Android Messages as a Cross-platform Desktop App
Run Android Messages as a desktop app, a la iMessage. For those of us that prefer not to have a browser tab always open for this sort of thing.
Not affiliated with Google in any way. Android is a trademark of Google LLC.
Inspired by:
Based on:
Head over to the latest releases page!
Important note: The Windows app binary isn't signed. This doesn't seem to be a big problem, but please report any issues you run into on Windows that may be related to signing.
Important note 2: We currently have builds for Windows and macOS, and Linux. I test releases on macOS, Windows 10, and Ubuntu Linux. I would love help testing on additional distros of Linux and other versions of Windows.
Implemented via the amazing electron-hunspell
library with dictionaries provided by the excellent dictionaries
project. Language files are downloaded when the app opens and the language used is based on the language set in your operating system. If you switch your system language and restart the app, the spellchecking should occur in the new language as long as it is in the list of supported languages.
Make sure you have Node.js installed, then run the following in your terminal:
git clone https://github.com/chrisknepper/android-messages-desktop.git
cd android-messages-desktop
npm install
npm start
npm start
Run all tests:
npm test
npm run unit
Using electron-mocha test runner with the Chai assertion library. You can put your spec files wherever you want within the src
directory, just name them with the .spec.js
extension.
npm run e2e
Using Mocha and Spectron. This task will run all files in e2e
directory with .e2e.js
extension.
npm version <type>
where <type>
is either major
, minor
, or patch
depending on the extent of your changes (this command increments the version in package.json and creates a git tag for the new version)git push
git push --tags
npm run release
(for this step to succeed, you must have a GitHub Personal Access Token with write access to this repository in your PATH
as GH_TOKEN
)Once the packaging process finished, the dist
directory will contain your distributable file.
We use electron-builder to handle the packaging process. It has a lot of customization options, which you can declare under "build"
key in package.json
.
We use png2icons to create Windows and Mac icons from the source PNG icon, which is located in assets/android_messages_desktop_icon.png. However, the Windows icon generated from this package seems to result in visual corruption on Windows 10, so I'm manually converting the PNG to a Windows icon with icoconvert.com for the time being.