Messenger, back on your desktop.

Completely. No price tag, no subscription, no ads, no paid tier. Carrier is open source under the MIT license - made by one developer who missed having Messenger on the desktop.

No - you sign in with your usual account, and all your chats are just there. Anything you send in Carrier shows up on your phone too, and the other way around.

No. Meta discontinued their desktop app, so Carrier is an independent, open-source replacement. It shows you the real Messenger - the same one from your browser - in a clean window of its own, with the Facebook clutter tidied away.

Carrier adds zero tracking of its own - it even blocks Facebook's telemetry by default. The Mac version is signed and notarized by Apple, updates are verified before they install, and the complete source code is public for anyone to inspect. Your messages still travel through Messenger itself, so Meta's usual terms apply there. Windows builds are currently unsigned and may show a SmartScreen “Unknown publisher” warning.

Yes - it's the full Messenger, so calls, group chats, reactions, photos, and everything else work like you'd expect.

Most chat apps ship an entire hidden web browser inside. Carrier uses the one your computer already has - so it downloads in seconds, starts in a blink, and goes easy on your battery.

Facebook changes its markup from time to time, and that can occasionally break a feature. When Automatic Update Checks is enabled, Carrier finds fixes automatically; you choose when to install - and you can always tell us what broke.

Carrier is a small Rust shell built on Tauri 2 that opens the official Messenger web app in your operating system's own WebView. At page load it injects a focused stylesheet and typed scripts that hide Facebook's surrounding chrome and add the desktop features - notifications, badges, shortcuts, themes. No bundled browser engine, no Electron.

Messenger content is processed only on your machine, only where a feature needs it - turning a new message into a native notification, counting unread chats for the badge, blurring names for screen sharing. Carrier has no servers and phones home to no one; the only network calls it adds are update checks against GitHub Releases. Off-site links open in your browser with Facebook's tracking redirect stripped first.

When Automatic Update Checks is enabled, Carrier checks GitHub Releases at startup and every four hours, then tells you when a signed update is available. You choose whether to download, install, and restart; Carrier cryptographically verifies the update first. macOS downloads are also Developer ID signed and notarized by Apple. Windows builds are currently unsigned, so SmartScreen may show “Unknown publisher.”

The .deb and .rpm packages are about 4 MB because they use your distro's WebKitGTK. The AppImage has to carry its own copy to run anywhere, which is why it weighs around 90 MB. If your package manager is an option, prefer it.

Yes - brew install --cask kristofferR/tap/carrier, and the same cask token works on macOS and Linux. Already dragged Carrier.app into /Applications? Adopt it with brew install --cask --adopt kristofferR/tap/carrier.

Of course. With Rust, Bun, and the Tauri prerequisites installed: clone the repo, then bun install and bun run build. The injected scripts are typed TypeScript under inject/src/.