Update March 13th, 2024 – Slack has announced that this method will be deprecated on September 1st, 2024. Please see my updated post for instructions and an example configuration profile on disabling the auto-update feature.
Tucked into the release notes on today’s standalone download of Slack is a particularly awesome nugget that many of us have been yelling about for a long time:
Long story short, the com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap preferences domain now respects a boolean (true/false) value called SlackNoAutoUpdates instead of requiring admins to set an environmental variable. Note that this functions slightly the opposite of what you might initially expect because the preference itself is worded and used as a negative value – setting it to true (yes) disables auto-updates. You can test this with the following in your terminal:
defaults write com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap SlackNoAutoUpdates -bool YES
Should you want to manage this with a configuration profile (AND WHO WOULDN’T?!) you can find an example one below.