
iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018) - ComputerGuru
https://neosmart.net/blog/2018/imessage-for-windows/
======
saagarjha
Ok, so a comment on the actual content of the article rather than iMessage in
general: I do the kinds of things that the author describes in the article
(digging into private implementations of things) and I while I believe all of
iMessage is a bit obfuscatory it's not nearly as bad as the author has
described it. Really, it's one of the places where Hanlon's razor actually
applies: the AppleScript bridge sucks because AppleScript in general sucks, as
Apple has let it decay until it stops working entirely. The iMessage team for
macOS is already kinda eh, and it shows in the app's architecture and lack of
new features for years, as well as its fairly strange usage of a web view
(actually the long-deprecated one…) for the main content. The rest of the
stuff about private frameworks…I mean, I don't really know what to say.
They're not meant to be linked against, they're undocumented, they change and
disappear between releases…you really cannot complain about them. They're not
Apple making it harder for you, they are just a side effect of how Apple
writes its applications and the fact that the entire OS is proprietary. Some
do venture into that realm (such as the author and I) and find meaning, but I
disagree with the characterization that Apple is fighting against reverse
engineers by making you dig through class-dump output and figure out how to
marshal your arguments through the right function to make it do what you want.

~~~
anoncareer0212
I've been developing for Mac and iOS before the App Store was released, and
have experience the author names - in broad strokes, your argument is valid,
but it's not correct - errors slip in when describing the Applescript
interface as just a reflection of Applescript sucking, describing his issue
with Apple having _fragile_ private APIs when his conclusion is the problem is
_private_ APIs, and reducing the problems inherent in the walled garden as
"making you dig through class-dump output"

~~~
scarface74
Why do people act like having “private APIs” is something evil? The entire
purpose of having published public APIs is that they should be something that
doesn’t change without a deprecation schedule or warning while the underlying
implementation can change without notice. This is software engineering 101.

~~~
sukilot
I don't know about evil, but it's _hostile_ because Apple is intentionally
preventing a non-AppleOS version from existing. The details of how they do it
are of merely scientific interest.

~~~
scarface74
It’s not hostile that you build a system with a public API that doesn’t change
and private methods that you make no guarantees about. This is how software
engineering has always worked.

------
carlyfan
For anyone who is interested in making an iMessage proxy and has time to
spend: There is a legitimate way to interact with the iMessage system with a
standard protocol. It requires you to have a host iPhone (no jailbreaking
needed).

What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access Profile)
support. Your iPhone will treat all messages from the MAP protocol as if they
are from the Messages app. This means it will automatically route your SMS as
iMessage if possible (you have no say on what the iPhone decides to do,
however). As a bonus, you can also use email addresses as recipients with MAP.

A good place to start probing is the WT32 or WT41u module from Silicon
Laboratories. It supports MAP, although it looks like the module supports
receive-only [1]. I do not know whether you can hack blueZ to support MAP.
I've tried to look at it and I don't think the MAP support for blueZ is
complete but I could as well be very wrong. A Raspberry Pi 0 as a bluetooth
middleman is very sweet, regardless.

Once that Bluetooth middleman is set up, you can use a public server to relay
your messages. The scheme will look something like this:

iPhone <\--bluetooth--> (WT41+ESP32)|(Pi0+BlueZ) <\--wifi--> MQTT broker
<\--wifi--> your device of choice.

I am relatively confident that this scheme will work. I just don't have time
in my hands to do it. So I figured I could share here. Hopefully, some good
hacker will do it and publish it. Happy hacking!

1: [https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/application-
notes/AN...](https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/application-
notes/AN994.pdf)

~~~
saagarjha
> What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access
> Profile) support. When you send a message from the MAP protocol, then your
> iPhone will treat all messages as if they are sent from the Messages app.

What is the “legitimate” reason for this? Bluetooth accessories that can send
messages, ideally from the MFI program?

~~~
narrowtux
Common use cases include car dashboards that read your SMS out loud and
smartwatches.

