1st party support is (sadly) usually the best experience you're going to get.

I'd love to see some real focus on open standards and enforcement for those standards at a legislative level (the first to go should be any limits on 3rd parties acting on behalf a user... it's essentially the same as the court case that allowed consumers to install 3rd party equipment at telephone jacks)

But until then (and I'm not holding my breath because the US congress is utterly, woefully, frankly perhaps intentionally, useless for both antitrust and tech regulation at the moment) I'll continue to use the first party software.

This is a real question: what are Slack huddles supposed to do? I run the native client. While anyone can start a huddle with me, I never see any UI for a huddle. All I get is the audio coming across. To end the huddle I have to force stop Slack and relaunch it.

What should be happening is a small window opens at the bottom of the left sidebar (under your channels/direct messages/apps)

The tiny window is sorta useless except for mute/hangup, but you can undock it from the sidebar and make it much larger for video chat or screensharing.

I really like them. No need to invite people to a meeting; just jump in. E.g. if you have an issue to diagnose as a group you can just stay on the line, and dip in and out where necessary.

In Teams you can just call the first person up and then add more people into the call. "Jane Doe is calling you from a group chat" or whatever it says. I'm surprised this is a new-ish feature in Slack?

It's hard to explain. You're in a channel already, e.g. your team's channel, and you hit a toggle and it creates a voice chat and others are notified to join. I think it's really slick.

Teams has that too, you can call groups, or teams, people can pop in and out at will.

Two years ago the multinational company I was working at had a global ransomware attack and we had a teams call for like 7 days straight with check-ins every two hours for everyone but there were on call people in there always if you had specific questions.

It worked really well and made it easy for people to get stuff done and have clear chain of command when everything else was down.

I know what you mean - we had Teams at my past place. Difference is Teams UI is intrusive, which might suit command and control style orgs. Huddles are much less intrusive. You can do regular calls with Slack as well, Teams-style, but huddles are much slicker IMO.

This is not true, Slack has removed support for regular calls. When you attempt to use calls it tells you it has been replaced with huddles.

Oh - actually I hadn't used them in a while. Didn't realise they'd gone. Fair enough.

Not really the same thing. Huddles are voice for channels.

Is there anything you can't do in slack's web client?

We use slack at work for text only. I’ve used the web client for probably 5 years now