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How the Zoom macOS installer does its job without you clicking ‘install’

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796 points _Microft | 5 comments | 31 Mar 20 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.395s | source
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aequitas ◴[31 Mar 20 12:29 UTC] No.22736838[source]▶
Not that I'm in favor of this practice, but the one key feature that conference software must have is: it just works™.

Nothing turns you off more from a conferencing solution than: any problem getting it working right now.

When there is just the slightest issue, one person not being able to join, one person not getting voice to work, bad audio, your entire team is blocked/distracted. Which results in a collective distain for the solution and video conferencing as a whole.

This extends to getting the solution working for greenfield installs as simple as possible. Because who knows which non-tech users from which department all need to join and can't figure out how to set the permission in their browser right or install/use the other browser that is compatible.

So sadly, from a functionality point of view, you want have the software be able to force itself onto the user in the most usable state it can.

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1. gwbas1c ◴[31 Mar 20 13:36 UTC] No.22737381[source]▶
Good point, but: You can do so much in a browser now. Does teleconference software really need an installed client anymore?
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2. JoeAltmaier ◴[31 Mar 20 13:40 UTC] No.22737419[source]▶
In theory. But in practice, as a developer you don't want to depend on the browser support for your whole product. Conferencing features of browsers have been pretty lame, compared to what's possible in a professional product.

{edit} My experience: investor took over our startup, made us switch from bespoke technology to web-based conference features. Every feature was compromised, reliability and capacity reduced by 10X.

3. rsynnott ◴[31 Mar 20 13:45 UTC] No.22737453[source]▶
Based on my experience with Zoom on the one hand and that Google thing on the other, yes, yes it does.
4. m0dest ◴[31 Mar 20 15:41 UTC] No.22738599[source]▶
For better or for worse, WebRTC is very opinionated about codecs and transports. Those might be great choices for some scenarios, but no developer wants their whole business to be constrained it.
5. noahtallen ◴[31 Mar 20 18:31 UTC] No.22740795[source]▶
Browser blocking and plugin features can prevent it from working. For example, I’ve been in hangouts meetings where the video feed wouldn’t load because autoplay was blocked on the browser. Of course, you can work around that, but having the Zoom desktop client provides a reliable experience without any tweaking