------
monadic2
If ever Apple needed to open source server and client code for a public good
it is with imessages. Yes it has clear limits with a centralized server, but
it is realistically how a lot of “secure” messaging happens and it’s very
difficult to endorse being tied to expensive hardware.

You can say the same about facetime: it is clearly higher quality than
competitors in every experiment I’ve tried, but their refusal to interact with
the wider software community means we all use zoom or skype instead for
personal chatting. These are tools; they should be effectively free and
universal.

~~~
est31
iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when
everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that?
What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint
many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the
people who don't have that blue circle.

Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe
they should absolutely open it up.

~~~
kelnos
> _iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android_

Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they
see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?

Note that I'm talking about _average_ users. Sure, there are likely a bunch of
privacy-conscious users who believe in Apple's commitment to security and
privacy and prefer iMessage on those grounds. But otherwise, why?

> _It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can 't use their phone
> to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle._

If that's truly the case, I don't think I'd want to be friends with people who
place importance on such superficial, trivial things.

Full disclosure: I've been an Android user for 10 years and the closest I ever
got to owning an iPhone was an iPod Touch I stopped using in 2012 or so. SMS
is fine for my needs most of the time, though MMS for group texting is
ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal or WhatsApp for
those use-cases.

I guess I just don't see a closed iMessage as that huge of a competitive
advantage for Apple. But presumably they know better as to what drives sales.

~~~
harpratap
> Why, though? Does your average iPhone user actually care if the bubbles they
> see in their chats are blue or green? If so, why?

They definitely do. Not sure what your age or demographic is, but young folks
do care a lot about higher social status which is tied to blue bubble because
of iPhone prices. It has nothing to do with privacy though.

~~~
jamescostian
I'm 22 and live in a mid-sized city, and I've seen people trying to get into a
relationship (or even something more casual, but not a platonic friendship)
get rejected because of the dreaded "green bubbles" \- and really, I'm not
exaggerating. And not from rich people who have the latest iPhone either.

In addition, I have been in friend groups that would exclude Android users
because if you have even 1 Android user in a group chat on iMessage, you lose
tons of features, like the ability to name the group chat (I'm being
completely serious here; this was considered an important thing). The work
around was "we'll take you out of this chat, and if something important
happens someone will send you a text" \- of course, it's not very easy to
always remember to send that person an SMS, so they end up _very_ left out of
things. This has also happened with middle-class people.

~~~
collegeburner
High school senior here; I can second the prevalence of this experience
starting in middle school.

Oh and texting an i phone user sucks because those reactions come through
like: Loved "blah blah blah"

Please when texting us android plebians don't use those reaction things.

~~~
Nextgrid
To be fair I am an iOS user and found the reactions an unnecessary and
annoying gimmick.

It’s faster to just type the “laughing with tears” emoji and press send than
to use the equivalent reaction.

~~~
saagarjha
I really like the "Liked" reaction after a former boss used it to signify
"+1".

~~~
sq_
I've found that, in my social groups, "Liked" gets used as an acknowledgement
for anything that doesn't require further discussion. Seems to clear up group
chats of endless OKs back and forth, so I'm all for it.

~~~
saagarjha
Yup, exactly. I think that by itself makes it my most used reaction by an
order of magnitude.

~~~
sq_
That, "ha ha", and "?" are probably about tied for my most used. I find that
they are all useful ways to acknowledge or question something without
cluttering chats.

------
gkoberger
As an iMessage user, I'm happy with a closed ecosystem. I know that's a
controversial opinion.

