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Changelog

What we have built, fixed, and improved in each release of Franz.

6.9.0

Local AI now runs through Ollama. You can share models across apps and update them independently of Franz. Franz no longer downloads or runs a separate set of chat models. Local chat stays available on Free, with Ollama running on your computer.

Signal got a refreshed interface, and this release also improved Google sign-in, Messenger badges and the way Ask Franz presents results from cached messages.

Already using local chat in Franz? Install Ollama, download a local model, then choose it in Settings > AI. Your previous Franz model files stay on disk, but Franz no longer uses them. Follow the Ollama setup guide to get started. Franz Cloud AI and your own provider settings stay in place. Email intelligence and voice transcription keep their separate local engines.

New

  • Added Italian and Brazilian Portuguese as app languages. Franz now starts in your system language on first launch.

Improved

  • Local AI setup became simpler. Choose an installed Ollama model and connect using its local port. Model updates and downloads are managed in Ollama.
  • Signal got clearer quotes and a cleaner composer. Updated the chat filters, voice-recording controls, background pattern and reaction animations.
  • Voice controls got easier to use. Added language selection for Signal voice-note transcription and improved dictation's language controls.
  • Ask Franz made cached-message results easier to read. Improved account discovery and counting guidance, preferred available contact names, and removed unrelated filters and technical columns from result tables.
  • Notices shared one banner row. Important notices took priority, with smoother transitions and support for reduced motion.
  • Plan upgrades showed clearer prices. Improved the confirmation of today's charge, tax and renewal details, and kept prices consistent with checkout.

Fixed

  • Fixed Cloudflare verification checks that blocked sign-in in Todoist and browser services.
  • Fixed Google sign-in rejection in affected services while preserving sign-in popups and their return to the service.
  • Fixed Messenger unread badges, including clearing the count after messages were read.
  • Fixed removing your own Signal reactions and the jump at the end of reaction animations.
  • Fixed white backgrounds in simply formatted emails when using dark mode.
  • Kept the open email visible in the unread view and applied "Not priority" to the whole conversation.
  • Kept email attachments available for retry after a failed send.
  • Fixed all-day calendar dates and the placement of events spanning several days.
  • Made the main AI switch turn off Smart Translate everywhere.

Under the hood

  • Updated Electron to 44.4.5 and refreshed mail security dependencies.

6.8.2

Marking an email urgent in Franz Mail could still leave you staring at an empty priority inbox. A deadline mix-up was keeping those messages out of view.

Fixed

  • Important mail stopped being hidden by misread deadlines. Franz could read a deadline as a date before the email was sent. That mistake no longer kept the message out of your priority inbox, including mail you'd marked urgent.

6.8.1

Catching up on a voice note you'd missed got easier, even if it arrived while Franz was closed. Ask Franz gained a card with the transcript and a play button together, so you didn't have to leave the assistant to hear the original. The rest is fixes: services that vanished after a crash, lock controls that lagged behind your PIN, and a sign-in gap that left returning users without their trial.

New

  • Ask Franz gained voice-note cards for WhatsApp and Signal. You could play the original audio alongside its transcript. If a note hadn't been transcribed yet, asking about it started the transcription, including notes received while Franz was closed.
  • You could choose the language of a voice note. Picking a language beneath the transcript transcribed the audio again, and Franz remembered your choice for that chat. If another attempt didn't work, you kept the text you already had.
  • Missing speech languages became downloadable from the voice-note card on supported Macs. The menu showed download progress and started transcription when the language was ready. Languages you'd already installed were recognised too.

Improved

  • Assistant cards got easier to read. Single results lost unnecessary counters and filters, and transcripts stopped appearing twice. Chat previews identified your messages with "You" and named the sender in group chats. Dates used your language and time zone.
  • Ask Franz stopped showing failure while it was still trying. A request stayed marked as running through a retry, so you weren't told it had failed before it finished.

Fixed

  • Services came back after a crash or reload. Dismissing a trial or upgrade dialog could leave the service area blank until you restarted Franz. It doesn't anymore.
  • A locked Franz kept its services hidden. Dismissing the waiting screen no longer revealed them over the lock screen.
  • Lock controls followed your PIN straight away. Setting a PIN made View > Lock Franz available immediately, and enabling Lock on startup took effect at the next launch instead of locking the session you were in.
  • Ask Franz got better at finding WhatsApp and Signal conversations. Fixed lookups that returned no messages even when the conversation had them, and incorrect dates on Signal voice notes.
  • A disconnected WhatsApp service stopped confusing Ask Franz. If you'd added more than one WhatsApp service, the assistant picked a connected one when available.
  • Returning users got their trial at sign-in. Signing into a fresh install with an existing Free account could skip the 14-day trial entirely. Now it doesn't.

Under the hood

  • Opening messages and conversations in large mailboxes got faster, with fewer pauses as you moved through your mail.

6.8.0

Press ⌘J, or Ctrl+J, and Franz shows you what you have. That's the magic bar, and it's the headline of this release: type a name and the mail, the WhatsApp and Signal messages, the todo, the calendar event and the service all come up in one list, and Enter takes you there in the right workspace. Hit Tab and the same bar turns into Ask Franz. That one got rebuilt underneath, and on Franz Cloud and some of the keys you can bring, a question that takes several steps now comes back as one answer. Two writing features arrived alongside it, Translate on any selected text in any service, and Snippets for the replies you write over and over. The in-app browser links open in got back, forward and an address bar, 1Password autofill works on Windows the way we said it would, and there's quite a lot of reliability work sitting under all of it.

The plans changed too. Franz Pro is the complete daily workspace now: unlimited services and workspaces, Franz Mail and Todos, the privacy tools, dictation on a supported Mac, 1Password on the direct downloads, Smart Translate on whichever model you've configured, and a library of plain snippets that follows your account. Nothing on that list needs Franz Cloud. What Max adds is the part that writes for you: smart snippets that fill in the name, the date and the thing you promised from the conversation you have open, plus the managed Franz Cloud allowance so you don't have to bring a model at all.

Franz Mail got quieter as well. A trial user wrote in to say the AI in Franz Mail was too much, and that they couldn't get it to go away. They had a point. A row in the list could carry a priority badge plus a whole stack of tags, the summaries had no way to dismiss them, and there wasn't a switch for any single one of them. Every row shows one chip now, and you correct Franz right there on the chip. Summaries read in full and remember when you collapse them. The briefing waits until a new mailbox has finished syncing before it writes anything, and each AI surface got its own switch in Settings.

Printing arrived too. ⌘P, or Ctrl+P, prints the service you're looking at, and in Franz Mail it prints the open conversation laid out properly for paper. Franz could also freeze while syncing, and on one day with two large accounts we counted seven freezes, from 24 seconds to more than 17 minutes. That's fixed, opening a message in a big mailbox got quite a bit faster along the way, and if you sync a big mailbox, this is the one to update to.

New

  • Everything you have, one shortcut away. ⌘J on a Mac, Ctrl+J on Windows and Linux, from anywhere in Franz. It searches your mail, your WhatsApp and Signal messages, your contacts, todos, calendar events, workspaces and services, and groups what it finds by where it came from. Enter opens the row you picked and switches workspace if that's where it lives. Type / for commands and filters like from:, to:, unread, starred and has-attachment, or scope the search to one service. Dictation works in the bar, so you can speak instead of typing. Open it empty and your recent searches are waiting.
  • Ask Franz from the same bar. Tab switches from searching to asking. The answer streams in place, cards and all, and ⌘↵ hands the whole conversation over to the assistant when you want more room. It's the same Ask Franz in both places, and it got rebuilt for this release.
  • Ask Franz works through the whole question. Ask something that takes several steps and you get one answer at the end. Ask which customers are still waiting on you and to draft each a reply, and the drafts come back together. On 6.7.1 that same question produced no card at all. Each run shows one plain line saying what it did.
  • It works over your data, with or without a dedicated tool. Franz can answer over what you have even where nothing was built for that question specifically. The result card now covers your calendar, todos, Signal and WhatsApp, not just mail. Correct a chip on the card and Franz runs the same work again without asking the model.
  • A draft says what it doesn't know. If Franz doesn't have the date, the price or the thing you promised, it says so instead of inventing it, and the card marks the gap for you. Nothing gets sent without a click.
  • The new loop runs on Franz Cloud and on some of the keys you can bring. Local models and the other keys keep the older, simpler loop.
  • ⌘K searches the service you're in. In Franz Mail and Signal, ⌘K, or Ctrl+K, opens the magic bar already scoped to that service, and the search field in the header shows the shortcut so you know which one drives it. Clicking the field does the same thing.
  • Compose from anywhere. Compose email in the magic bar and ⌘N both open the Franz Mail composer. If you don't have a Franz Mail account yet, Franz says so and offers to set one up, and the new service lands on its Email accounts tab ready to sign in.
  • Print what you're looking at. ⌘P on a Mac, Ctrl+P on Windows, prints what's in front of you: a service, a popped-out tab or a page in the in-app browser. There's a Print item in the Services menu and a Print row in the magic bar, and they all do the same thing. Tested on macOS and Windows so far.
  • Franz Mail prints a proper conversation. Subject and sender on top, then every message in order with who wrote to whom, names and email addresses both, the full date, Cc and the attachments with their sizes. The quoted history under each reply is left off, so you don't print the same thread over and over, and a forwarded message prints whole. Print sits in the thread's overflow menu and in the right-click menu in the message list, and every message has its own Print this message. Remote images aren't fetched again for paper, so a tracking pixel doesn't fire a second time. They print as their description instead.
  • Translate anything, anywhere. Select text in any service, right-click, pick Translate. Signal has it in its own context menu, and /translate in the magic bar translates whatever you type or paste. The card keeps the original next to the translation, both languages are chips that open the language list, and Swap flips them. Copy and retry are one click each. Part of Franz Pro and Max, on any supported model you've configured: your own key, a local model or Franz Cloud. Under a result from a model that isn't Franz Cloud, Franz shows one line recommending Franz Cloud AI, and the result stays exactly as it is.
  • Type a sentence, get a translation. Free text that matched nothing used to end in No results found. Now there's a Translate row under the real hits, and Enter translates what you typed. /translate works as before.
  • Snippets. Save the replies you write over and over in the Snippets rail and drop them into whichever message field you're in, or onto your clipboard when the field can't take them. Search, create, edit, duplicate and delete your library, and it syncs with your Franz account, so it's on every machine you use. A plain snippet never touches a model, and it's part of Franz Pro. Smart Snippets go further: put an instruction in double braces and Franz fills that part in from the conversation that's open, then shows you the result to read and edit before you press Insert. Nothing goes in until you say so, and a snippet with no conversation to read from tells you that instead of failing. Smart snippets are part of Franz Max, work with your own configured model as well as with Franz Cloud, and Lifetime and active trials get them too.
  • One switch per AI surface in Franz Mail. Settings, AI has a switch each for the priority briefing, thread summaries, the classification chips and smart replies. Switch one off and it's gone right away, no reload, and Franz stops asking the model for it. Everything stays on until you say otherwise.
  • Look inside spam and trash when you mean to. Spam and trash stay out of your search results by default, the same way the magic bar and Ask Franz already handled it. Type in:spam or in:trash when you actually want to look there. It shows up as a chip you can remove again.
  • The in-app browser got real controls. Links from a service have always opened inside Franz. That window has back, forward and an address bar now. The switch in Settings, General still decides whether links open in Franz or in your system browser, and holding Cmd, Shift or Ctrl while clicking still does the opposite.
  • 1Password autofill on Windows. The padlock fills your logins and your one-time codes on Windows now, the same way it has on a Mac. 6.7.0 said Windows was next. Part of Franz Pro, on the macOS and Windows direct downloads, and not in the Mac App Store version.
  • The trial is a Max trial. 14 days with everything Max has, plain and smart snippets included, and 1M Franz Cloud tokens for the trial. When it ends on Pro, your plain snippets keep working and your smart snippets stay in the library with an upgrade path, nothing is deleted.
  • Lifetime includes the workflows. A Lifetime licence has plain and smart snippets, Smart Translate and the native integrations on their supported platforms, all with your own model. Hosted Franz Cloud AI stays an optional add-on.

