Free Messaging App for Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and More | Hacker News Reader

Free Messaging App for Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and More

meetfranz.com

88 pointsvinnyglennon78 comments

I'm eagerly waiting for https://volt.ws, which is the only app I know that plans to be a true native client for all those services (no browser, no electron).

The Mac build is out, and I'm waiting for the Linux build which I hope will be out I a few days (same for Windows).

>What language is Volt written in? V. It's a new language I created to develop Volt.

That's some dedication to create your own language for a single program; but looking through the V site and it looks solid. Live reload, blazing fast compilation, and good interop with C/C++ (including conversion from C _and_ C++ code).

> `In the age of 300 MB chat clients and 10 MB web pages we started to forget how powerful our computers are and how much can fit in 1 MB. A lot of time and resoures were spent to ensure the small size and great performance. `

I like the philosophy. He has fit more into an entire desktop program than most sites fit into their initial load. The optional icons that volt loads are larger than the entire code base by 50%.

I'm really curious about what they are using to connect to all those backends at the same time, I'd suspect seriously libpurple there again, but I'm not sure.

Libpurple is not used.

Only official APIs.

Volt looks fantastic, but I doubt their roadmap. When it was first posted a few months ago they had Discord/Telegram set to launch within a month. Seems like the story hasn't changed. I highly doubt they'll be able to add all these integrations by the end of March.

That being said. I like what they're doing and I'm happy to be proven wrong

It's against Slacks ToS to recreate the main app offering so I'll be curious to see how long they can offer Slack support. I'm pretty sure they even killed the slack terminal client someone created awhile back.

Do you refer to this one? https://github.com/erroneousboat/slack-term

Do you have a link about them killing the terminal client?

Thanks

> It's against Slacks ToS to recreate the main app offering

Please provide a reference. The ToS suggest that your are not allowed to produce a competing _service_ (i.e. a server replicating the API). The Slack API even provides special client tokens to application vendors, so you would assume this is considered OK?

> I'm pretty sure they even killed the slack terminal client someone created awhile back

I'm pretty sure they didn't (why would they?). Just a claim anyways ;-)

+100 for this effort, I don't even have much use for it but I applaud his effort to have a small client. I've given €10 on patreon, this attitude should be encouraged.

Thanks!

I was really hyped when I first saw it, downloaded immediately, but was left somewhat underwhelmed by instability and lack of touted features...Most useful stuff is said to be coming shortly, but I'm not sure if some of it is at all possible (e.g. Slack support like others pointed out). In any case, this would be an absolutely amazing app and I chipped in, but have doubts...

Come back in a couple of days. I'm fixing lots of crashes right now.

Slack support is pretty much ready. Even threads (they need to be merged into master though).

Feels like we've come full circle back to the early 2000's were apps like Trillian let you chat on MSN Messenger, AIM, IRC, ICQ and others.

It looks that Miranda IM (initial release in February 2000) is still actively developed - https://www.miranda-ng.org/.

Same for Pidgin

https://pidgin.im/

I used Pidgin for years, but while it may be actively developed it has been stagnant. It's ugly and very difficult to customize to make it less so, and Unicode has always been broken (at least on Windows). Compared to mobile or even web versions of Messenger and Hangouts Pidgin is terrible, which is why I eventually gave up on it.

They should probably remove "AIM" from their front page, considering it no longer exists.

Trillian and Adium were such killer apps at their time.

And yet not; those were native apps which reverse re-engineers or reimplemented the protocol.

My understanding is that Franz and such are just wrappers around the same websites/webapps that run the underlying service

I used Trillian for a while, but then at some point moved to Meebo. I forgot who they were acquired by, but it was a sad day when they shuttered.

I do miss the days of early Trillian.

Don't forget about Digsby, which I believe was OS Native and written in Python.

Anybody remember Fire for OS X? I used that until iChat came around.

Yes! I think Adium won that war.

Adium was awesome! I miss the days of good native apps.

No reason to get excited folks - its YAEC (yet another electron component).

Me: Wouldn't it be great if we had a light-weight native chat app that was compatible with all of the many slow-resource intensive chat programs i am chained to?