I have dozens of channels of communication, and iMessage is the only one I
don't get spam on. I really, really like that. Anyone without iMessage can
still contact me the same way, via SMS, and they're all grouped in the same
place. But I love that in 10+ years of using iMessage, I've never gotten a
single unwanted blue message.

~~~
mmglr
Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam?

> I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.

This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

~~~
spideymans
It's trivial to use software to automate spam on more open web-based
platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. This is a lot tricker with iMessage,
where only authenticated Apple devices, with a unique identifier, can connect
to the service. Buying truckloads of Apple equipment to spam iMessage is
obviously uneconomical(and totally ineffective, given that Apple will swiftly
ban any spamming devices), and software hacks to be exploited by spammers are
either hard to come by or non-existant, and can quickly be patched by Apple

Again, not saying spam on iMessage is impossible, but it's clearly very
difficult given the relative lack of spammers on the platform.

~~~
njovin
I thought Facebook Messenger was very strict about assigning page-specific
user IDs to avoid this. Last I checked there was no way to send a message to a
Facebook user using their profile ID.

~~~
Nextgrid
Facebook Messenger (and similar) can be spammed through UI interaction
automation (on Android) or even manually with cheap labor in third-world
countries.

iMessage is more resistant to this attack because the _device_ is your
credentials to the network (instead of an account) which makes such an attack
very expensive if you need to replace banned iPhones every day.

I’ve actually seen spam on iMessage (a friend’s Apple account was compromised
and she started seeing the spam messages sent by someone else thanks to
iMessages’s iCloud sync) but I’m not too concerned because I assume the
offending devices will be banned relatively quickly.

------
sgt
"The looming demise of macOS as a developer platform".

There's some sentiment these days on HN about this but personally I think it's
hogwash. No platform is perfect, but macOS to me is as close as you can get to
a developer's dream workstation / laptop.

Remember all those years when we dreamed of a Unix with a proper UI? Well, it
exists. Windows doesn't even come close.

I'd rather go Linux before Windows as a developer and hacker.

I know this varies based on industry and countries, but about 95% of
developers I work with on a daily basis use Macs. These are everything from Go
devs, JS devs to people working on ancient Java EE codebases.

A disclaimer; I haven't actually tried Catalina yet, all my Macs are still on
Mojave.

~~~
nailer
> Remember all those years when we dreamed of a Unix with a proper UI? Well,
> it exists. Windows doesn't even come close.

You should reconsider Windows. A full Linux kernel and apt-get is way better
than Homebrew will ever be.

~~~
unix_fan
Personally, I find windows to be much more intrusive than macOS out of the
box.

sudo spctl --master-disable is usually enough for macOS to keep quiet.

------
aphroz
It is really interesting to see the difference between countries, I travel
between Asia and Europe and I knew that iMessage existed, but I thought people
dropped it like SMS, years ago. Interesting to see that in a globalized world
some differences still persist. I have asked around me to Iphone owners if
they used iMessage and they almost never use it. It must be something specific
to the US.

Please do not downvote me for not living in the US :)

~~~
pottertheotter
So people don't use SMS outside the US? I knew WhatsApp was big in other
countries, but didn't realize no one even uses SMS not iMessage.

What do people use in Europe?

~~~
aeyes
In Europe: WhatsApp, no one uses SMS anymore because WhatsApp started getting
popular when people still had to pay for each SMS sent.

I currently live in South America, same story: Nobody uses iMessage, everybody
is on WhatsApp. Even businesses prefer WhatsApp over phone calls.

The biggest difference between Whatsapp users in Europe and South America that
I observed has to be the crazy amount of people using voice messages to
communicate. Why don't you call and speed up the conversation by 50%?

~~~
aphroz
It is asynchronous communication, like emails, the recipient can listen to it
when they are available, but you don't need both to be available in the same
time.

~~~
aeyes
Yes, but here voice messages are used for synchronous communication.

------
ceocoder
I came across this article[1] and this thread quoted[0] in article some time
ago. I don't think of iMessage as a walled garden, it is almost like a low
fence you can see across with a sign that "you must be this cool to
participate".

iMessage is literally the only reason I have not tried an android phone
because I don't want to deal with the fallout of all of my chat threads going
back to 2011(?) getting disrupted. I don’t think I can come up with a better
example of vendor lock-in.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/BenBajarin/status/1162048581299163136](https://twitter.com/BenBajarin/status/1162048581299163136)

