One of the New Slack Widgets for IPhone Is Actually Quite Useful
If you have an iPhone, you now have an even easier path to Slack, which, depending on how you feel about your work, may or may not be a good thing.
The company just released home screen widgets for its app on iOS, which comes as a bit of a surprise considering the feature has been available on iPhones since 2020 . I guess better late than never, but I would expect more from a company that had four years to develop widgets for their app.
Slack offers three widget options to choose from: a small Status widget that acts as a simple shortcut to launch the status page in Slack; a small “Catch Up” widget that also acts as a shortcut to the Slack app (this time to display missed notifications); and a middle Status widget that lets you customize your Slack status from the home screen.
I find the first two of these widgets a little gimmicky. There’s no way I’m going to take up home screen space with a button that takes me to Slack: I don’t change my status so much that I feel the need to save a few seconds by opening the app and fumbling for the status page instead of just being taken there directly by the widget. The Catch Up widget is much more useful since you can see the number of unread and missed mentions, but still, I would prefer to just click Catch Up after opening the app yourself.
But I like the medium-sized Status widget. Again, I don’t change my status that often, but with it you can change your status without opening the Slack app at all. When you click on one of the status options, your status is automatically set to that option. The widget will then change to display your new status and when it will clear. If you want to clear your status sooner, you can click the large Clear Status button available to you.
This is how most widgets should be: you should be able to make changes to your apps without opening the app itself. This is why the Catch Up widget disappoints me: If I could dismiss or respond to notifications from the home screen, that would be great. If I could at least see what those notifications are on the home screen, that would be great. But in its current form, the widget doesn’t convey much more information than the standard notification icon in the Slack app. (By the way, I also have disabilities.)
But even the average status widget isn’t particularly useful on its own: the three status options found here (Focus, Break, and Lunch) aren’t customizable. If you have other statuses you want to set, you can click “What is your status?” which, you guessed it, launches the damn app.
However, the truth is, I don’t really care how good Slack’s widgets are. Unless my iPhone was a work phone, using these widgets continues to blur the line between proper work-life balance. You go to check your iPhone in the evening or on the weekend and see a bunch of unread notifications… do you have the willpower to ignore them until you get back to your watch? Or are you sacrificing downtime to put out fires?
If anything, I would place the middle status widget in the Today view (leftmost menu on the home screen). At least it’s out of the way there until I need it.