Slack revamps its Android app with Material design, emoji, team notifications, tabs

Fast-growing team-communication startup Slack today announced version 2.0 of its Android app, introducing a new look and several feature updates.

The new version complies with Google’s Material design standards. There’s a nice new plus-sign button at the bottom right that lets you start channels, groups, or direct messages.

You can now modify the formatting of text in Slack messages, drop emoji into messages (!), find notifications of messages grouped together by team, and select the team you want to chat with using a new dropdown menu, according to a blog post on the news.

Slack has removed the left and right drawers from its app and instead introduced tabs, which show channels, direct messages, mentions, and starred messages.

This is the first update to Slack’s Android app since April 8, according to the Google Play Store.

It comes as Slack looks to keep expanding its usage, generally inside of companies but also across companies.

Slack has apps for several other platforms, and more improvements should be coming across the board, given that it is so well funded. Last month the San Francisco startup announced a $160 million funding round at a $2.8 billion valuation.

“We’re working on making performance on low memory devices better and optimizations around initial load time,” the Slack for Android team wrote in the blog post.