Everyone else: We have solved your problem by creating a new standard resource intensive chat program that solves none of your problems! Also it has cool animations!

You: I’m too lazy to do much more than wine about my problems. Everyone else: well, we’re just going to hang out over here with the solution. Come join us when your done whining.

I am excited by this project and so are a few people I showed it to.

I have 3 or 4 of these messengers open at any given time. Resource consumption has never been an issue for me - needing to have multiple "talk to people" windows/programs for what I consider the same task annoys me every single day.

Well at least you only have to run one, instead of many.

XMPP ?

Alas there are no video-chat programs out there that actually work well : /

Tried Movim https://movim.eu/ ?

Electron

aTalk on Android (XMPP client) works well for voice/video chat. It looks ugly though :)

Pidgin with plugins. Lots of plugins.

Another free messaging app worth checking out which also supports all these services is https://chrome.google.com/

Yes :) Open those networks, pin them, boom you have the same result!

*Also works on Firefox

And lose them when you close the stupid window. At least Safari understand that pinned tabs should be present on EVERY windows at all time. Chrome is so stupid.

FluidApp or other site specific browsers is an even better solution in the vein of your recommendation.

I've been using Franz for a while now, mostly for a replacement for Facebook Messenger, but lately also for Slack and Hangouts. Is it amazing or flawless? Nope - I often come back from a sleepy laptop to find I need to "reload services", or that I have to log back in though I would prefer to be remembered. But it works and I do not have performance issues.

I used Trillian a ton years ago for AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger, and I don't remember why I stopped using it, other than maybe because I stopped using the above chat services! I always liked having that as my minimal chat app. Franz is definitely bulkier, but that's sort of the direction chat went. Everything has to support GIFs!

And - I just installed 5.0 beta (up from some 4.x version) and now there's an 8-10 second waiting period for my services to load unless I pay for a license? Hmm... of course I understand software is written to make money. I write software! So I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Slack's desktop app has some sort of lazy loading for its workspaces which makes its resource usage somewhat bearable. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Franz and it used more than 3 GB RAM on my devices. Especially on a laptop with 8GB RAM this was way too much for me.

Also take a look at rambox[1] which is partly open source. However they are all just webframes to the services.

For a true gateway look at https://matrix.org which has a whatsapp and telegram bridge in addition many others.

[1] https://github.com/ramboxapp/community-edition

Rambox have really annoyed me; they were promising spell checking since day 1 (which seems like an obvious feature in a chat product), strung people along and then created a premium, paid for version which implemented it.

Franz are also locking spell checking behind their premium product, which really does rub me up the wrong way. Charging people £35/year for a feature you get free with the open source framework you're using, seems wrong.

Most of the Matrix gateways are relying on …libpurple that is the base library of Pidgin :)

this isn't true, fwiw - there are about 30 matrix bridges, and only one of them (matrix-bifrost) uses libpurple, and only then as a fallback if there isn't a better stack available.

Edit: For instance, one of the best telegram bridges for Matrix is https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram, which uses the 'telethon' Py3 library to connect to telegram.

Conversely, https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-whatsapp is one of the best whatsapp bridges, which uses the go-whatsapp Go whatsapp library to connect. Libpurple is very much the last ditch resort where everything else has failed.

Oh I spoke too fast. Thanks for the rectification then :) My bad.

I love the idea of this, but when I tried using Franz a while back it just felt like a second, specialized web browser just for chatting websites. Sort of similar to when a mobile app is just a WebView wrapper. Ultimately I feel like I might as well just use my existing web browser.

I'm not sure if things have changed at this point - maybe there is some added feature that makes this more appealing.

I had a quick look at the pricing page, and the "free" version seems to be ad supported (the paid version says "no ads, forever"). Though the FAQ on the homepage says it doesn't sell information, I'd like to know what ads are shown in the free version and what kind of tracking (if any) is used by the advertising network used by the service.

I don't understand why I am forced to make an account. It seems to be purely for the purpose of selling me on a subscription service, which as far as I can tell, doesn't actually need to exist. Like who's going to pay an additional subscription on top of Slack or whatever they use right now?

Is there any way to use this software without making an account?

What I would give for a third party iMessage integration.