Improved

  • Franz Pro includes dictation and 1Password autofill. Both used to sit a tier up. Dictation needs macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon.
  • The in-app plan comparison shows snippets and Smart Translate. Plain snippets on Pro, plain and smart on Max, and the translation row is checked on both. The two platform-dependent rows, dictation and 1Password, are still explained on the feature pages rather than in the modal.
  • Downloads moved into the utility rail, next to your todos and calendar, and you can filter them down to a single service.
  • Franz Mail search answers straight away. The first results come out of the text index, so you get something the moment you type, even when the smarter half of search hasn't warmed up yet.
  • Local model downloads say what went wrong. A download that fails now tells you why instead of leaving the button as it was, and Download is offered for whichever model you select, not just the one Franz picked for you.
  • Signal reads like a chat. Messages from the same person in a row join into one block, search has tabs, a chip showing what you asked for and highlighted snippets, you can paste an image straight into the composer, and Reply puts the caret where you type.
  • A service that won't load tells you more. The recovery actions sit behind a Troubleshooting disclosure, and a DNS failure names the host Franz couldn't reach.
  • Unread from your other workspaces. The collapsed workspace switcher shows when something new landed somewhere else, and a badge clears properly when its service unloads.
  • One chip per row, and the chip is the control. A message in Franz Mail shows a single reason chip instead of a badge plus a row of tags, and an approval outranks a review everywhere. Click the chip and you can tell Franz it's not this, that the mail isn't priority, or that this sender never is. Franz then says in plain words what it did. The reading pane header shows the same chip as the row, so one email doesn't have two different reasons depending on where you look.
  • Thread summaries slide in when they're ready. No more placeholder box that shows up, holds space and jumps. The summary opens by default, reads in full instead of being cut off, and if you collapse it Franz remembers that.
  • The priority briefing reads in full. The summary got its own line at the full width of the card, and it's open the first time you see it. Mark something as read, snooze it or archive it and it leaves the briefing right away. While a fresh briefing is on its way the old text stays, with a small spinner next to the greeting.
  • The briefing's numbers match the list under it. With two mail accounts connected the header could say 0 urgent over two visible rows. It counts what the list shows now, across all your accounts. Show all next to the week's unread count opens exactly those messages.
  • A new mailbox gets a briefing worth reading. While Franz is still syncing and sorting a freshly connected account, the card says so and tells you how many messages are left. The briefing shows up when that's done, instead of being written over a half-synced inbox. A busy day also can't use up the day's briefings and leave the card empty any more.
  • Smart replies got calmer. Each suggestion has its own row and wraps, so a long sentence isn't a chip you have to drag sideways. The tone colours and the Fast badge are gone. It's still one click.
  • Urgent means more. A stranger writing URGENT in a subject counts for less than it did. Urgency words weigh fully when the sender is someone you've replied to, a VIP, on your own domain, or when there's a real deadline in the text. The model also got a proper definition of what high priority means, and promotional mail using urgency words isn't it.
  • The Add filter menu lists Invoice, in the same order as the chips in the sidebar.

Fixed

  • Franz no longer freezes while syncing a large mailbox. The app could stop responding for anything from a few seconds to many minutes while a big account synced. Conversations without proper reply headers still group into one thread like before.
  • Emails that showed nothing show their text. Some messages on IMAP accounts arrived with a blank reading pane. If you hit that, this is the version to get.
  • Turning Franz AI on takes effect right away. The switch in Settings used to write the setting and then do nothing until the next launch, with nothing on screen saying a restart was needed. Mail sorting and search intelligence now start the moment you switch it on.
  • Quitting Franz stops Signal's helper too. The process Franz talks to Signal through used to outlive the app, and because every Franz install on a machine shares its connection, a second profile couldn't link Signal until you found and ended it by hand. Both ways of quitting, the menu and an update restart, end it now.
  • Signal quotes work in both directions, your own replies included, and an edit lands on the message you actually edited. Each Franz profile keeps its own Signal database, so two profiles on one machine stop writing over each other, and a slow Signal start no longer switches the service off.
  • Passkey sign-in no longer loops on Windows. A page asking for a passkey Franz can't put a dialog on screen for is turned down now, instead of reopening the same dialog forever.
  • The WhatsApp badge counts what's in your chat list, not the chats you've hidden from it.
  • Date phrases in German and French resolve properly. "nächsten Freitag" now means this coming Friday whether or not you typed the umlaut, and the date is read in your app language first.
  • Windows tray icons are transparent again, and a todo due tomorrow says tomorrow instead of "in 9,287 seconds".
  • No more update offers on macOS 12. Newer Franz builds can't run there, so Franz stops offering them instead of failing to install.
  • With more than one Franz Mail service, the one you're looking at updates live. Sync progress, inbox counts, the priority list, snoozes, signatures and account changes could all land in the wrong place and leave the open mail view stale until you reloaded it.
  • The classifying status tells the truth. It could stay on over an idle app, and on other days it never showed while Franz was busy sorting. It's on while mail is being sorted and clears when the last message is done.
  • Attachment sizes follow your language, so German and French read 1,5 kB.

Under the hood

  • Sorting your mail stays out of your way. The work that indexes and sorts your mail runs in a process of its own now, on a budget Franz sizes to your machine, so a big mailbox being worked through doesn't make the rest of the app sluggish.
  • Signal stopped writing message text to the log. The helper Franz talks to Signal through was printing message bodies and contact names into the app log. It doesn't any more.
  • Opening a message in a big mailbox is faster. Franz used to recount its whole stored mail every time you opened a message or a thread, which could cost well over a tenth of a second each time. It keeps a running total now.

6.7.1

A focused reliability release. The headline is for Linux: Franz now launches cleanly when installed from the .deb package on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, and we verified the fix on Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian 12 before shipping it. Alongside that, reconnecting 1Password takes a single click, mail sorting loads its on-device model in the installed app, and service updates now reach every service, even one with a broken definition.

Fixed

  • Franz starts on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer. Installing from the .deb package now sets up everything the app needs on recent Ubuntu releases, including the security profile the system expects. If Franz never opened for you after a .deb install, this is the version to get. Verified on Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian 12 before release.
  • Reconnecting 1Password takes one click. The 1Password connection rests after a few minutes of inactivity. Approving it again now gets you a fresh connection right away, and the padlock goes straight back to filling your logins.
  • Mail sorting loads its on-device model. The installed app now finds the bundled model that sorts your mail on your machine, so more of that work happens locally, fast and private.
  • Service updates repair broken definitions. A service whose definition fails to load can now still receive the update that fixes it, and a single unexpected value no longer invalidates the whole definition.

Under the hood

  • When syncing between your devices fails, Franz now records the exact reason in its log and flags a failure that keeps repeating, so a stuck sync is visible and diagnosable at a glance.

6.7.0

Franz can fill in your logins now. When you land on a service's sign-in screen, a small padlock appears in the sign-in fields. Click it, pick the right item from your 1Password vault, and Franz types it in for you, one-time codes included. It's part of Franz Pro, on macOS and coming to Windows soon.

Mail search got much better at the thing search is actually for: finding all of something. Ask the assistant for every invoice from a quarter and you get the real number, the messages grouped by sender, and every attachment a click away as a folder or a spreadsheet. Type a name and the people you write to come up alongside the messages. Search a name without accents and it still finds the person with them.

The rest is reliability, and there's quite a lot of it. What you change on one machine now reaches the others: the order of your workspaces, the services you add yourself, the tabs you set up on your first day. Your calendar shows the whole day and the events it should. And the badge that tells you there's something new is telling you the truth again.

