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Desktop app for Google Chat

latest-tag downloads homebrew chocolatey release-linux release-mac release-windows

An unofficial desktop app for Google Chat built with Electron

Announcement

This app is no longer maintained.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

Motivation

  • 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. 😉

Installation (Debian based Linux)

  • 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

Uninstall (Debian based Linux)

  • 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.

Installation (Mac)

  • Homebrew users can run
brew install --cask --no-quarantine google-chat-electron

or

  • Download the zip (darwin) file from releases
  • Extract the zip file
  • Move the app to your ~/Applications folder
  • 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

Uninstall (Mac)

  • Logout and Quit from app
  • Move the app to trash

Installation Windows

choco install unofficial-google-chat-electron
  • If you prefer winget-cli on Windows 10+, you can run:
winget install --id=ankurk91.GoogleChatElectron  -e

Installation (Fedora/RHEL/CentOS)

We 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_64

This 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.

Supported Platforms

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

Major features

  • 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

Acknowledgements

Disclaimer

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.

License

GNU GPLv3 License