Legacy workspace apps
The developer preview for workspace apps has ended. Weβre taking the components of workspace apps and bringing them in phases to existing as well as new apps.
You are welcome to install workspace apps as internal integrations or distribute them to other workspaces, but we won't accept them as submissions for the Slack app directory going forward.

Here's what we learned from you: to provide the best developer experience, we must make it simpler to create Slack apps. The extended developer preview is now closed.
We know that some beloved features entered into the world via workspace tokens, including umbrella conversations:*
scopes and token rotation. Fear not: over the next few months, we'll make sure that these features land gracefully in the world of classic Slack apps.
Read our announcement to learn more about our motivation behind these changes.
Workspace apps may no longer be created. Slack will not accept new workspace apps into the app directory going forward, but you're welcome to distribute them to other workspaces using Add to Slack and OAuth.
Read the documentation
These documents explain how workspace apps departed from traditional Slack apps:
- Working with workspace tokens
- Rotating and refreshing credentials
- Permissions API
- Upgrading permissions progressively
- Working for users
- OAuth permission scopes
- Web API methods supporting workspace tokens
These notices marked content about different types of tokens for workspace-token specific information:
This treatment appeared on OAuth scopes and Web API methods that support workspace tokens.
This feature was exclusive to our workspace apps developer preview. The preview has now ended, but fan-favorite features such as token rotation and the Conversations API will become available to classic Slack apps over the coming months.
What was unique to workspace tokens?
Workspace apps departed in a number of ways from the original model of Slack apps:
- Workspace apps were installed on a workspace-level. Once installed on the workspace, the workspace owned the installation.
- After installation, a workspace app could be added to public channels, private channels, direct messages, and other conversation types.
- Your app was granted a single, potent access token per workspace that reflected your app's current and full set of permissions and capabilities.
- Upon installation, your app could open a direct message conversation with the installer of the app β an opportunity to let them know how your app works and offer a safe demo experience.
- Your app could progressively ask for additional permissions as part of an interactive conversation experience, without requiring the heft of a full re-installation flow.
- Scopes were granted workspace-wide but your app was limited only to the resources it was explicitly granted access to.
- Your app's access token could be rotated programmatically.
- You could link deeply into Slack and conversations with your app.
- Sign in with Slack could be used with workspace apps.
- Workspace apps could perform some limited operations on behalf of users.
- Workspace apps could begin conversations with users by requesting the
conversations.app_home:create
scope and then calling the fan-favoritechat.postMessage
method.
Stay tuned
The developer preview for workspace apps has ended. Keep track of where we're going with the future of the Slack platform:
- We announce new features on Twitter and our changelog.
- We have an RSS feed of api.slack.com's recent updates; learn about new features as soon as they're launched by subscribing with
/feed
in your favorite Slack channel.
Send us feedback! We love feedback! Email us at feedback@slack.com.
Known issues
As with any far-reaching platform feature, workspace tokens have a few bugs and unimplemented features.
Feature | Problem |
---|---|
OAuth | Workspace tokens cannot yet call the legendary auth.test method. |
OAuth | Workspace apps' approved OAuth scopes are not listed in HTTP headers like X-OAuth-Scopes and X-Accepted-OAuth-Scopes and it's possible they never will be. |
Documentation | Some of the OAuth scopes listed as supporting workspace tokens do not actually support those tokens yet. Some methods claiming workspace token support don't support them yet. Personal experience will tell you for sure. |
Find a new issue or have a question? Send us email to feedback@slack.com.