BIG Emoji bug, critical to our team's usage ? – Slack Review

Slack is pretty great, constantly growing/expanding to add truly useful features and functionality, which all typically work pretty well from the moment they're launched I don't usually experience any issues with app crashes, slow or unresponsive UIs, and push services work great and timely across multiple devices/platforms One of the best things about Slack though is it's ability to be customized, which is why the fact this new emoji issue even managed to ship out the door is SUPER surprising, feels like something that should have been caught, and/or something that should have already been fixed within the multi-day time window that I first experienced it and have been contemplating over writing this review for ever since. I held off though, hoping they'd notice themselves, and push out a quick patch. As a mobile developer myself, seems like something of a simple and careless developer oversight, that's an accidental consequence of a change for an entirely different system, or dependency upgrade. Here's the issue at hand, and in detail… Custom emojis on our team make for an extremely curated, easily digested, referenced, and efficient means of communication We've learned to lean on them SOOO heavily, that we long ago started adding Slack emoji text to other systems for automation purposes. In an example, we could have an event on our Google Calendar with the title ":emoji_name: EVENT :another_custom_emoji::and_another:" These are really stupid and useless titles, if we were to be consuming the Google Calendar system directly, but we don't, we have Slack integrations to update and remind us about these events automatically, just one of many systems we're passing emojis through to Slack from other systems. Our ENTIRE usage case for most of these other systems, is the Slack integrations and emoji comparability. What used to render as beautiful and meaningful calendar event titles in our Slack notifications, are now 100% text content, all meshing together in the same bold blue font color, and generally unreadable because they were never meant to be consumed as text in the first place. Instead now what we see is ALMOST identical looking to what we would have originally typed in say, Google Calendar for example, with the only difference being that there are colons in them. I would imagine that should the colons have not been parsed out by Slack at some point, that the content would actually still render just fine, but at some point Slack has parsed this content and stripped all the colons away! I also noticed another review where a user stated that they used to be able to add emojis to their names, similar to how a status emoji might appear and be used, but by setting their parts of the value on their actual name, to emojis like "Mad :mad_mike: Mike" potentially, maybe, or whatever floats their boat. Anyway, this user stated that now they can't. My team doesn't currently make use of the ability to do this ourselves, but I have observed that it can be done, and seen it working in the past myself as well… seems like the same issue probably, or at least related. So PLEASE FIX, this functionality is very important and valuable to us! The only other potentially helpful info I can offer are some of these randomly observed points… • Issue only occurs on iOS for the moment, as far as my team can tell, Android devices seem to be running the same as before • Older messages since from this issue started occurring that we can confirm at one point we're rendered and displayed properly, are now also being rendered incorrectly as we roll back up to review our chat history • Have confirmed across multiple services/platforms/systems, that none of our data has been changed or started to be sent to Slack any differently than before when things were working - i.e., Google Calendar events are still stupid and ugly looking, with the full breadth of all Emoji name information, including the surrounding : symbols • This started happening on the exact same versions of iOS that it had once worked on before in the past (in other words, these weren't iOS bugs caused by Apple, because some of us haven't updated our devices version of iOS between now and the last time we saw everything working)
Review by Max Andreola on Slack.