New

  • Fill your service logins from 1Password. A padlock appears in the password field of a service you're signing in to, and in the username field on pages that mark it as one. Click it, pick the right item from your vault, and Franz fills it in. If the item stores a one-time code, Franz fills that from the same item. Settings has a new Passwords page where you connect your account, see how many of your services have a matching item, and turn the padlock or the one-time codes off. When a page asks for your username first and the password on the next screen, Franz fills the username and stops there, so you finish the way you normally would. Franz Pro, on macOS, and not in the Mac App Store version. Windows is next: 1Password supports it and most of the Franz side is already written, it just needs a proper test run against a real Windows vault before we switch it on.
  • Ask the assistant for a whole set of mail. Ask for something like all your invoices from a quarter and you get a card with the real number, the messages grouped by sender, and a stat bar across the top. The count comes from the database, so it's not the assistant's own reading of the page.
  • Correct what Franz understood, on the card. The card shows how it read your question as chips: the period, the tag, the sender. Click the period chip, pick a different one, and the card re-counts and re-lists straight away without spending another AI turn.
  • Select messages on that card and archive them without leaving the conversation.
  • Take every attachment in a result set at once. Download them all into a folder under Downloads with a manifest of what got written and what got skipped, and live progress while it runs. You can export the set as a spreadsheet too, with German characters intact.
  • People in the search bar. Type a name and a People section lists the matching correspondents with how many emails you have with each of them. Pick one and the search filters to that person. It looks at your whole correspondent history now, not just the first 2,000, which used to drop about two thirds of your contacts.
  • A full day in the calendar. The day grid runs midnight to midnight instead of starting at 07:00, so an early meeting isn't squashed into a sliver at the top edge. It'll scroll to the most useful part of whichever day you open.
  • Working hours. Set a start and end hour in Settings, Calendar, and the day grid shades everything outside them.
  • See everyone a message went to. The "+N more" at the end of the To: line is a button now. It opens the full To: and Cc: list, grouped and de-duplicated, and every row copies when you click it.

Improved

  • Search results in Franz Mail keep loading as you scroll instead of stopping after the first batch.
  • Franz Mail search is a lot faster. The search worker was being pointed at a folder instead of the database file, so every search across accounts fell back to a slow path that couldn't count anything and reported "50 of unknown". The same search in testing came back in a few milliseconds instead of a few hundred, with a real total.
  • Names without accents find people with them. Searching for muller finds Müller.
  • Numbers and dates on the new search card follow the app's language, not your computer's. German was showing 1,357 and 06/27 in the middle of German sentences.
  • The Franz Cloud usage chart covers a rolling 31 days. It shows the date range in the header and colours the bars by which billing period they belong to. If your billing cycle crossed the end of a month, that chart was just empty before.
  • The setup window is taller on a fresh install, so the first screen of setup fits without scrolling.
  • The last screens of setup fit too. The trial summary and the finish screen used to be one screen, and the Launch button could end up below the fold: 44 pixels down in German, 25 in French, 3 in English. They're two screens now and both fit, in all three languages, at the height Franz opens at and at a shorter one.
  • Franz does a lot less calendar work while it starts up, and the calendar panel fills at launch instead of up to five minutes later.
  • French reads consistently again. The new Passwords screen addressed you informally while the rest of Franz doesn't.

Changed

  • Franz no longer writes classification labels into your mailbox unless you ask it to. Franz used to create its own labels in Gmail and categories in Outlook on the first sync, and there was no prompt and no way out of it. There's a per-account switch for it now, and it's off by default for existing accounts as well as new ones, so if you've been using those labels they'll stop being updated until you turn it back on. Triage still works exactly the same with it off, it just stays on that device. There's a Clean Up Mailbox button that removes the labels and categories Franz created and tells you how many it took out. Turning the switch off on its own never deletes anything.
  • The trial starts automatically during setup again, outside the Mac App Store. It gets a screen of its own near the end: what you get, what it costs after, and the date it ends. No card, and nothing gets charged. Then a last screen tells you Franz is ready and hands you the button. This is how Franz worked before 6.5.0, and picking a fourth service during setup no longer opens a separate offer, because your trial is already running by then.

Fixed

  • Changing one setting on a service can't corrupt or delete it any more. Four bugs compounded into this: a service you edited could come back renamed to Untitled with its recipe gone, and then be removed from every device. Incoming changes are merged field by field now, and a field only wins if it's actually newer.
  • Things you changed reach your other devices. Reordering workspaces, services added with Add browser or as a custom service after the first sync, and every tab made during first-run setup were all saved locally and never sent. Deleted services and tabs came back on the next sync. A new browser could sit there for up to an hour before it showed up elsewhere.
  • A workspace you delete while it's open elsewhere no longer leaves a dead entry behind. The switcher kept a clickable entry for a workspace that was gone, and clicking it tore down all your services and left you on no tab. The sidebar also just started showing every tab from every workspace.
  • Removing a mail service takes its accounts with it. The accounts were left behind, and confirming their removal didn't stick because the next sync brought them back. Leftovers now show up in the confirmation banner instead of disappearing, and that banner is reachable from Calendar settings too.
  • Franz stops re-uploading your custom service icons on every sync. A 512x512 image was going out with every single change, and the server had nowhere to put it, so it threw the thing away on arrival.
  • A search across two mail accounts returns both of them. The merge starved the smaller mailbox, so the first page could be 50 rows from just one account. The assistant was also building its address book from the first account only, and its option to search one specific account had no effect on what came back.
  • Named periods work. "Second quarter" and "zweites Quartal" produced no date filter at all, so the search ran over your whole mailbox and then got cut at 50. A stated year is kept now, so Q4 2026 means 2026, while a bare "Q4" in August still correctly means last year's.
  • Counts are real or absent. Franz Mail's header shows a genuine count from the database, or no count at all when it can't work one out. The assistant used to be handed the size of one page of results along with a note telling it to report that as the total. Both are gone.
  • One broken calendar no longer hides the rest of your events. Loading walked your calendars in order and a single failure stopped the whole thing, so everything after the broken one vanished, and there was nothing on screen to explain it. Background refresh had the same problem and could leave the panel stale for good.
  • Only your own response marks an event declined. A colleague or a meeting room declining used to strike the event out in your agenda, and it'd make the assistant think you were free during a meeting you were going to.
  • One-off appointments aren't labelled Recurring. On a Mac, every single Apple Calendar event carried it.
  • Editing or deleting one occurrence hits the one you clicked, not the first in the series. Choosing "all events" deletes the whole series now instead of a single occurrence.
  • The same event from two accounts shows once, once those accounts have synced again.
  • The unread badge can't get stuck at zero. Archiving, moving or deleting priority mail nudged the count one step away from the truth each time, and because it can't go below zero it could never find its way back. With two accounts in one mailbox, whichever finished counting last overwrote the total, so if that one had nothing unread both the sidebar and the dock badge went to zero.
  • Franz Mail and Signal follow the hibernation switch. Both hibernated after five minutes no matter what the switch said, and on Franz Mail the switch wasn't even drawn.
  • Switching workspaces keeps your services loaded if you've turned hibernation off for them. They were getting unloaded and cold-reloaded every time you came back.
  • Turning AI off frees the memory. The setting saved, but the local model stayed in memory until you quit Franz. On one machine that's 15.5 GB it was still holding on to. Switching from a local model to the cloud leaked the same way.
  • The free plan can use the assistant with a local model. The check was looking for a Pro subscription instead of your local model, so free users were locked out of something the plan says they get. That's been wrong since May 2026.
  • A todo passing its deadline shows up inside the app. The dock badge lit up but nothing else did. No badge on the rail, no red on the row, and the assistant's countdown froze wherever it first rendered.
  • Services you pick during setup stay picked. On a fresh profile they were recorded but never got a tab, so they weren't in the sidebar afterwards. Adding the same service again from inside Franz always worked, which is what made it hard to spot. If you hit this, it sorts itself out after one restart.
  • Dictation can't get stuck on Preparing. On a Mac, the speech helper could latch on to a wrong answer about a language not being installed and then it'd refuse every attempt until you quit Franz, while the pill promised a download that had never started. Franz throws the bad helper away and starts a new one, and if the language really isn't available it'll say so.
  • The calendar settings columns are labelled with icons now. The German headings for visibility and notifications didn't fit their boxes and ran into each other.
  • Settings reports your real cache size. It was adding up the folders and then keeping only the last one.

6.6.0

Franz can take dictation now. Hold the shortcut, say what you want to send, and the words land in the message field you were already writing in, no matter which service you're in. A small pill shows the transcript while you speak, and the text drops in the moment you let go. It's included with Franz Pro, and it needs macOS 26 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac.

The rest of this release is repair, and quite a lot of it. WhatsApp could freeze for close to forty seconds while it started up, and loading older messages, downloading media and deleting a message had all stopped working against the current WhatsApp Web. Element couldn't be added as a service at all. Signal showed raw account ids instead of names for group members who aren't in your contacts. Local transcription of voice notes was switched off by a bug that told the app the engine wasn't ready when it actually was. Those are all fixed. Franz Mail got the other half of the attention, starting with an uncomfortable find: replies sent from Franz carried an internal id where the real message reference belonged, so in your recipient's Gmail or Outlook your reply opened a brand-new conversation instead of joining the thread. That one had been there since the very first version of Franz Mail.

New

  • Speak your message. Hold the dictation shortcut, talk, and Franz types for you. The words land in the message field you were writing in, whichever service you're in, and a small floating pill shows the transcript while you speak. The text drops in when you release the key. Included with Franz Pro, on macOS 26 or later with Apple Silicon.
  • Better voice notes on a Mac. Franz now uses Apple's own on-device speech recognition to transcribe WhatsApp and Signal voice notes on a recent Mac. It's a lot more accurate than what we had before, German especially. Nothing leaves your machine, same as always.
  • Reply to any message in a thread. Every message in a Franz Mail conversation now has its own actions menu: reply, reply all or forward from right there, and the composer opens directly beneath the message it answers.
  • Several drafts in one conversation. Answering one message while forwarding another is now perfectly normal. Each draft keeps its place in the thread, and when you leave the conversation and come back, every draft you had open is restored right where it was.
  • Your signature, your call. The composer now has a signature control: switch to a different signature, remove it for just this message, or bring it back after removing it. A manage link takes you straight to your signature settings, and changing your From address updates the signature to match.

Improved

  • Conversations read the way they happened. A reply now appears beneath the message it answers instead of at the bottom of the thread, so long back-and-forths stay easy to follow.
  • Priority changes show up right away. Marking a message urgent or changing its tags from an open conversation now applies instantly and stays in sync with your priority and category views.
  • Mute all looks muted. When you silence every service, the sidebar button now shows it, so you can tell at a glance why things have gone quiet.
  • Settings is easier to scan. The settings list is grouped now, with your account and workspace items separated from the feature ones, and About sits at the bottom where you'd look for it.
  • A smaller download. We trimmed what goes into the build, so the download and the install both take up less room.

