow you to confirm your action and, in some cases, those weren't working. They are now.
• Fixed: Users who attempt to confirm their email address after their original email link has expired can now resend that email and then confirm it, and thus log in. Again, people being able to log in to an app is a very important part of the user experience. We’re committed to ensuring they can do that. Back in business!

Slack 19.07.20

15 July 2019

What’s new

• As of this update, we’ve removed 3D Touch functionality from a few places inside the app – channel names and DMs – where, let’s be honest, it simply wasn’t doing what it should do. 3D Touch still works on the icon on the home screen and when quick-replying to a notification, as it’s perfectly up to scratch there. (N.B. “Scratch” is not a valid gesture, please don’t go scratching your device on our account.)

Bug fixes

• Fixed: When viewing the channel details screen in dark mode, the area showing the channel title is now, like everything else, also in dark mode.
• Fixed: Where two channels or users had the same name, they’ll no longer randomly switch places with each other in the channel/DM list.
• Fixed: Opening a thread containing a message with a link that contained certain characters made everything crash. And yes, seeing as you asked, that one was satisfying to hunt down. And to fix.

Slack 19.07.10

1 July 2019

What’s new

• The first message in a channel or direct message now includes a date header, so you can tell what day it is (or was).

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Where sharing a file from Slack to another app did not on occasion work, it now works.
• Fixed: And sometimes, when sharing a file did work, it would change the file name from words to a series of numbers. Great for robots, terrible for humans.
• Fixed: Messages that included the same custom emoji more than once with no space between them were only displaying that emoji once. So :emoji::emoji: was only appearing as :emoji:. You now receive all the emoji you desire, and no fewer than you deserve.

Slack 19.06.20

17 June 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Where you were promised the ability to add a link to an emoji through the Slack API so that people could tap that emoji and be transported to the link, we were not making good on that promise. We’ve fixed the bug preventing it from working and everything’s rosy now.
• Fixed: Some custom bot names were not being displayed correctly, but now they are.
• Fixed: The list of apps in a group conversation would sometimes show the list of users instead of apps. And apps aren’t people, are they?
• Fixed: Some message buttons wouldn’t display a confirmation dialogue when tapped, which was a bit odd and slightly confusing. Now it’s been fixed.

Slack 19.06.10

3 June 2019

What’s new

• Typing Cyrillic characters now allows you to find users or channels containing those characters as easily on iOS as it has been for a while on desktop.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: When starting a group conversation that included one or more single-channel or multi-channel guest users, sometimes previously selected users were being deselected. Not any more. Now you’re all in that together.

Slack 19.05.21

28 May 2019

Bug fixes

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

Slack 19.05.20

20 May 2019

What’s new

• Want to upload multiple images at the same time from the message box? In both channels and threads? Of course you do. And now, you can! Hurrah.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: In some fonts, using asterisks to make part of a sentence bold would result in all of the text after the bold words *also* being in bold. While we like to believe that fortune favours the bold, it has come to our attention that this is not what that phrase means. So we fixed it.

Slack 19.5.1

6 May 2019

What’s new

• This is the last release that will support iOS 10 and therefore the last version that will run on 32-bit devices such as the iPhone 5, iPhone 5c and fourth-generation iPad. To continue receiving Slack updates, please upgrade to iOS 11.1 or later.

Slack 19.4.2

23 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.

Slack 19.4.1

8 April 2019

Bug fixes

• Links in some Slack app buttons were not working, taking you nowhere instead of the expected somewhere. They now whisk you away to the URL you thought they would take you to in the first place.

Slack 19.3.2

25 March 2019

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Screenshots and other .png images sent over Slack were looking blurry. We applied a little focus and now we’re in the clear. If the blurriness persists, you might want to consider an eye test.

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.

Bug fixes

• Fixed: The text welcoming you to Slack the very first time you launched the app didn’t quite fit the screen on smaller devices. Not the biggest problem in the world (literally), but first impressions count.