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With iOS 8 due out soon, HipChat revamps its app for more efficiency

Image Credit: Atlassian

Yesterday, Apple announced that iOS 8, the latest version of its mobile operating system, will finally arrive on September 17 — and HipChat is ready for it.

The enterprise communications tool is revamping its iOS app and taking full advantage of iOS 8’s capabilities, including the actionable notification widgets, integration into iOS 8’s Today view, file and link-sharing from other apps, and the ability to search through the chat history.

“The small form factor forces you to think about streamlining the experience,” said Atlassian general manager Bernardo de Albergaria in an interview with VentureBeat. Atlassian acquired HipChat in 2012.

With iOS 8’s entirely new capabilities such as interactive notifications, the HipChat redesign is taking advantage of them in its newest attempt to streamline the app on the tiny screen.

In the case of the interactive notifications, users can respond to notifications from other apps without having to leave the app or the current conversation or screen they’re in. Unlike working with a desktop where a user can easily switch between multiple windows, mobile users have had to exit out of a screen or app in order to interact with another. iOS 8’s interactive notifications are helping keep the work flow intact.

The new sharing capabilities also have the same aim — to save you from having to switch between multiple apps and screens in order to share a picture or link from HipChat to another one and vice versa, which is annoying on the small screen.


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With the Today view in the notification center and the chat history search, HipChat wants to help its users cut through the information overload. Apple is opening up the Today view to third-party apps, enabling HipChat to send customized notifications into the user’s Today menu.

With chat history search, users can quickly pull up references to work items without having to scroll back through lines and lines of messages (we’ve all been there, haven’t we?).

Although these new updates might seem small, staying up-to-date with iOS is of huge importance to HipChat. The company always begins its updates with its Mac and iOS apps, de Albergaria told VentureBeat, and its users spend a fair amount of time on mobile, even though desktop is still the main form of HipChat use.

“Mobile is an incredibly important component to our users behavior,” said de Albergaria. While HipChat users were previously confined to a few uses for the mobile app due to the constraints of the small screens, de Albergaria hopes file-sharing, for example, will pick up on mobile now that it’s much easier. Eventually, he hopes the mobile use becomes as rich as the desktop.

“We want to enable users to have a parity use ability on mobile as they do on desktop,” he said.

Not surprisingly, other work communication tools such as Slack, Yammer, and Convo all have mobile apps in order to help their users get work done on the go. Apps like Cotap are even focusing solely on mobile — “texting for the workplace” — yet also adding rich capabilities such as document sharing.