Fixed

  • WhatsApp doesn't freeze on startup. A WhatsApp Web update sent Franz hunting through the whole page for things that had moved, and that search could block WhatsApp for close to forty seconds while it started. It's back under a second, and if it ever happens again Franz now says so instead of just sitting there.
  • WhatsApp messages, media and deleting work again. The same WhatsApp Web update broke loading older messages, downloading attachments and deleting a message. All three work again.
  • WhatsApp voice notes transcribe by themselves again. Voice notes were the one kind of message the automatic transcription never picked up, because Franz was looking for the wrong type internally.
  • Local transcription actually runs. The on-device transcription engine reported itself as not ready before it had finished loading, and everything that uses it waits for ready, so it sat there unused.
  • Signal shows names, not account ids. Group members who aren't in your address book showed up as a long raw id. Franz now asks Signal for everyone it knows about, not just your saved contacts, so those people have names.
  • Signal replies show what they're replying to. The quote above a reply now shows the message it points at, including whether that was a photo or a voice note, and clicking it jumps to the original in the thread.
  • Signal says when it has stopped. If the Signal connection dies for good, Franz now tells you instead of looking connected, and it keeps its logs so a broken link can actually be diagnosed.
  • Element can be added again. The Element service pointed at an address Element has since left, so it could never load. It also couldn't be installed at all, because one harmless field in its definition was enough to make Franz reject the whole thing. Unread badges for Element count properly again too.
  • One bad service definition no longer takes the service with it. An unexpected value in an optional field used to throw away the entire definition instead of just that field.
  • Your hibernation setting sticks. Turning hibernation on or off for a service was saved locally but dropped on the way to your other devices, so it never survived a second machine or a full refresh.
  • Workspaces keep their services. A sync bug could quietly drop services out of a workspace's list.
  • No more codes with nowhere to type them. Some screens sent you a verification email saying "enter this code in Franz" while having no code field anywhere. Those screens send a link again, and only the screen that has a code field asks for a code.
  • Replies from Franz Mail thread properly for the person receiving them. Franz was sending an internal id where the real message reference belonged, so your replies started a new conversation in the recipient's Gmail or Outlook instead of joining the existing one. Replies now carry the proper reference.
  • Escape closes the menu, not the conversation. Pressing Escape to dismiss an open menu in Franz Mail also backed you out of the whole conversation. It now closes just the menu, and only leaves the thread when nothing else is open.
  • The what's-new screen waits for slow starts. After an update, the overview of what changed could count itself as shown before it ever appeared, and then never show up again. It now waits until you've actually seen it, and if it can't load, Franz tries again on the next launch.

Under the hood

  • Franz moved to a newer Electron release, which brings the usual Chromium security and performance updates.

6.5.3

The first few minutes with Franz were doing too much asking. Signing up sent you out of the app to hunt for an email; on a Mac, the system's calendar permission dialog could appear before you had even picked a service. Both are gone. Signup now shows a six-digit code field right in the window, the email leads with the code, and you are through in a few seconds. Or you skip it, and Franz only brings it up when you reach for something that needs a verified address. Calendar access now waits for a screen that explains itself first, and for your yes. The rest of this release is trust repair, and the biggest piece is the trial: if you started one and Franz carried on treating you as a free user, that was our bug, it is fixed, and the accounts it caught have been put right. Underneath it, a family of sync problems that could lose a setting you had just changed, bring back a service you deleted, or empty out a brand-new second machine on its very first sync, are all closed.

New

  • Sign up without leaving Franz. Creating a Franz Cloud account now shows a six-digit code field right in the window. The verification email leads with the code, you type it in, and you are on your way. Prefer the link? That still works, and Franz picks it up the moment you switch back, no restart needed.
  • Not ready to verify? Keep going. Skipping verification no longer parks you behind a wall. Franz gets out of the way and asks once, in context, when you actually reach for something that needs a confirmed address, instead of stacking a banner and a block on top of each other.
  • macOS: your calendar is invited, not assumed. Franz used to hand you the system's calendar permission dialog during first launch, before you had any idea why. Now there is a step that shows what the calendar panel does and lets you decide, and nothing reaches the system until you say yes. Say "maybe later" and the panel keeps a friendly offer waiting for whenever you change your mind. If you have already granted access, nothing changes for you.
  • Calendar access, visible and reversible. Settings now has a calendar permission card showing exactly where you stand, and if access was turned off at the system level, Franz shows you the way back with a direct link into System Settings.

Improved

  • More of your settings follow you between devices. Your search engine, telemetry preference, content filter and AI preferences (context, tone, suggestions and generation settings) now sync alongside your theme. Changes also land on your other devices promptly instead of waiting for a full refresh. Your local AI models, your provider keys and your WhatsApp chat categories deliberately stay on the device they belong to.
  • Deleting your account no longer asks for your password. Franz sends a confirmation link to your account email instead, and your account stays fully active until you confirm. The email now comes from an address a person actually reads, so if you reply to tell us why you are leaving, it reaches us.
  • Removing a mail account really removes it. Confirming the removal of a mail account on a second device used to leave it syncing for the rest of the session, with its sign-in still stored on your machine. It now signs out properly and clears the local mail cache right away.
  • German and French across the new screens. The new signup, calendar and account screens are fully translated, and the German account-deleted email no longer signs off with an English footer.

Fixed

  • Your trial counts from the moment you start it. Starting a trial after signing in never linked it to your account, so Franz kept showing you the free plan, the Pro features you had just unlocked stayed out of reach, and the trial reminder emails never went out. Trials are now linked the instant they start, with a second attempt on the next launch if you were offline. Accounts affected by this have been repaired on our side, so nothing is needed from you.
  • A fresh second machine no longer wipes itself. Under an unlucky combination, signing in on a new device could pull an empty account down over your existing services, tabs and workspaces and leave you with nothing. That path is closed.
  • Mail accounts that never made it to the cloud now do. Some devices reported their mail accounts as synced while nothing was actually stored, so a second machine downloaded zero accounts, silently and permanently. Those devices now notice and re-send on their next sync.
  • Deleted services stay deleted. A service, tab or workspace you removed on one device could reappear later from another device that had been offline, sometimes as a broken leftover. Deletions now travel properly between your devices, and a genuinely newer edit still wins.
  • Changes made mid-sync no longer vanish. A setting you changed in the second a sync was running could be quietly dropped and never sent again. It now rides out on the next round.
  • One device with a wrong clock can't freeze the rest. A machine with a badly set clock could stamp a setting so far in the future that no device, including that one, could ever change it again. Franz now keeps those out, and accounts already stuck this way heal themselves on their next sync.
  • Two devices syncing at the same moment keep both sides. Simultaneous syncs from two of your machines could quietly discard one of them. They now take turns.
  • No more "please restart the app." Confirming your email on the web told you to restart Franz. The app picks the change up on its own now, so the instruction is gone.

Under the hood

  • Routine sync check-ins are much lighter. Most of the time your devices have nothing new to say to each other, and Franz now answers that in a single quick round trip instead of a full exchange, which means less waiting and less battery spent on nothing.
  • Signing in, checking your plan and opening the upgrade flow are noticeably quicker, and no longer slow to a crawl when other things are busy.

6.5.2

If WhatsApp told you "There was a problem sending your message" this week, this release is for you. WhatsApp rolled out an update in late July that broke sending from Franz entirely, and your reports let us pin it down fast: the new WhatsApp version needs two things Franz wasn't providing, and now does. Sending works again, tested against the real thing before shipping. The rest of this release fixes a recurring annoyance: Franz forgetting things you had already done. You bought Cloud AI, and it asked you to sign in. You've owned a lifetime license for years, and it suggested an upgrade. You were signed in, and it asked again. All of that second-guessing is gone. Rounding it out: a sneaky bug where deleting a service could quietly slow down your entire machine, a close button on Windows that ignored your clicks, and Signal now lets you keep typing right after you hit send.

Fixed

  • WhatsApp: sending works again. After WhatsApp's late-July update, every message you tried to send failed with "There was a problem sending your message." Franz now supports what the new WhatsApp version requires, and sending is back to normal. No relinking needed.
  • Cloud AI works the moment you buy it. After purchasing Cloud AI, Franz could keep telling you to sign in for up to twelve minutes before your purchase kicked in. It now takes effect within seconds, no restart needed.
  • Lifetime licenses are recognized everywhere. With a lifetime license and the Cloud AI add-on, Franz Mail could still show an "Upgrade to Pro" prompt on the reply generator, especially on machines with less memory. Franz now remembers exactly what you own.
  • No surprise sign-in when upgrading. Opening the upgrade flow while already signed in could stop you at a sign-in screen anyway. It goes straight through now.
  • Upgrading while already subscribed no longer errors. If you opened the upgrade flow with an active subscription, Franz stopped you with an error. It now recognizes your subscription and takes you straight to managing it, where you can switch plans, and plan changes you make there are picked up by your account right away.
  • Signal: keep typing after you hit send. Sending a message kicked the cursor out of the compose box, so the first words of your next message went nowhere. Focus stays put.
  • Deleting a service no longer slows down your machine. Removing a service mid-session could push Franz into a permanent background loop heavy enough to make your whole computer feel sluggish. Fixed at the root, and installs already caught in the loop free themselves automatically after updating.
  • "Ask where to save" downloads wait their turn. With the new ask-me-where setting, a download appeared in your downloads list, progress bar and all, before you had even chosen where to put the file, and cancelling the save dialog could leave ghost entries behind. Downloads now show up once you've picked a destination.
  • Windows: the downloads window can be closed again. Clicking the X on the download manager did nothing, because the invisible strip used for dragging the window was swallowing the click. The button now responds like it should.
  • First-time setup stays on screen. With unlucky timing, a service you were signed into could suddenly appear on top of the setup wizard and leave you stuck looking at the wrong thing. The wizard now keeps its place until you're done.
  • Linux: updates through our apt repository are dependable again. For a short window, the repository could offer a pre-release build or fail the download entirely. It now only ever serves stable releases, with safeguards to keep it that way.

6.5.1

A small release, but if one of these three bugs had your name on it, it's a big one. Some of you couldn't use Franz at the office at all: on company networks that route traffic through a proxy, every service timed out while the app itself looked perfectly healthy. Others were locked out of Signal, where one failed linking attempt could quietly poison every attempt after it, even across updates. And on Windows, some antivirus tools raised a false alarm after every single update. Each had a single stubborn root cause, each is fixed properly, and all three came straight from your reports. Keep them coming.

