What is App Home?
Also called home tab, app surface.
App Home is a dedicated per-application space inside a chat platform, most prominently in Slack, where an installed app presents its own persistent view to an individual user. It typically combines a direct message conversation with the app and a rendered tab that the app publishes and updates. It gives a chat-installed app a stable place to live beyond message history.
In Slack the space is organized as tabs: a messages tab holding the direct conversation with the app, a home tab whose contents the app publishes per user, and an about tab describing the app. The home tab is built from the platform's block layout primitives and is republished by the app whenever the underlying state changes, so it is a rendered view rather than a stream of messages.
Because the view is per user, it can be personalized without leaking anything into shared channels. Common uses are a personal task list, current status of running work, connection and authorization state, and settings the user controls for themselves. An opening event fires when the user visits, which apps use to refresh the view with current data.
The pattern solves a real problem with chat-based applications: messages scroll away, so state expressed only in messages becomes unfindable. A persistent surface gives the user somewhere to check what is configured, what is pending, and what needs their attention, without searching history or reissuing a command.
Other platforms provide comparable concepts under different names, such as personal tabs in Microsoft Teams, and the specific capabilities and limits differ between them. Designs that must span platforms usually keep the underlying state in the application and treat each platform's personal surface as one rendering of it.
Key points
- Per-user persistent surface for an installed chat app
- Slack organizes it as messages, home, and about tabs
- The home view is published and republished by the app
- Solves state disappearing into scrolled message history
- Comparable personal surfaces exist on other platforms
In practice
A workspace assistant installed in Slack publishes a home view for each user listing their pending approvals, the three tasks the assistant is currently running, and which integrations they have authorized. When the user opens the tab, the app receives the open event and republishes with fresh data. Approving from that view updates the underlying record and the next publish reflects it, with nothing posted to any shared channel.