Similarly, if Android phones lose headphones jacks and expandable storage, there's no reason to stay on the platform anymore and be the outsider in the iMessage world when the hardware is otherwise equal these days.

Assuming you don't care about the OS. Once I switched away from iOS, I am finding it very hard to go back

How come nobody has reverse engineered the iMessage protocol properly? Is Apple using any hardware stuff to prevent this? I think an unofficial iMessage client appeared a few years ago, but it was very closed source and I don't think it worked for very long

> How come nobody has reverse engineered the iMessage protocol properly?

People have, but changes have been made where the barrier to entry on the crypto/client verification side is sufficiently high a barrier to make it not practical. See next answer for more context.

> Is Apple using any hardware stuff to prevent this?

Yes.

> I think an unofficial iMessage client appeared a few years ago, but it was very closed source and I don't think it worked for very long

The iMessage team scrambled on its release to block it as it leveraged a severe security breach.

Thanks for the insight.

Buy mid-range Motorola phones. This G4 play is the best $150 I've ever spent.

Considering the security & privacy issues plaguing Android, there’s very little reason left to stay on that platform.

Security is probably no better or worse, but Apple has taken a very pro-consumer 180degree turn on privacy in the last year, which is amazing. I have every reason to move, except their subpar feature set on hardware.

I used Franz for over a year, but had some annoying issue with Slack where I couldn't copy anything with a keyboard shortcut. It was filed as an issue on github but with no activity, so the project looked dead-ish. Has the activity picked up?

I ended up going to an alternative called Station (https://getstation.com/), which I've been happy with. Still an electron app, so if that's not your thing, it's not a replacement for Franz.

I like workona chrome plugin as my tab manager. I might have 5 google sheets open related to 5 different tasks, so that’s how I like my groups sorted. Sadly no Firefox support. Not saying getstation isn’t cool, just offering an alt.

Does using this get around Facebook's tracking? I'd like to chat with some people on Messenger, but I'm not about to allow a FB app on my devices.

Does anyone know how we could have several of our sales team all receiving/responding to Whatsapp messages?

We're in need for a tool which would allow any number of our sales agents the ability to acknowledge and respond to WhatsApp messages.

At the minute, we have one company number but only one person can be logged on at any time, any time someone else logs on it boots anyone else out.

There are unofficial clients for the WhatsApp Web API. You could easily build something around that, though it's likely to break often.

I know Twilio has Some Whatsapp APIs that could be useful for this.

(I’m not affiliated with them btw)

hah this is great. We've now come full circle to pidgin again.

I wish, gaim/pidgin is still superior in many ways with extensibility, plugins, and encryption capability to anything available. In its heyday, along with trillian and a few others, i could chat on over 17 different networks under a unified interface. It was glorious.

Our team actually uses Franz. It is fantastic. I generally subscribe to the "one screen" philosophy that most people primarily use one screen for work. Franz is the one screen for me, connecting multiple Slack groups, FB messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp.

I heavily recommend giving it a try.

I just tried to install it on linux and it the estimated footprint by `pacman` was 400MB!

I would use Franz, but I don't want to sign up for a Franz account. Why would I need to create an account with them when it's a client for 3rd party services? I don't want to hand over any data to another party.

just use a fake email adress then?

I think you have to give them all of the login details for all of your services or at least it was unclear to me as a user that that wasn't happening.

If they could make this for mobile, then that would be amazing. I've removed Messenger from my phone and I can't access it via mobile. It just sends me to the store to install on my phone.

We're using Slack, Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat. So some guys in my team use this app as one portal for Election apps, but I would like to use the official apps instead.

Not a VIM user here, but I think it's pretty great that someone used a tool, often seen as a techie, coder tool, and optimize it to his content creation needs....

...on top of all the cognitive space he opens up. And the ability to quickly change his tweaks as his workflow needs further optimizations.

Nicely done.

not sure how this ended up in the wrong thread....

I really wanted Tinder on there on but it was complicated to make an extension. The one on GitHub was broken due to changes in logging. I stopped using Franz after that since the added benefit wasn't worth the hassle

that's all nice, but big majority of users don't use these services on desktop at all

Nagware, why bother.

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