Deprecate the Gitter desktop app
Deprecate the Gitter desktop app after the v5 update.
We already have plans to deprecate the iOS/Android apps to reduce the surface area that the small Gitter team has to maintain. We should probably do the same for the desktop app because we don't get it regular maintenance. We just wait until it breaks.
Most recently, we had to spend a week working on a Gitter desktop app update after GitLab sign-in broke over there.
The desktop app is a lot better than the mobile apps in terms of effort needed because it wraps the same entire webapp
project that runs in the browser but because we don't regularly update the NW.js wrapper piece, it uses an old version of Chrome. Sometimes things break in old Chrome.
Here is the messaging we already have on the apps page:
Our efforts are focused on the webapp which is the backbone of the mobile/desktop apps but mainly focused on the web experience. There are a number of bugs in these desktop/mobile clients and they spread the Gitter team too thin for us to give them proper attention. The apps are open-source if you want to tackle something particularly annoying to you. (desktop, iOS, Android)
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/merge_requests/1444
webapp
a suitable replacement?
Is the browser Notification sounds
The desktop app has a notification sound by default but this isn't available in the browser webapp.
This feature is tracked by https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/-/issues/735
Separate taskbar icon
Chrome has a desktop PWA feature to install a webapp and get full window and separate taskbar icon.
This feature is tracked by https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/-/issues/1992
Remediation
Iteration 1
-
Remove links to apps from the apps page -
Add deprecation notice to desktop
readme- Notify flatpak maintainer(@ghisvail) about deprecation: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/desktop/-/issues/293#note_363442463
-
Warn existing users that there is no future feature development but will still address critical bugs
Iteration 2
-
No more desktop maintenance