[1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-
an...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-and-your-
android-green-bubbles-in-our-imessage-chat)

~~~
spideymans
Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players
could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that
Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than
iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors
couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback
functionality, which while nice, is definitely a feature that people could
live without.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just
has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage. Spam is a major issue on all
non-iMessage messaging platforms I've used. No messaging app I've used on any
platform has performance as fast and fluid as iMessage on iOS. Competing
products are often full with ads and useless features that clutter the user
interface and degrade performance. And these platforms often have annoying
restrictions on media quality. Facebook Messenger, for instance, has garbage
quality images and video compression, while iMessage appears to apply no
further compression on media files. Using any other messaging app, either on
iOS or Android, has consistently been way more of a headache than its worth
for me.

~~~
ceocoder
Google and Facebook may have a larger user base but it is not the in the same
realm, e.g. I use iMessage to talk to my family, my close friends, parents
from my daughter's preschool, co-workers, people I've only interacted with
professionally - vendors etc - all it takes to connect is a phone number which
is universal, and like you say it falls back to SMS. Compare that to Facebook
where you have to add someone as a friend - which I don't do often because it
just feels odd, or Google where messaging ecosystem is a bit fragmented with
Allo, Duo, Hangout, Hangout Chat etc. Signal and WhatsApp are actually viable
options but compared to iMessage feel heavy and not native, however I do use
them both.

And like you mentioned - spam - I have yet to receive an iMessage spam
message. That is pretty amazing.

~~~
slivanes
How about all the iMessage created "Liked", "Loved", "Emoji" messages? Each
and every one of those creates a message alert on non-iPhones. It is by far
the most spammy type of message one receives on an Android device (in the USA
at least).

~~~
saagarjha
Anecdotally, any iPhone users don't know they're doing that ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
megraf
Funny, I've actually spent a good amount of time tearing apart the iMessage
database back in 2016-2017. The queries you end up with are hilarious. Here's
one from my website's sample code

```

INNER JOIN chat_message_join ON message.ROWID = chat_message_join.message_id
INNER JOIN chat ON chat.ROWID = chat_message_join.chat_id INNER JOIN
chat_handle_join ON chat.ROWID = chat_handle_join.chat_id INNER JOIN handle ON
handle.ROWID = chat_handle_join.handle_id LEFT JOIN message_attachment_join ON
message.ROWID = message_attachment_join.message_id LEFT JOIN attachment ON
attachment.ROWID = message_attachment_join.attachment_id ...

```

But it really wasn't that hard. I was able to programmatically send and
receive iMessages. The problem (as the author pointed out) was that this
changed, and didn't really work for the long. Although, I'm sure it could
still be reveng'd – it's a pain in the ass, and (for me) not really worth
it... =/

~~~
mwlp
I've been working on a new version of [my iMessage
bot]([https://github.com/inculi/Sue](https://github.com/inculi/Sue)) recently.
Previously it was using Applescript handlers on Sierra, now sqlite calls to
iMessage's chat.db (I have to give credit to another bot,
[Jared]([https://github.com/ZekeSnider/Jared](https://github.com/ZekeSnider/Jared))
for help in this area).

I get latest messages with:

```

SELECT handle.id, handle.person_centric_id, message.cache_has_attachments,
message.text, message.ROWID, message.cache_roomnames, message.is_from_me,
message.date/1000000000 + strftime("%s", "2001-01-01") AS utc_date FROM
message INNER JOIN handle ON message.handle_id = handle.ROWID WHERE
message.ROWID > #{rowid};

```

and their attachments with:

```

SELECT attachment.ROWID AS a_id, message_attachment_join.message_id AS m_id,
attachment.filename, attachment.mime_type, attachment.total_bytes FROM
attachment INNER JOIN message_attachment_join ON attachment.ROWID ==
message_attachment_join.attachment_id WHERE message_attachment_join.message_id
>= #{rowid};

```

where rowid is the max rowid from the previous search, and attachments with
null mime_types get ignored (YouTube previews, etc). Sending through
Applescript still.

