Google Hangouts / GChat as a Stand Alone App on a Mac by Nate Ritter on 7/9/2014 in How To with 41 Comments I’ve been waiting for Google Hangouts / GChat to come out with a stand alone desktop app for Mac OS X for too long.

Desktop client for Google Hangouts

(This app is in no way associated with or endorsed by Google)

Install it

We provide prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux 32 / 64 and Windows 32 / 64. This is the latest release

Check out our wiki for additional installation methods

We love bug reports!

What does it do:

• Send/receive chat messages
• Send/receive SMS/MMS (Project Fi / Google Voice) -- basic functionality
• Create/change conversations (rename, add people)
• Leave/delete conversation
• Notifications (using native OS notifications)
  • Toggle notifications on/off
• Drag-drop, copy-paste or attach-button for image upload.
• Hangupsbot sync room aware (no bot name, proper user pics)
• Show inline images
• Send presence/focus/typing/activeclient to behave like a proper client
• History scrollback
• Video/audio integration (open in chrome)
• Focus/typing indications (mainly a design issue. keep it clean)
• Offer alternative color schemes
• Translations in 22 languages so far:
  • English / Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil) / French / Spanish / Czech / German / Polish / Russian / Hebrew / Ukrainian / Slovenian / Korean / Tamil / Romanian / Swedish / Japanese / Italian / Danish / Bengali / Slovak / Turkish
  • We're looking for volunteers to translate the app to new languages

NOTE

Yakyak may show up as iOS Device and Google may alert you that 'some iOS Device is trying to use your account'. This is normal as yakyak is an unofficial client and it mimics the behaviour of an iOS device in order to establish a communication with Google Hangout APIs.

Credits

Main authors

Contributors

Developing

This is an open source project. Please help us!

It is written in coffeescript (nodejs) based onhangupsjs usingtrifl on top ofelectron (atom shell).

How can you help?

You can improve YakYak in many ways:

• Core functionality
• Interface (example: new themes only require choosing less than 20 colors)
• Bug fixing
• Translations (new translation only need 117 strings)

Send a pull request, start a conversation with anew issue or participate on aongoing conversation.

Setup

Requirements:

Google Hangouts Client For Windows

• Node.js (v4 or v6)

Continuous build

Run it

Build Binaries for Deployment

Hangouts App For Mac

Supported platforms: Windows (win32), Mac OS X (darwin), Linux (linux)

Suported architectures: 64-bits (x64), 32-bits (ia32)

If you have fpm installed (gem install fpm), you can also build RPM and Deb packages:

note: if you are building Windows binaries in Linux or Mac OS X, Wine (1.6 or higher) must be installed. It also requires a 32-bit Wine installation when building Windows 32-bit binary.

Structure

Location	Description
src/	Is where sources live
src/ui/	Holds renderer code (client side)
dist/	Everything is compiled to this directory

Acknowledgement

• All the users and developers of YakYak
• 'You wouldn't believe' as the 'new message' sound for some platforms and is licensed under CC