Fixed

  • Franz works on office networks again. On networks that require a proxy, services failed to load with a connection timeout while everything else about the app seemed fine. Franz had quietly stopped honoring your system's proxy settings for services, a bug that goes all the way back to the start of Franz 6. It now respects them again, the way Franz 5 always did.
  • Signal linking can no longer get permanently stuck. If a device-link attempt failed on an older version of Franz, it could leave behind a broken half-finished setup that made every future attempt fail too, no matter how often you retried or updated. Franz now detects that leftover, clears it out, and gives your next attempt a genuinely fresh start.
  • Windows: Signal linking works again after updates. Updating Franz on Windows could quietly leave older copies of Signal's engine behind, and Franz sometimes started one of those instead of the newest, and the Signal network then refused to link your device. Franz now always runs exactly the version it ships with, so linking goes through.
  • Windows: your antivirus stops crying wolf on updates. Some antivirus tools, AVG among them, flagged Franz after every update because the update packaging accidentally stripped the original publisher signature from a bundled component. That component now ships untouched with its signature intact, so security software recognizes it for what it is.

6.5.0

This one is about stability. We spent the last weeks hunting down crashes and rough edges across the whole app: Windows machines that crashed on launch, mail that could double-send, an upgrade window that came up blank, Signal threads that made the fans spin. Dozens of fixes later, Franz starts faster, runs lighter, and finally catches the crashes that used to vanish without a trace. Franz Mail got a dedicated hardening pass, Windows got a rebuilt close-and-tray experience, and getting started got some love too: setup is now three quick steps, and the 14-day trial only begins when you actually reach for a Pro feature, so it covers the time where it counts. Downloads, too, learned to respect your preference: keep saving straight to your download folder, or have Franz ask where each file should go.

New

  • A fresh start, in three steps. First-run setup has been rebuilt from the ground up: create or sign in to your account, pick your services, and you're in. The service picker leads with what people actually add first, including Franz Mail, and a "Browse all 70+" view opens the full catalog without losing your selections. The whole flow speaks English, German, and French.
  • Your trial starts when you're ready, not when the installer finishes. Franz no longer burns trial days while you're still looking around. The 14-day Pro trial begins at the moment you reach for a Pro feature, like adding a fourth service, so the trial actually covers the time you're using it.
  • A calm ending to the trial. In the final three days a quiet countdown appears, and when the trial ends you see exactly what you've built, your services, workspaces, and mail, with one button to keep everything exactly as it is. Decide to stay on the free plan instead? Your first three services keep working, no strings attached.
  • Decide where your downloads go. A new choice in Settings → General: keep saving files automatically to your download folder, or have Franz ask you where to put each one. If you never touch the setting, nothing changes. Downloads land where they always have.
  • Windows: closing Franz finally behaves the way you expect. A rebuilt window-behavior setting lets you choose exactly what the close button does: quit, minimize, or tuck into the tray. Franz explains the first time it hides so you're never left wondering where it went. In English, German, and French.
  • Crash reports that catch the invisible crashes. Some crashes used to take Franz down without leaving a trace. Franz can now capture these and send an anonymous diagnostic so we can actually fix them. If you want to help more, there's a new opt-in for detailed crash reports in Settings → Privacy, off by default, encrypted, and deleted after 30 days.

Improved

  • Franz Mail, hardened. A focused reliability pass on mail: undo-send can no longer double-send, reconnecting an account can't mix up identities, mail re-syncs when you come back to the app, and opening a thread recovers gracefully when something goes wrong. The undo-send window is now a snappier 5 seconds.
  • Signal threads, much lighter. Long conversations now render only what's on screen, cutting the work your machine does in big threads to a fraction of what it was, so scrolling stays smooth even in your busiest groups.
  • Faster to first message. The mail editor and other heavyweight parts now load only when you need them, trimming startup work and memory.
  • Adding Gmail or Outlook as a service? Franz Mail says hello. When you reach for the Gmail or Outlook web service, Franz points out, once, that these accounts work best connected to Franz Mail, where they get search, notifications, and the assistant.
  • Cloud AI introduces itself the first time you use it. The first time you reach for an AI feature, Franz shows what's included and gets you going without any setup.

Fixed

  • Sidebar tabs stay put. Dragging services around could make tabs vanish from the sidebar until a restart. They stay visible now.
  • Signing in on a fresh install no longer wipes local data. A guard now prevents a first sync from clearing local state when the server copy is emptier than yours.
  • The upgrade window works again. The embedded checkout could come up blank or broken for some people; it opens reliably now. And if the payment form ever does fail to load, Franz notices, closes the sheet, and offers you a retry instead of leaving you hanging.
  • Checkout no longer trips over an almost-finished trial. Upgrading with less than two days left on your trial could fail at the payment step. Fixed.
  • Signing up without a last name works. The form no longer insists on a field some people simply don't use.
  • Open conversations now update as replies arrive. In Franz Mail, a new message in a conversation you had open only showed up in the message list, and the conversation itself stayed frozen until you left and came back. It now refreshes within seconds of the mail arriving.
  • Discarding a draft really discards it. Throwing away a draft opened from the Drafts folder could leave its content sitting in the reading pane and the Drafts counter stuck at the old number. Both clear properly now.
  • Blank Signal conversations show their messages again. A duplicated incoming message could blank out an entire Signal thread. Affected threads render again, existing duplicates are cleaned up automatically, and new ones can no longer sneak in.
  • Signal odds and ends. Custom-emoji reactions render properly in the picker, and a rare crash when a message arrived without an envelope is handled gracefully.
  • Popup windows go quiet when you close them. Closing a window Franz opened for an external link, a YouTube video say, could leave its audio playing until you quit the app. Closing the window now actually stops it.
  • The sound badge lets go. A service could keep its "playing audio" badge after the sound stopped. It clears now.
  • Clearer mailbox errors. When a mail account can't reconnect or be added, Franz now tells you why instead of failing silently.
  • Windows: the taskbar icon lost its white box. On some setups the Franz icon sat on a white square in the taskbar. It renders cleanly again.
  • Windows: a launch crash-loop is gone. A mail-intelligence component could take Franz down right at startup on certain Windows machines. It now runs safely isolated, so a hiccup there can never crash the app again.
  • Windows: smooth scrolling is back. Installed builds had quietly stopped using the graphics card for rendering. Hardware acceleration works again.
  • Newer builds stay put. Running a newer Franz than the latest public release, like a beta, could get silently replaced by the older version on restart. Franz now only ever updates forward.

Under the hood

  • Closed windows hand their memory back. File previews, popup windows, and the checkout sheet quietly kept running in the background after being closed, slowly adding up until the next restart. They're fully released the moment you close them now.
  • No more busywork on unreadable attachments. An attachment Franz could never make sense of, a corrupt PDF for example, was retried on every mail sync, forever. It's now marked and skipped, which saves background work and battery.

6.4.1

A smaller release this time: one welcome addition, and a good deal of putting things right. The headline: you can now connect a Gmail account to Franz Mail. Because Google no longer allows sign-in inside an app window, Franz hands you off to your usual browser to approve access and brings you straight back, and your Gmail then lives in your inbox like any other account. We also owned a rough edge from 6.4.0. A change on Signal's side had quietly broken device linking for a lot of you, and that works again. On top of that, the assistant answers again for lifetime owners with a Cloud AI add-on, managing your subscription works no matter how you paid, and the old Facebook Pages service has followed Meta over to Business Suite.

New

  • Connect your Gmail to Franz Mail. You can now add a Gmail account alongside your other mailboxes. Google doesn't allow signing in from inside an app window anymore, so Franz opens the approval step in your normal web browser and then returns you to the app automatically. Once you've said yes, your Gmail behaves just like any other account in Franz Mail.

Improved

  • Facebook Pages is now Meta Business Messenger. Meta retired the old Pages inbox and moved page messages into Meta Business Suite. The service has been renamed and now opens straight to the Business Suite inbox, so your page conversations are where Meta keeps them. If you already had it added, it carries over, no need to set it up again.

Fixed

  • Signal links your devices again. A change on Signal's side had started rejecting device linking, which left many of you unable to connect or reconnect Signal after updating to 6.4.0. The bundled Signal component is now updated, and Franz keeps it current going forward, so linking works as expected again.
  • The assistant answers again on a lifetime licence with Cloud AI. If you own a lifetime licence and added the Cloud AI option, the assistant and its usage view had stopped responding. They work again.
  • Managing your subscription works however you paid. Opening the billing portal to update payment details or view invoices failed for some customers, including lifetime buyers and anyone who'd only added Cloud AI. Everyone who's paid can now reach it.
  • Beta testers see the release announcement too. If you'd run a pre-release build, the "what's new" announcement for the matching stable version was being skipped. Each release now shows once, whether or not you'd seen a beta of it first.

Under the hood

  • Lighter background syncing. If you don't use workspaces, Franz had been redoing a full sync every cycle for no reason. It now recognises that as your normal setup and skips the needless work.

6.4.0

The headline this release is a first for Franz: it has a calendar. Your days now sit right beside your messages and email: a tidy agenda to scan, or a full Day view with a time grid when you want to see how the hours fall. Add something on the spot, connect your Apple and Outlook calendars (Google is arriving shortly), and Franz quietly reminds you before a meeting, with a one-tap Join when there's a video link. Franz's assistant grew up around all this, too: it can read your week, find you a free slot, move a meeting, prep you for who's in the room and, when your own inbox comes up short, research someone on the open web. Alongside the calendar you can finally drop a picture straight into an email, and we worked through a long list of everyday friction across Windows, Linux, Signal, and notifications.

