Products · Broad category
Messaging apps
Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 11 years (2016–2026), in 20 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with Messaging apps, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 21 complaints
- Search in chat apps is so poor the commenter avoids storing knowledge there2026-08-20
- Non-tech-savvy people lose years of messages when switching devices or apps2026-07-15
- Separate tools feel worse because they are not integrated with each other2026-01-28
- Can't select part of a message, only copy whole messages2025-09-24
- Same findings must be copied across Slack, Jira and Notion, forcing repeated work2025-06-19
- Apps feel slow and laggy to interact with day to day2025-05-13
- Everyday apps take 20+ seconds to launch, slowing daily work2025-05-13
- Slack and Teams are poor in usability and performance compared to Discord2024-03-27
- Must switch to browser, hunt for message tab, and re-wait for large download2023-01-14
- Electron chat apps become unresponsive and sluggish, requiring restarts to fix2022-12-22
- Colleagues can't find information and get overwhelmed by the volume of messages, docs and notifications2022-11-09
- Chat tools lack per-topic threads with titles, making discussions hard to follow2021-09-16
- Chat app notifications constantly compete for attention and interrupt the user2021-07-10
- Apps feel laggy and sluggish to interact with2020-12-03
- People are confused about which chat client to use and where to go2020-05-13
- Hard to tell which app a conversation happened in, or to find it later2019-07-24
- Can't tell whether Return inserts a newline or sends, so messages get sent accidentally2018-11-12
- Sidebars don't collapse when window is tall and narrow, making apps unusable in tiling WM2018-02-22
- Send button in bottom right strains the thumb2017-10-06
- Users must search through results to find a decent enough message2017-02-24
- Conversations are scattered across apps with inconsistent search and no interoperability, creating cognitive load2016-07-07