An unofficial desktop app for Google Chat built with Electron
This app is no longer maintained. Reasons:
- My employer has moved to Slack
- It takes lots of time to build and test on all the platforms.
- Google is blocking 3rd party apps to log-in, see #52
📣 Since version 2.17, we have removed support for snap package on Linux
- Google has shutdown the official Google Chat Desktop App in March 2021
- Google is forcing users to use PWA which has less features
- You don't want to install Chrome; just to use a PWA. 😉
- You can download the latest debian installer from releases section
- Install the debian package with this command: (correct the file path yourself)
sudo apt install ~/path/to/google-chat-electron-xxx-amd64.deb- Logout and Quit from app
- Remove the app with this command
sudo apt-get remove --purge google-chat-electron- The uninstallation script should remove all relevant files and folders.
- Homebrew users can run
brew install --cask --no-quarantine google-chat-electronor
- Download the zip (darwin) file from releases
- Extract the zip file
- Move the app to your
~/Applicationsfolder - Fix the permission issue with this command
sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine ~/Applications/google-chat-electron.app- Above command should fix the Mac-OS Gatekeeper issue
- Logout and Quit from app
- Move the app to trash
⚠️ This app is NOT available on Windows App Store- You can install this app by downloading the installer
- If you prefer chocolatey on Windows, you can run:
choco install unofficial-google-chat-electron- If you prefer winget-cli on Windows 10+, you can run:
winget install --id=ankurk91.GoogleChatElectron -eWe don't provide installers for Fedora/RHEL/CentOS, but you can build a local RPM package by your own.
sudo dnf install rpm-build npm
curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh | sh -
git clone https://github.com/ankurk91/google-chat-electron.git
cd google-chat-electron
pnpm install
npm run pack:linux
npx electron-installer-redhat@^3 --src dist/google-chat-electron-linux-x64 --dest dist/installers/ --arch x86_64This will create an RPM package in ./dist/installers folder (you can specify any location you wish).
You can install it with dnf or rpm-ostree depending on your distro.
The app should work on all x64 and Apple arm64 platforms, but due to lack of time; we test on most popular only.
| OS/Platform | Version |
|---|---|
| Ubuntu GNOME | 20, 22 |
| Linux Mint Cinnamon | 21 |
| MacOS | 10.15, 11, 12 |
| Windows | 7, 10, 11 |
- System tray
- Unread message indicator
- Offline indicator (no internet or not logged-in)
- Close the app to tray when you close the app window
- Desktop notifications
- Clicking on notification bring the app to focus and open the specific person chat/room
- Unread message counter in dock
- Auto start the app when you log in to your machine (configurable)
- Auto check for updates on startup and notify user if any (configurable)
- Auto check for internet on startup and keep retrying to connect every 60 seconds if offline
- Open external links in your OS default web browser
- Preserve window position and size
- Prevent multiple chat app instances from running
- CTRL+F shortcut to search
- @robyf for the initial work
- @squalou for enhancements
- All past contributors
This desktop app is just a wrapper which starts a chromium instance locally and runs the actual web-app in it. All rights to the Google Chat product is reserved by Google Inc. This desktop client has no way to access none of your data.
GNU GPLv3 License