New

  • Franz has a calendar. A calendar now lives in Franz's side panel, right next to your services. See what's ahead as a tidy agenda, or switch to a Day view with a proper time grid to watch how the hours line up. Drop in something new with the quick-add box, colour-code by calendar, and tuck the ones you don't need to see behind a per-account filter. Connect your Apple (macOS) and Outlook calendars and your events show up in their own colours. Google Calendar support is arriving shortly.
  • Meeting reminders that follow your lead. Franz now nudges you before a meeting, using the reminders you already set on each event, with no fixed, naggy default. Click a reminder to jump straight to the video link, or open the location in Maps when it's somewhere you need to be. Mute reminders for any single calendar, or turn them all off in Settings.
  • Your assistant works with your calendar. Ask Franz's assistant what's on today, when you're next free, or to pencil something in. It reads your agenda, finds open slots that actually fit, and creates, moves, or cancels events for you, always showing you the change before it makes it. It can block time for a todo, or fire off a quick note to everyone in a meeting when you're running late. (Part of the Franz Pro assistant.)
  • Meeting prep, before you walk in. Ask the assistant to get you up to speed on a meeting and it gathers what you already know about the people in the room, quietly, from your own Franz email history, with nothing leaving your device. Need more than your inbox holds? One tap sends Franz to research them on the web, and you can save the whole briefing as a document in your Downloads. (Part of the Franz Pro assistant.)
  • Ask the assistant to research the web. Franz's assistant can now look things up on the open web, whether a person, a company or a product, and hand back a clear summary with links to its sources, so you can always see where an answer came from. When a question names a specific person, Franz checks with you before anything leaves your device. (Part of the Franz Pro assistant.)
  • Inline images in your emails. Drag an image into the composer or paste one from your clipboard and it embeds right in the message body, where you're writing, rather than landing as a lone attachment. Hold Shift while dropping if you'd rather attach it as a file instead. Images stay put when you save and reopen a draft, and they show up embedded for whoever you send to.

Improved

  • Your email accounts show their faces. The Email Accounts settings pane now displays each connected account's photo alongside a Gmail or Outlook icon, so it's easy to tell them apart at a glance.
  • Clearer sender details when reading email. A message's header now shows the sender's address right next to their name, plus a plain To: line for who it went to, and you can copy any address with a click.
  • "Show in folder" speaks your system's language. The download menu now says Finder on macOS, Explorer on Windows, and Show in Folder on Linux, instead of always saying Finder.
  • Settings is in the menu on Windows and Linux. There's now a Settings entry (Ctrl+,) in the menu, matching what macOS already had.
  • Tidier window controls in the horizontal tab layout. On Windows and Linux, the window buttons now sit flush in the tab bar, with the empty gap that used to sit beside them removed.

Fixed

  • Your notification choices stick now. Turning notifications off for a service used to quietly revert after a restart, or come back on a second device. The setting is saved properly now and stays the way you left it.
  • Signal links your device again. A change on Signal's side had started rejecting device linking; the bundled Signal component is updated, so linking and reconnecting work as expected again.
  • Signal starts on Windows even with a space in your username. On accounts with a path like C:\Users\Jane Doe, Signal could be wrongly reported as broken before it ever launched. It now starts normally.
  • The application menu is reachable on Linux. Linux uses a native window frame with no in-window menu bar, which left the Franz menu unreachable on many desktops. There's now a menu button in the header to open it.
  • No more silent startup crash on Wayland-only Linux. On some Linux sessions Franz would exit a moment after launch with no message. It now falls back to a compatible display mode and starts cleanly.
  • Ctrl+Plus zooms in on Windows. Zoom-in used to fire only if you also held Shift; it now works with the plain Ctrl+Plus you'd expect.
  • A mistyped proxy no longer breaks a service. Typing an invalid value into a service's proxy field used to route all its traffic through a dead proxy and fail every request. Invalid entries are now ignored, and the service stays on a direct connection.
  • Custom service icons stick around. Icons you'd set yourself could disappear after a sync. They're now kept and restored.
  • "Summarize this email" reads the whole message. Asking the assistant to summarize a long open email no longer works from a cut-off copy. It now sees the full message.
  • The workspace switcher no longer wraps in German. Longer labels like "Alle Dienste" stay on one line and truncate cleanly instead of spilling to two.

Under the hood

  • A newer browser engine. Franz moved up to a newer version of its underlying Chromium engine, bringing the latest security and stability fixes to every service you run.

6.3.1

Franz learned to read the room this release, quite literally. If your computer runs in a right-to-left language, Franz now mirrors its whole layout to match, so everything sits where your eyes expect it. We also tracked down two email quirks that chipped away at trust (attachments that slipped off drafts, paragraphs that looked squashed before sending) and put a stop to a startup crash that hit some Windows machines without a word of explanation.

New

  • Franz now follows your system's text direction. Set your computer to a right-to-left language (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, or Urdu) and the entire app mirrors to match: the sidebar, your services, settings, popups, even popped-out and preview windows all land on the correct side. Writing right-to-left feels natural too. The search field, the email composer, and the assistant now align your text the way it should read, whatever language Franz itself is displayed in.

Improved

  • Unread badges in the horizontal tab bar are smaller and tidier, so they tell you what's waiting without crowding the tab.

Fixed

  • Email drafts keep their attachments. Files you added to a draft could quietly disappear when you reopened it later. They now save with everything else, so your draft is exactly how you left it.
  • What you see in the composer is what they get. Multi-paragraph emails (especially pasted text) looked squashed together while you wrote them, even though recipients saw proper spacing. The composer and Franz's own message view now match the sent mail.
  • Franz no longer crashes silently on some Windows PCs. On certain machines, often ones with integrated AMD graphics, a hardware check could take Franz down a few seconds after launch with no error at all. That check now runs safely on its own, isolated from the rest of the app, and Franz only uses graphics acceleration when it's proven stable on your hardware.

6.3.0

The thing you'll notice the moment you open this release: Franz now speaks French, the whole app top to bottom, so if French is your language, you can switch to it in Settings and feel at home right away. Around that headliner we tidied up a lot of the small daily friction: dark mode that stuck, email sync that got stuck, popups that didn't size themselves quite right. We also gave Signal on Windows the missing piece it needed to connect.

New

  • Franz speaks French. The entire app, menus, settings, the email view, everything, is now available in French. Pick it from the language list in Settings and Franz switches over instantly. (German is fully covered too, including the parts that were still slipping back to English.)
  • A new About page in Settings, with an optional Beta program. App updates now live on their own About page, and from there you can opt in to early Beta builds if you like getting new things first. Beta follows your account across every device you're signed in on, and the page tells you that up front before you flip the switch.
  • See where a link goes before you click it. Hover any link inside a service or an email and Franz shows you its destination in a small preview. Hold ⌘/Ctrl/Shift while clicking to open it the opposite way to your usual setting, system browser or in-app, without changing your preference.

Improved

  • The workspace switcher and Privacy Shield now slide down inside the window instead of opening as separate floating windows. They feel quicker, stay out of your way, and the shield's toggle now plainly says "Block Trackers" so it's obvious what it does.
  • The AI assistant explains itself better. When a request is beyond what your current AI model can handle, you now get a clear, actionable message, and a one-tap way to switch to a more capable option, instead of a vague "something went wrong." Local models are handled more reliably, too.

Fixed

  • Dark mode no longer slips off your services at startup. A timing issue at launch could quietly reset some services (LinkedIn was a common one) back to your system theme even though Franz was set to dark. They now stay the way you set them.
  • Email sync no longer gets stuck. A leftover email account could cause a whole sync to fail and keep retrying. Sync now skips the stray account and keeps everything else flowing.
  • Signal connects on Windows again. Packaged Windows builds were missing a component Signal needs to start up. It's now bundled, so Signal links and runs as expected.
  • Deleting a Signal service on Windows no longer leaves leftover folders behind, and any that piled up before get cleaned out automatically on launch.
  • Search and sign-in popups size themselves correctly. The search box and the basic-auth window were leaving an empty gap below their content, or in one case clipping the buttons at the bottom. Both now hug their content exactly.
  • Camera and microphone prompts now show up in the right window when you've popped a service out into its own window.
  • The trial badge now clearly reads when your free trial ends instead of being vague about the date.

6.2.2

Fixed

  • Franz no longer quits unexpectedly on Windows. Franz could crash a few seconds after launch, often while it was quietly syncing email attachments in the background, and disappear without explanation. The cause was the part of Franz that pulls text out of PDF attachments; it now runs safely on its own, isolated from the rest of the app, so a hiccup there can't bring Franz down with it. Startup and attachment sync are stable again.

6.2.1

A maintenance release, so there's no new feature to show off this time. What landed is the kind of work you only notice when it stops getting in your way. The headline: Franz on Windows now updates itself properly again. The auto-update was downloading but failing to actually install and relaunch, so it could quietly leave you a version behind. That's fixed. Alongside it, the extra windows Franz opens, meaning external links, the email-preview window and pop-out service windows, now look and behave the way they should on Windows and Linux.

Fixed

  • Windows updates install and relaunch on their own again. On Windows, Franz would download a new version and then stall at the last step. The installer couldn't replace the running app, so nothing actually updated and Franz didn't come back up. It now hands off cleanly to the installer and relaunches itself, so staying current is automatic the way it's meant to be.
  • The extra windows Franz opens are fixed on Windows and Linux. When Franz pops open a separate window, an external link, the email preview/save window, or a popped-out service, the minimize, maximize, and close buttons were invisible against the light header, and when you could find them they didn't always act on the right window. They're now clearly visible, sit flush in the corner at the full height of the header, and reliably control the window you're actually looking at. The header content no longer starts with a stray gap on Windows or gets pushed off the left edge on Linux, and the three-dot app menu only shows up on the main window, where it belongs.

6.2.0

Every inbox quietly accumulates ghosts: the people you used to talk to all the time, who slipped off your radar without you noticing. This release gives them a name. Ghosts, new in Franz Mail, surfaces the relationships that are cooling off so you can reach back out before they go cold for good, and it's computed entirely on your own machine, so nothing about who you talk to ever leaves your device. Around it: you can now bring your own Google Gemini key to the Pro AI assistant, Cmd+K finally searches inside your WhatsApp messages instead of just chat names, overdue todos now count toward your dock badge so nothing slips, and a run of fixes lands on draft handling, smoother reply sending, and pop-up windows on Windows and Linux.

