I have a few use cases for the chat app feature to be integrated into some of my apps. I'm genuinely trying to make it work, but the chat apps just don't seem to be there yet. Is the an Appsheet team working on future support of this? Is there anyone on the team that I can direct some struggles or feedback to?
I noted some confusion / struggles with the /Search feature here.
I also noticed that the forms in chat apps don't honor conditional show if parameters. And if a field is not shown, then it ignores the required statements as well. Meaning some of my required fields would show up once the user selects the first required field (to triage them), but the fields don't show up upon selection in the chat app form. This wouldn't be an issue if I could just make a different form view to show everything for chat apps only, but the show conditions are on the table level not view. So there's not really a way around this if I wanted to give users a different experience in chat vs in app. (edit: I guess I could use context() within the show expression as well to customize desktop vs chat users of the form? 🤔)
You also can't send a notification to a user via chat / chat app based on user email. E.g. Let's say an admin take an action in the app, and that triggers a notification to the user who originally requested something. I can't send a chat to [_thisrow].[user email] to say "your order is here you can pick it up at <<[Location]>> (this is regardless of whether the users has the chat app "installed" or not).
More generally it would be nice to use chat as a notification method regardless of installation status or not. At least when it comes to apps secured by domain. The way I see this it's like the "notifications" option for mobile in the automations, but for the desktop users. I.e. a chat gets pushed for quick notification situations.
Anyway, just a few points off the top. I don't see many people talking about chat apps on here which leads me to believe it's not used much yet. I'd like to help change that if there is someone on the AppSheet team that's working on it.
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