
Free Messaging App for Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram and More - vinnyglennon
https://meetfranz.com/
======
elcomet
I'm eagerly waiting for [https://volt.ws](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).

~~~
withoutclass
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.

~~~
helge5
> 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 ;-)

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gregschlom
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.

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

~~~
ihuman
Same for Pidgin

[https://pidgin.im/](https://pidgin.im/)

~~~
kakuri
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.

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exitcode00
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!

~~~
edhelas
XMPP ?

~~~
exitcode00
Alas there are no video-chat programs out there that actually work well : /

~~~
edhelas
Tried Movim [https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/) ?

~~~
exitcode00
Electron

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

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

*Also works on Firefox

~~~
dimillian
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.

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neogodless
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!

~~~
neogodless
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.

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hs86
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.

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sschueller
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](https://matrix.org) which has
a whatsapp and telegram bridge in addition many others.

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

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

~~~
Arathorn
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](https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-
telegram), which uses the 'telethon' Py3 library to connect to telegram.

Conversely, [https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-
whatsapp](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.

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

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joekrill
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.

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newscracker
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.

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tomphoolery
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?

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exabrial
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.

~~~
ttsda
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

~~~
jsjohnst
> 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.

~~~
ttsda
Thanks for the insight.

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ikornaselur
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/](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.

~~~
johnmarcus
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.

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reaperducer
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.

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chrisacky
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.

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

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

~~~
justtopost
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.

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ajiang
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.

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malvosenior
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.

~~~
donperdon
just use a fake email adress then?

~~~
malvosenior
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.

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michaelbrooks
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.

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anhthang
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.

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

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taude
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.

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

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turtlecloud
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

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

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johnmarcus
Nagware, why bother.