New

  • Ghosts, see the relationships that are fading. Franz Mail now has a dedicated Ghosts view that gathers the people you used to be in regular contact with and have quietly drifted from, grouped by how cool things have gotten (Cooling, Cold, Frozen) and sorted by how warm the relationship once was. Each one is a single click away from a pre-addressed reply. It's all worked out on your device from your own mail history. The warmth math never goes to a server. The free plan shows your three warmest quiet relationships; Franz Pro opens up the full list. And when you start writing to someone you haven't spoken to in a while, a gentle note in the composer lets you know, no nagging, just a heads-up.
  • Bring your own Google Gemini key. Franz Pro's AI assistant now supports Google Gemini alongside the existing providers. Drop in your own Gemini API key in Settings and the assistant runs on it, with full support for the assistant's multi-step actions.
  • Search inside your WhatsApp messages. Cmd+K now reaches into the text of your WhatsApp messages, not just conversation names. Find that thing someone mentioned, and the result jumps you straight to that message in the thread. Group chats are searched too.
  • Overdue todos in the dock badge. Todos that are overdue now add to the count on your dock and tray icon, right alongside unread services, so an overdue task is visible without opening Franz. Tick one off and the badge updates immediately.

Improved

  • Your draft is waiting where you left it. Reopen an email thread that has a saved draft and Franz now drops you straight into the composer with that draft loaded, instead of making you find and click Reply again. A Forward chip stays handy in case you meant to forward instead.
  • Search every email from one sender. The sender details panel in Franz Mail gets a Search button that pulls up every email from that address in one go.
  • Sending a reply is smoother. The moment between hitting send and seeing your message land in the thread used to flicker and briefly go blank. The reply now stays visible the whole way through, with no jump.
  • App menu items reflect what you can actually do. Entries like Focus Search Bar, Find Next/Previous, and Toggle AI Assistant are now active only when they apply to what's on screen, instead of being there but doing nothing.

Fixed

  • Avatars and custom service icons sync again. Setting a profile picture or a custom icon for a service was silently failing to save. It never made it to your other machines or to your account on the web. Uploads work again, so your avatar and icons follow you everywhere.
  • Cmd+K stopped hijacking other services' shortcuts. A recent change meant to protect WhatsApp's search was over-broad and broke the native Cmd+K quick-switchers in Slack, Discord, and Teams. Cmd+K now behaves normally in those services again.
  • Slack huddles and similar pop-ups open again. Some services open a blank pop-up window and then fill it in: Slack huddles, certain sign-in and feature dialogs. Those were being blocked and would fail with an error; they open correctly now.
  • Google Calendar sign-in stays put. Signing in to the Google Calendar service used to bounce you to a separate browser window and leave the calendar stuck on its marketing page. Sign-in now stays inside the service where it belongs.
  • Generated-draft paragraphs survive sending. Drafts written with the AI generate shortcut looked right in the editor but arrived in the recipient's inbox with the paragraph breaks flattened into one run-on block. Your paragraphs now make it through intact.
  • Pop-up windows look right on Windows and Linux. The Basic Auth, Download Manager, and screen-share windows no longer show stray app title-bar buttons, the corners are now drawn cleanly by the OS instead of doubling up on Windows 11, and the Basic Auth dialog sizes itself to its content instead of clipping the buttons at the bottom.
  • Search box sizing and shortcut hints. The Cmd+K search pop-up now sizes itself to its results instead of clipping the last row or showing up too narrow on Windows, and the keyboard hint correctly reads "Ctrl+K" on Windows and Linux rather than the macOS ⌘ symbol.

6.1.0

This release brings Franz 6 finally to Linux. AppImage and .deb packages on x64 and arm64, plus a snap on x64, with native window decorations, system tray, autostart, live OS theme sync, and proper franz:// and mailto: handling. The goal was for Linux to feel native rather than ported. Alongside that, a new "Mute all services" button silences every tab in one click (with a per-service mute toggle in each tab's header), email search now reads the message body and not just the subject, and a stack of cross-app fixes lands on frozen email folders, smart-reply line breaks, and WhatsApp typing lag.

New

  • Linux builds, finally. Franz 6 now ships natively on Linux as AppImage and .deb packages for both x64 and arm64, and as a snap on x64. Your desktop environment draws the window decorations; the tray icon registers on KDE (and on GNOME with the AppIndicator extension installed); the autostart toggle in Settings writes a proper XDG entry; the OS dark/light theme is followed live; and franz:// links plus the optional default-mail-client handler register the same way they do on macOS and Windows. Signal device-linking works on Linux arm64 too.
  • Mute everything, or just one. A new "Mute all services" button at the bottom of the sidebar silences every service in one click. Each service tab also gets its own mute icon in the header, so you can quiet one without touching the rest. Both settings persist across restarts; turning global mute off restores your per-service preferences exactly as you left them.

Improved

  • Email search reads the message body. Searching for a word that only appears inside an email, not in the subject or sender name, now finds it. The index rebuilds automatically the first time you open a folder after upgrading.
  • Smart reply keeps your paragraph breaks. Inserting a smart-reply suggestion into the composer used to flatten line breaks into spaces; the paragraph structure now survives all the way into the sent message.
  • Thread reader opens at the latest message. Opening a long thread no longer scrolls you to the top. It lands at the most recent reply, with the sender row visible instead of tucked under the sticky header.
  • WhatsApp typing is snappier. A background poll and an over-broad DOM observer were stealing main-thread time on the WhatsApp tab; both are gone, so the typing cursor keeps up with you.
  • WhatsApp unread badge counts every conversation. Group chats no longer get demoted to a separate indirect dot. Every unread chat, 1:1 or group, contributes to the same direct count the way unread mail does.
  • Folder unread badges match the folder. The "N new" badge was counting messages that lived in both a folder and Trash or Spam, so it disagreed with what the folder actually showed. The badge now uses the same filter the folder list does, so the two numbers agree.
  • Browser and custom-website services contribute to the dock and tray. Self-reporting services published via the new in-page unread schema now count toward the macOS dock badge and the system tray badge alongside everything else.

Fixed

  • Post-send failures surface as toasts. The 10-second undo-send countdown used to silently swallow any error that fired after the countdown ended, and the draft just reappeared with no feedback. You now see a toast explaining what happened (rate-limit, network error, etc.) when a send fails.
  • Email folders freezing on open. Opening folders with very few items, Drafts or low-volume labels, could lock the email tab with one CPU core pinned and the UI frozen but still scrollable. The folder load no longer spins on itself.
  • Avatar upload in Settings → Account. Applying a custom avatar after cropping was throwing "An object could not be cloned" and silently failing. It saves now.
  • Failed and cancelled downloads have a context menu. Right-clicking a download that errored or was cancelled used to do nothing; the menu now opens with "Remove from List".
  • Download Manager popup double-border on macOS. The popup was painting its own rounded border on top of the OS window frame, producing a visible double-edge. Cleaned up.

6.0.4

The way Franz Assistant answers catch-me-up questions got most of the work this release. The idea is to have the assistant do more of the reading for you so you can scan and act. Ask "what do I need to do today?" and you get a structured briefing instead of long prose: emails grouped by priority with a one-line summary on each card and Reply, Snooze, Archive, or Remind one tap away; todos grouped by what's overdue or due today, with a checkbox to tick off right there. Elsewhere, a new Settings → Network toggle helps Franz get past managed corporate networks that were blocking Gmail and WhatsApp, inline images finally display inside HTML emails, and the Help menu has a new entry that opens an in-app summary of what changed in the version you're on.

New

  • Structured catch-me-up briefings. Catch-me-up in Franz Assistant now returns structured cards instead of long prose. Emails group by priority, Urgent / Important / Informational, with a short summary on each card; todos group by Overdue / Due today / Upcoming with a checkbox you can tick off right there. Hover any email card for Reply, Snooze, Archive, or Remind. Up to three follow-up actions for the whole answer sit in a row of pills beneath the cards.
  • Corporate network compatibility. Settings → Network has a new toggle for managed corporate networks where Gmail, WhatsApp, or other Services wouldn't load. When a service fails to load with a network error, the recovery panel also offers "Enable corporate network compatibility" as a secondary action so you can fix it from the error screen.

Improved

  • Stronger passwords for new accounts. New signups and password changes now require at least 12 characters. Existing accounts keep working, and only newly-set passwords are subject to the new minimum.
  • Quieter background activity when your session expires. When the app's sign-in expires, background syncing and entitlement checks pause instead of repeatedly retrying with a stale token. They resume automatically once you sign in again.

Fixed

  • Inline images in HTML email now display in the message body. Images embedded directly into the message (rather than fetched from a remote server) were being dropped silently. The "Images are hidden for privacy" banner still appears for messages that try to load images from a remote server.
  • A pass over catch-me-up rough edges. The spinner no longer hangs above the answer when the model's output is slightly malformed, the structured cards reliably render instead of occasionally falling back to a plain text chip, the redundant prose recap that used to follow the cards is gone, and the raw "Looking up todos / Checking emails" intermediate cards are hidden from the start instead of flashing for a few seconds before collapsing.
  • The page header search bar resizes with the window instead of staying at full width on narrow windows and squeezing the buttons on either side.

6.0.3

Mostly an unblocking release. Gmail sign-in had quietly stopped working for consumer accounts. Corporate networks running authenticated proxies were swallowing every outbound request Franz made. Both are sorted. Alongside that, Mattermost and Rocket.Chat get back their Hosted / Self-hosted choice, Signal opens cleanly on a fresh install, and a handful of smaller papercuts around email attachments, service deletion, and the session-expired banner are gone.

New

  • Hosted or Self-hosted for Mattermost and Rocket.Chat. Adding or editing one of these services now shows a Hosted / Self-hosted toggle. Hosted points at the official cloud and works on any plan; Self-hosted lets you point Franz at your own server and is available with Franz Pro. Existing services keep working as before. If you're on Free with a self-hosted setup, you'll see an upgrade card on the service until you upgrade to Pro or switch to a hosted instance.

Improved

  • Discord unread and mention counts stay accurate as Discord keeps redesigning its UI. The number on the sidebar matches what's actually waiting for you.
  • Email thread attachments in the list and collapsed view now include attachments from every message in the thread, so a paperclip on an older reply is no longer hidden behind a newer text-only one.
  • The "X new" pill on email folders matches what's actually in the folder. Archived, trashed, and snoozed mail were being counted, which produced "N new" badges over folders that showed nothing fresh.
  • Login, register, and password-reset rate limits are more generous. Households and corporate networks, anyone behind a shared internet connection, were sometimes hitting rate-limit walls made up of strangers' traffic. Successful sign-ins also no longer count against the login budget.
  • The unread badge font shrinks when the count reaches "99+" so the number fits inside the circle instead of overflowing it.
  • Service icons in tight layouts hold their size instead of being squeezed by neighbouring elements.
  • Pressing Enter inside a service-settings field saves the form, instead of accidentally triggering the upgrade modal.

