Front desktop app on a Mac: the shared inbox on its own

Front ships an official macOS desktop app. That settles the first question most people have when they search for it, and it opens a harder one: the official app is one app, signed into one account, showing one set of inboxes. Plenty of people who use Front are also in a second workspace, or a client's instance, or a personal account that they do not want mixed with the work one. This is about what the official app covers, where it stops, and what to change if the shared inbox still lives in a browser tab.

What the official app is, and where to get it

Front lists four downloads on its download page: macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, alongside a link to launch Front on the web. The macOS build is a universal binary served as a single disk image from Front's own download host. It is a large download, roughly 205 MB, last updated in August 2026.

Installing it gets you the things a wrapped browser tab does not give you for free: a Dock icon that survives a browser restart, native notifications tied to an app rather than a site, and a window that does not disappear when someone closes the browser to clear out forty tabs. Front also keeps a Desktop release notes section in its help center, with a legacy archive covering versions 3.43.9 and below, so the desktop client has its own release track separate from the web app.

The web app remains fully functional. Front's own help center points people at it, and the browser version is the same product. So the choice is not between a real app and a degraded fallback. It is between two front ends to the same account, and the interesting cases are the ones where one app per person is not enough.

Where one app stops being enough

Three situations come up repeatedly, and none of them is solved by installing the official client a second time.

Two accounts at once. Front's paid plans include multiple workspaces on Professional and above, but a workspace is not the same as a separate login. Agencies and contractors are often invited into a client's Front instance with a different email address. Switching accounts means signing out and signing back in, which drops the state of everything that was open.

A second window for a second queue. Support work and account management are different rhythms. One is a queue you drain, the other is a set of threads you watch. Keeping them in the same window means scrolling past one to reach the other.

Handing one app to something else. If an automation or an AI assistant is going to read and draft in a shared inbox, giving it the whole browser gives it every other signed-in service too. Giving it one signed-in app that only reaches Front is a narrower hand-off.

The common thread is isolation. What is needed is not another copy of the same app but a window with its own cookies, its own session, and its own icon.

There is a fourth case that looks like a preference but is really a constraint. Some teams run Front next to a second tool that owns the same keyboard reflexes, a helpdesk or a CRM with its own reply shortcuts. When both live as tabs in one browser window, the muscle memory for one fires in the other. Separate windows with separate icons remove the ambiguity, because the app you are looking at is the app that receives the keystroke.

What a browser tab actually costs during a shift

It is worth being specific about what goes wrong, because "tabs are messy" is not an argument anyone acts on.

A shared inbox is opened and left open. Over a shift it collects state: a draft half written, a thread scrolled to a particular message, a filter applied. Every one of those is lost when the browser is restarted, and browsers get restarted for reasons that have nothing to do with the inbox. An update, a stuck video, a memory problem on an unrelated site.

Tab titles are the second cost. Front's own marketing calls the problem tab hell, and it is a fair description of what a support browser looks like by mid afternoon. Once a window holds more than fifteen or twenty tabs, the titles are truncated to a few characters and finding the inbox becomes a scan rather than a target.

The third cost is notifications. A site notification from a tab is attributed to the browser, so clicking it puts you in the browser and then, maybe, in the right tab. An app notification is attributed to the app, so clicking it lands in one place. This is a small difference per event and a large one across a few hundred events a week.

What Front costs, so the second-account question is priced honestly

Front's published pricing is per seat, billed annually. Starter is $25 per seat per month for up to 10 seats and covers a single channel type. Professional is $65 per seat per month for up to 50 seats and adds omnichannel, macros, up to 20 automation rules, and multiple workspaces. Enterprise is $105 per seat per month with unlimited rules and macros and AI Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT included. Front states that annual billing saves 24 percent and that more than 9,300 companies use the product.

The AI features are priced as add-ons on the lower plans: Autopilot starts at $0.05 per conversation, Copilot and Smart QA are $20 per seat per month each, Smart CSAT is $10, and the QA plus CSAT bundle is $25.

