“Franz is a free messaging app / former Emperor of Austria and combines chat & messaging services into one application.” That’s what the homepage of Franz says, a desktop messaging app with a developer based in – guess it – Vienna.

Franz collects dozens of popular messaging services – WhatsApp, Skype, Telegram, Tweetdeck, Slack, Gmail, Outlook.com, to name only a few – and manages the logins to each of them. If your favorite messanger is missing, you can write a “recipe” to add it to Franz. Recipes are written in NodeJS. For more info consult the plugin-Dokumentation.

From a technical point of view, Franz does no more (and no less) than display the web frontends of these services under a smart, common interface; instead of using a typical graphics toolkit such as QT or GTK, the program window is designed with the platform-independent Electron framework (HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript), so that Franz is also available for Mac and Windows.

Franz is published under the Apache license; the source code is published on Github. Unfortunately the free application is bound to a user account since version 5; this opens up the possibility for the developer to install a payment function for premium features. In addition, the services configured in Franz can be synchronized across several devices. However, user name and password are explicitly not synchronized. Further information can be found in the privacy statement.

Installation

Version 5 is available as AppImage for all Linux platforms; for Ubuntu, a .deb package is provided. Downloade the package and install as follows:

sudo dpkg -i franz_5.0.0*_amd64.deb