Fixed

  • Gmail sign-in for consumer accounts is working again.
  • Sign-in behind authenticated corporate proxies goes through cleanly now, including networks that require proxy authentication, certificates installed by your IT team, or Windows-domain credentials.
  • Signal failing to load on a fresh install with a "no such table" error. Signal now opens cleanly the first time you launch it.
  • Deleting a service didn't unlock the rest. If you were over your service limit and then removed one, the others stayed locked. They unlock as soon as the count drops back within your plan.
  • Trial accounts that should have expired could stay entitled indefinitely when a renewal signal never arrived. Trials now end on the date they were supposed to.
  • Cancelled paid subscriptions that were still inside their billing period were being silently downgraded to Free. They now keep their plan until the period actually ends.
  • The session-expired banner appears immediately the first time your sign-in is rejected, rather than around thirty minutes later, and no longer leaves the app stuck in a half-signed-in state with no clear way out.
  • The unverified-email banner dismisses when you verify in the browser and switch back to Franz. Previously the app didn't notice the window had regained focus, so the banner lingered until you restarted.

6.0.2

This release closed a few things you'd likely noticed missing like Email accounts now sync across your machines. Add Gmail on your desktop and the account shows up on your laptop, ready to sign in.

New

  • Email accounts sync across devices. Add a Gmail or Outlook account on one machine and it appears on every other machine you're signed in to. Synced accounts arrive with a Reconnect button: one sign-in per device and mail starts flowing in. If an account is removed on one device, the others ask you to confirm before clearing it locally, so a sync glitch can't quietly wipe a mailbox out from under you.
  • Unverified-email banner. If you haven't confirmed the email on your Franz account yet, you'll see an amber banner with a one-click Resend confirmation button. The Franz Assistant stays unavailable until confirmation lands, and shows a clear card explaining why with the same Resend in place.

Improved

  • Cross-machine setup. Copying your Franz data to a new computer no longer leaves the app in a half-signed-in state where nothing worked but nothing looked broken either. The app now detects an unreadable session cleanly and asks you to sign in again.

Fixed

  • Email search filter chips stay active when you clear the text query, instead of dropping you back to the Priority Inbox. Marking a search result as read also updates the row in place, instead of leaving it bold until you re-run the search.
  • Search typeahead finds Signal contacts and WhatsApp chat partners again. Both had quietly stopped returning results.
  • Dark mode contrast on email-account rows that need reconnecting. The account name is legible again against the amber background.
  • Banner buttons on Windows no longer slide under the minimize / maximize / close controls in the top-right corner. The fix that v6.0.1 applied to the unverified-email banner now covers every top-edge banner in the app.
  • Settings · AI providers: removed a duplicate "Pro" label on the provider card. The tier badge already says it.

6.0.1

A small follow-up to v6.0.0 that cleans up three rough edges only the broader rollout could surface: sign-in stalling at the Cloudflare challenge on Windows after a fresh install, the new app-menu button crowding the page header on Windows, and freshly arrived emails staying bold in the global inbox until you switched folders.

Fixed

  • Sign-in on Windows after a cold start no longer hangs at the Cloudflare challenge. The challenge reuses warmed-up state between attempts now, so a second try settles in a handful of seconds instead of repeating the same long wait, and a real error surfaces when something actually goes wrong instead of a silent timeout.
  • Window controls on Windows. The new app-menu button stops overlapping the icons in the page header next to it, its glyph is the vertical ellipsis it should have been, and the stray divider line beside it is gone.
  • Newly arrived emails in the global inbox flip from bold to read the moment you open them, instead of staying bold until you click into a folder.

6.0.0

Franz turns ten this year, and Franz 6 is the release that marks it. One person at the keyboard, the same one who shipped the first prototype on a weekend in 2016, with everything ten years of stubborn work taught us built into a single version. This is the one I am proudest of. If you have used Franz at any point in the last decade, you are the reason it is still here. Thank you.

6.0.0-beta.3

This beta closes a long-standing gap: Franz finally tells you what changed. A new Release notes item in the Help menu and a matching link in Settings → Update both open this changelog scrolled straight to the version you're running. The next time Franz prompts you to install an update, the "what's new" dialog shows real notes written for you instead of a commit log. The integrations behind Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and the rest also refresh on their own at startup now, so fixes for upstream service changes reach you without waiting for a Franz release. Underneath that headline sits a long pass of polish: Signal voice notes that play natively on every phone, a Drafts folder that finally shows your drafts the moment you create them, and a long list of small fixes across email, onboarding, and WhatsApp that had been quietly nicking at the day.

New

  • Release notes inside Franz. A Release notes item in the Help menu and a matching link in Settings → Update, both opening the changelog scrolled to the version you're running.
  • Update dialogs that tell you what changed. When Franz offers to install an update, the notes are written for you, not pulled from a commit log.
  • Service updates that arrive on their own. The bits that integrate Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and the rest now refresh at startup, so fixes for upstream service changes reach you without waiting for a Franz release.

Improved

  • Signal voice notes send in a format every Signal client decodes natively. Your iPhone and Android contacts hear them in the chat instead of getting a generic file attachment.
  • Signal stays connected through the cold-start hiccups (slow disks, big sync backlogs) that used to flicker the linked-device status to "unlinked" half a dozen times in a row before settling.
  • Email Drafts show drafts you started from "New email" or "Reply" the moment you start them. Clicking a draft row opens it in the composer where you left off, with attachments and signatures intact, instead of opening the read view and silently spawning duplicates.
  • Email composer polish. Emoji typeahead anchors to your caret instead of the top of the window, replies stop seeding your own address into the recipient list, and quoting wraps just the line you selected.
  • Settings search no longer traps you. Pressing Escape while typing in a settings search clears the search instead of closing the whole Settings window.

Fixed

  • Copy buttons inside services that had been silently doing nothing now actually copy. If "Copy" in Slack, Notion, or any other service had stopped working for you, it works again.
  • Onboarding no longer leaves you on a blank screen after signup. The first sidebar service activates automatically once setup completes.
  • Open email threads refresh when new messages arrive, instead of staying frozen on whatever was there when you clicked in.
  • Email search filters work again. Searches that relied on priority, smart tags, or folder scopes had been quietly returning nothing.
  • Long URLs and tokens in emails no longer push the message body off-screen.
  • Undo send restores attachments along with the message, so you don't have to re-attach files after fixing a typo.
  • WhatsApp contact suggestions stop showing the same name twice on the same row.
  • Email sender intelligence. The "Communication" card on a sender's profile now reflects how often you actually reply to them, instead of reading 0% for everyone.

6.0.0-beta.2

The release where privacy stopped being a promise and became a switch. Franz has always said that you shouldn't have to trade focus for surveillance. This beta makes that a setting you can see and control. A new Privacy & Analytics section in Settings lays out exactly what Franz collects, why, and how to turn it off, with anonymous product analytics and crash reports both explicitly opt-in. Beyond that, the polish updates only reveal once people start actually updating: auto-updates that finish cleanly on macOS, Windows installers that stop crying wolf, and a tray icon that respects your system theme.

New

  • Privacy & Analytics settings. A single place to see what's collected and turn it off. Product analytics and crash reports are both opt-in, both anonymous, and both listed field-by-field in a disclosure panel. Whatever leaves your device is stripped of email addresses, tokens, and file paths before it goes anywhere.
  • "Reset service data" action in Settings. When a service gets stuck (a logged-out Slack, a frozen WhatsApp), reset it without reinstalling the service.

Improved

  • macOS tray icon follows the system theme instead of drawing a dark icon on a light menu bar.
  • Settings update section now shows a colour-coded status badge right in the navigation so you can see at a glance whether Franz is up to date.

Fixed

  • Auto-updates on macOS finish properly on beta channels instead of hanging at "update downloaded" and making you relaunch by hand.
  • Windows installer no longer throws a false "Franz is already running" error during an upgrade.
  • Cross-device sync reconciles sidebar drift instead of overwriting what you just changed on the other machine.
  • Priority inbox deduplicates threads and clears stale "in the loop" entries that were sticking around.

6.0.0-beta.1

Ten years in, Franz 6 lays the foundation for the next ten. Underneath it's a full rewrite onto a modern runtime. On screen it's the Franz you already know, sharper around the edges. A Franz Cloud onboarding that finally feels right, Windows Hello unlock that shows up before you set a PIN instead of after, and a long list of the small fixes that accumulated over time and needed a release to call home. The first beta's job is simple: everything that worked before still works, only better.

New

  • Franz Cloud onboarding in-app. Sign up, confirm consent, and reset your password without leaving the app.
  • Quit Franz from the Windows taskbar. Right-click the Franz icon and quit directly, without opening a window.

Improved

  • Service and workspace forms now behave the way you'd expect: hit Enter to submit, screen readers read them correctly, and errors surface consistently.
  • Windows Hello settings stay visible whenever a Hello provider is available on your machine, so you can find the biometric unlock option even before setting your PIN.
  • Priority inbox sorts newest-first and regenerates the priority briefing without carrying over messages you already deleted.
  • Trial and upgrade modals no longer stack on top of each other mid-upgrade.

Fixed

  • Orphaned tabs from removed services are cleaned up at startup, so tab order stays stable across restarts.
  • Cross-device sync preserves changes you made offline instead of dropping them when a full sync runs.
  • Deleting a message, thread, or service sticks across your other devices instead of reappearing after the next sync.
  • Gravatar avatars stay visible after the app remounts from cache instead of flickering back to generic initials.
  • Saving an email as a file works from the preview window again. Cmd+S was being swallowed before.
  • Email composer. A whole pass through the reply experience: signatures route correctly, line breaks render as they should, draft restores stop duplicating content, the slash menu stops eating the first character you type, and the Manage Signatures deep link actually goes there.
  • Attachments and links inside the file viewer open in your system browser instead of stealing focus back into the viewer.
  • "Continue with Free" on the trial-ended modal now closes the modal instead of leaving it hanging.
  • Trial expiry registers immediately after a restart instead of needing a second relaunch.
  • Windows notification toasts are no longer hidden behind the window controls in the top-right corner.
  • Franz installer on Windows stops claiming Franz is running during an upgrade when it isn't.

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