Back in July, Slack introduced Huddles, the company's take on Clubhouse-style audio chatrooms. For starters, Slack's Huddles feature lets you start a live conversation in a channel or DM to "recreate the spontaneous and informal discussions that you miss from the office." While the feature is in its current state is audio-only, it may soon gain video support.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
Slack version 21.11.10.0 recently started rolling out on the Google Play Store, and within the APK, we have discovered some new strings that suggest that Slack is working on adding video support to the Huddles feature.
The following new strings mention the huddle feature requiring camera permission, indicating that users will be able to start a "video chatroom." Note that video support for Huddles hasn't rolled out to users and appears to be a work-in-progress.
<string name="huddle_camera_permission_subtitle">To use video, you'll need to allow Slack access to your camera</string>
<string name="huddle_camera_permission_title">Slack needs access to your camera</string>
Slack already lets you call people and then switch on video and screen sharing, similar to Google Meet. As such, we're not really sure why Slack feels the need to bring video support to Huddles. It will be interesting to see how Slack will differentiate a Huddle from a normal call.
As mentioned above, video support for Slack Huddles isn't live yet. We don't know when, if ever, Slack plans to roll it out to users. We'll let you know as soon as we have more information about this upcoming feature.