This matters for the second-account question because a seat is a seat. Being invited into a client's instance does not cost you anything on your own plan, but it does mean your day now spans two billing accounts with two logins. No client-side window trick changes the invoice. What it changes is whether both logins can be open at the same time without a sign-out in between.

The four ways to put Front in its own window

Route	Dock icon	Extensions	Separate login	Engine
Browser tab	No	Yes	No	Whatever browser you use
Official Front desktop app	Yes	No	One account at a time	Front's own build
Add to Dock in Safari	Yes	No	No	Safari (WebKit)
Install as an app in Chrome or Edge	Yes	Shared with the browser	No	That browser
Site to app tool	Yes	Yes	Yes, per app	Chosen when you create it

The official app is the right default for the account you live in all day. It is maintained by Front, it has its own release notes, and notifications behave the way a native app's do.

Safari's Add to Dock, available on macOS Sonoma and later, is the fastest way to get an icon. It does not support browser extensions and it shares its login session with Safari itself, so a second account is out.

Installing as an app in Chrome or Edge keeps extensions working, which matters if a password manager or a text expander is part of how replies get written. The catch is that the installed app runs inside the browser's profile, so it shares cookies and sessions with ordinary browsing. Two accounts still collide.

A tool that turns a website into a standalone Mac app gives each app its own browser profile. Cookies, sessions, history, and cache are separate per app, which is the specific thing the other routes do not offer. Whether extensions are worth keeping is per app, and the profile isolation is described under Features.

The practical shape: official app plus one isolated window

For most people the useful configuration is not one or the other. It is the official Front app for the primary account, plus one isolated window for the second one.

That split keeps the thing Front maintains in the position it maintains it for, and puts the exception somewhere it cannot interfere. The second window gets its own Dock icon and its own name, so Cmd+Tab distinguishes the client instance from your own. Because the profile is separate, being signed into both at once is the normal state rather than something that breaks on the next session refresh.

A few details are worth setting deliberately when you build the second window. Pick the engine before anything else, since the app follows that browser's binary rather than bundling its own. Decide whether the tab bar is visible: off gives a single clean page, which suits an inbox. Decide whether notifications are on for that app, because two inboxes both notifying is worse than one. The three steps for creating the window itself are in the Guide.

What gets better and what does not

Three things get measurably better when the second inbox has its own window.

Finding it takes one keystroke instead of a scan across tab titles. Being signed into two accounts at once stops requiring a sign-out. And closing the browser no longer closes the inbox, which means a browser restart is something you can do in the middle of the day again.

Two things do not change. The first is the price: seats are billed by Front regardless of what the window looks like. The second is anything that depends on the account itself, such as which channels are available, how many automation rules a plan includes, or whether AI add-ons are enabled. Those live server side.

One more limitation deserves stating plainly. A wrapped window is a browser window, so it behaves like the web app, not like Front's native build. If a capability exists only in the official desktop client, a wrapped window will not have it. That is the trade for isolation, and it is why the official app stays in the picture rather than being replaced.

What is supported out of the box

Tools in this category usually ship a list of services already configured, so you are not typing URLs and hunting for icons. The preset list here runs past 300 services, and the pattern across it is consistent: mail, calendars, chat, AI, dashboards, anything opened many times a day for a short visit. A shared inbox sits squarely in that group, which is also why Front built a desktop app in the first place.

For a service that is not on the list, entering the URL is enough. The app name is suggested from the page, and the icon can come from the site's own favicon. The current list is at Supported services.

Cost is worth checking before you build anything. Up to three apps are free with no feature restrictions, which covers a second inbox and a spare. Beyond that, Kagemusha is a one-time $24.99 with no subscription.

What to change first

Install the official macOS app for the account you use most, and stop running that one in a tab. Then, only if a second account or a second queue is part of your day, build one isolated window for it and leave everything else alone. Two apps with clear jobs beats five windows that all look the same.