Comment by al_borland
15 days ago
> Campfire hasn't been actively developed for ~10 years
For people looking for a simple chat that stays simple, is this a bad thing? When do we call something feature complete? If a product is free, they no longer need to manufacture new features to justify continued payments. It does look like there were updates 2 months ago. Based on the few number of open issues, and a PR closed last week, it feels like it’s being maintained, even if it’s not getting major new features.
I’m not a Campfire user, so can’t speak to the UX, but I feel like there is a market for actively maintained projects, that are considered feature completely, which aren’t searching for new features to shoehorn in. In the long-term, this need to constantly add features generally gets interpreted as enshitification by users. Avoiding falling victim to this relentless push for “more” can be seen as a feature in itself.
>For people looking for a simple chat that stays simple, is this a bad thing?
If the application does everything you want it to do, then no, it's fine. How much new development does grep get these days?
However, it was mentioned that it has no mobile apps, and that's a deal-breaker for probably most organizations and teams. If you can't access your team's communications channel when you're away from your desk, that probably isn't acceptable to many. And of course, developing and supporting mobile apps (on at least 2 platforms these days) is a large effort, and also requires constant maintenance since the two dominant platforms are continually evolving and changing their APIs.
No mobile app sounds like a feature in my book. Few things are so urgent that people should be expected to be reading and replying to chats while away from their desk.
If your job requires you to go on-site, or even to another part of the company to work with physical equipment, this is going to be a no-go. Not all jobs can be done from your desk.
Looks to me like it doesn't have mobile apps because it doesn't need them to work on a mobile.