Open links in the Desktop App not Web
complete
Shannon Draegen
Is there a way when opening a task link, it opens in the desktop app instead of launching web version?
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Ivan Kanevski
complete
Today we released the latest version of the desktop application, which now includes the "Open in Desktop" feature.
This feature works in all browsers except for Safari. When you open a ClickUp page in the browser, we will now try to detect to see if your desktop app is running. If it is, the web app will prompt you to open that page inside the desktop app.
You can also configure this behavior to happen automatically (without you having to click explicitly).
You can peep the help docs for more detailed info: https://help.clickup.com/hc/en-us/articles/6311884486423-Use-the-ClickUp-desktop-app#%E2%80%9CAutomaticallyOpenClickUpLinksDesktop%E2%80%9D
Will close this feature request, but feel free to open up new threads with improvements & comments (there are still ways we plan to make this better!).
Travis Carden
For folks who are interested in accomplishing this when clicking links outside the browser (i.e., in another app), here's a workaround for Mac: https://feedback.clickup.com/feature-requests/p/workaround-open-http-links-outside-the-browser-in-the-desktop-app-without-the-cl
Pavel Shershniov
When I click a ClickUp link now, it opens a browser tab, then opens the desktop app. So I have 2 interfaces open with the same task, is this expected behaviour?
Can't the browser tab auto-close itself?
Nick Kadutskyi
Please consider support for clickup protocol to open links directly in the app without going to the browser first (currently links with regular task ID work but links with custom task id doesn't): https://clickup.canny.io/feature-requests/p/use-clickup-protocol-to-open-clickup-links-in-desktop-app
Ivan Kanevski
Nick Kadutskyi: looks like a bug, thanks for the note
Tine Kristensen
What if I share a CU link in Teams or e-mail - my guess is a lot of us do that? That doesn't seem to work.
Ivan Kanevski
Tine Kristensen: Not sure I follow - what doesn't seem to work?
Tine Kristensen
Ivan Kanevski: It still just opens in the browser and not the app.
Ivan Kanevski
Tine Kristensen: We can't change how your computer opens "https" links (for example, from your Teams or email), because that means that all links would have to be routed through ClickUp (vs. a browser).
Current UX brings the desktop app one step closer, and we can still do more to make this experience faster (so you don't have to load all of ClickUp for example), but we need to do a lot of foundational engineering to make this work (we would have to rewrite our "routing" logic for how all pages are opened in ClickUp, for example).
We'll chip away at this!
Tine Kristensen
Ivan Kanevski: Then I'm not sure I understand which links this DOES open in CU? (sorry if I'm being particularly thick skulled here)
Ivan Kanevski
Tine Kristensen: We can open any link in the desktop app, but we first have to open that link in the web browser before we can route people to the desktop application.
I wish it was more magical and transparent (by allowing links posted in Teams to automatically open), but we are mostly limited by how operating systems (Mac / Windows) work.
René Rolighed
Ivan Kanevski: Couldn't you "invent" a ClickUp type of link? Like clickup://xxxxxxxxxxx and register this in windows for opening in the desktop app?
Ivan Kanevski
René Rolighed: That's exactly how it works today. You can just replace 'https://app.clickup.com/' with 'clickup://' and it will open that page in the desktop application.
Rob Barreca
Ivan Kanevski: But notification emails sent from ClickUp still use https:// or is there a way I can change this?
Ivan Kanevski
Rob Barreca: yeah, no way to change what links the notifications include, but it's a good idea of a setting we can add.
J
Jure Idzig
Thank you for this feature. Now here is another upgrade you could make to further develop the platform and fine tune the settings:
Reasonium
I'm am genuinely grateful for the progress on this and simultaneously do not consider this a completed task. The "solution" on Windows is poor and doesn't make much sense to use in its current form.
Issues:
- Links open a (previously closed) browser AND users must be signed in to ClickUp in the browser for this to work. Perhaps this is unavoidable but has anyone in your company reached out to Microsoft in case ClickUp developers may be missing something or Microsoft may be able to update this limitation?
- Additionally, the opened browser tab remains in the background until manually closed. This means that for every task you want to open in the Desktop app via a link, you have to close an associated browser tab.
I don't think it's merely semantics to consider this as incomplete. I understand it may not be worth adding nuanced status tags to canny.io such as "incomplete", "working", "partial", etc but this not complete in terms of quality. It's quite janky.
Zooming out for a second, I fully understand that this is a trivial first world problem but still a minor enough inconvenience that will keep us using the browser version instead and give us pause about the discernment of your staff in the future.
I hope your team will do better if only by changing the status to something more open instead of setting a low bar.
Ivan Kanevski
Reasonium:
- This isn't quite possible without changing how the operating system handles "https" links. There used to be some software on the market that did this, but I couldn't find any modern variants. Can any other application on your computer do this? Where you opening the "https" link, it sends you straight to the desktop app?
- We can't automatically close the tab (browsers prohibit this). But, we can do this with our Chrome extension, but that functionality is further out for us since it involves making lots of fundamental changes to the extension.
Matthias Müller
Yes!!! 🥳🎉 Thank you so much for implementing this!! Really appreciate it! For me, this was the most important feature request of all! Awesome👍
L
Larry Sacks
So far loving that this change took place.
But my default browser is Brave and Brave Clickup links still open in Brave instead of Clickup. Is there any word if the Brave browser will be supported? Brave is based on the Chromium engine so if it works in Chrome, then could it not work in Brave as well?
Ivan Kanevski
Larry Sacks: Brave is more locked down, so it likely has similar issue as Safari, where communicating with the desktop app is blocked. Will dig in though and see if there is a work-around.
L
Larry Sacks
Ivan Kanevski: Thanks. I know some of the developers at Brave so I'll reach out to them as well.
Ivan Kanevski
Larry Sacks: For Brave, there is a workaround. I got it to work by turning off the shield for app.clickup.com. There might be a more granular way to do this. And we're still going to see if we can make it work out of the box.
Christopher Lepkowski
Ivan Kanevski: Is there a similar fix for Safari? Thanks.
R
Rene Yanes
It works for me in windows/chrome. However from my gmail if i click the link it does open in the app but it also opens a tab on chrome. So it identifies the app running but not smart enough to not open another tab.
Ivan Kanevski
Rene Yanes - this is intended behavior. Your operating system will open an https:// link in the browser, we can't intercept or control this behavior at this point. But, when you open ClickUp, we can determine you have the desktop app running, and we can then open it from there.
RG
Nice, finally! But it doesn't work (edit: for me, sorry). Setting applied in both web and desktop app versions (which wasn't synced for some reason). Task link opened in Firefox, opens in Firefox, there are no prompts to open it in Desktop.
Ivan Kanevski
RG: It's working for me in Firefox on Mac. The desktop application needs to be running (make sure you're on latest version - 3.2.7), and we will only prompt you when you open a brand new tab (imagine opening a link from an email). Try refreshing a page in ClickUp with the desktop app running.
RG
Ivan Kanevski: Ivan Kanevski: Oh thanks for that! I was indeed on an old version. Had to manually download the latest, because "Check for updates" didn't work -now it does-) and links open just fine now.
I hope this is just a MVP, because it should be based on Content type (like mailto, zoommtg, msteams) so the browser detects it before loading AND passes it to the app. Now what happens is what Joe mentioned and that's not ideal. And that implementation takes into account user choice as well.
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