~~~
megraf
Nice job. I'll take a look at your project and see if I can contrib

------
locusofself
Oh man. Apple has us by the nuts. I love my iMessage. I've been on a macbook
for ~10 years, but I just started working at Microsoft and thus have been
spending a lot of time in Windows. Multiple times per day I think of something
I want to send my wife, like a link to something I'm reading or something, and
I look for the iMessage on the dock and of course there is no dock and no
iMessage. I want iMessage for Windows. and Linux.

~~~
sneak
I was in exactly this same boat for a long time. I bought maybe a dozen
iPhones through the years to upgrade friends and partners from Android just so
I could iMessage them.

Turns out, most of iCloud is _not_ e2e encrypted, critically, notes and
pictures and contacts and backups. Apple (and by extension, US military
intelligence and FBI/DHS) can read your private notes and see your nudes, and
review your address book and message history. I knew I was going to need to
switch eventually.

* iCloud device backup is on by default. This syncs all of your _unencrypted_ iMessage history to Apple. It also syncs all of your conversation partners’ message histories, from their phones, to Apple. It is not e2e encrypted so it suffers from the Zoom Problem: Apple has the keys and can decrypt it, for themselves or the government via the illegal PRISM program.

* iMessage (despite being e2e) can be arbitrarily wiretapped by injecting a surveillance key because the client trusts the key list from the server blindly, with no UI notifications for the sender on key changes/amendments.

* I can’t run the client on half of my computers

* Signal works on ios/android and has desktop clients for all major platforms... and critically now supports iPads. It also has the nice property of being e2e without implicit trust in the server, although hopefully the TOFU model can be improved.

I switched. I am now signed out of iMessage on all my computers, and it’s
great.

If I can do it, anyone can. I was in as far as one can go.

------
rrdharan
Meanwhile, [https://airmessage.org/](https://airmessage.org/) seems to have
existed for quite some time now...?

~~~
hellotomyrars
This software requires a server component to be run on a mac. It's not self-
contained.

~~~
cridenour
So does the one in the article.

------
aantix
SendBlue will be launching soon. They support sending iMessages at scale,
similar to Twilio's SMS service.

Not sure how they're doing it.

[https://sendblue.co/](https://sendblue.co/)

~~~
jedieaston
I'm curious if they have a farm of iPhones somewhere to host this off of. They
are sending the iMessages from phone numbers -- not email addresses, which
means they didn't just get a bunch of Mac Minis and do it the (probably
easier) way.

Jailbroken iPhones where you can automate the UI and (maybe?) access any
private Messaging API Apple left laying around would make this scalable
though.

~~~
aantix
The phone farm has to be the approach. I don’t see any other way.

------
Wowfunhappy
> For example, hackintosh PCs that act identical to genuine Mac hardware can
> use all macOS features except iMessage, which has been locked – so far as we
> can tell – to only allow network activation on devices that have “blessed”
> NICs that officially shipped with Apple hardware.

This isn't true! The computer I'm typing on right now can send and receive
iMessages just fine, and I'm _not_ using a donor MLB. You just need to get all
of various parameters right, so Apple's servers are presented with logical
information.

~~~
ComputerGuru
The information was circa 2017, I do believe the kexts and bootloaders for
hackintosh configurations have since improved significantly.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Not in this regard. I don't think there was any point at which iMessage on
Hackintosh was impossible without a donor, but I've personally been using it
since ~2015.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Maybe you got lucky with your hardware? I can’t remember all the exact details
but these posts are all from the same 2017-2018 window and the solutions all
resolve around network hardware:
[https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=N&hl=en-
us&q=...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=N&hl=en-
us&q=%22hackintosh%22+an+error+occurred+during+activation+imessage&ved=2ahUKEwiK5-ix8unpAhVXK80KHbC_D4U4ChDm3gIwBHoECAYQCA&biw=414&bih=719&dpr=2)

It’s been too long for me to remember more than this, but I did have iMessage
on a hackintosh circa 2013 or so but wasn’t able to get that to happen when I
tried in 2017/2018.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
It's not luck! :) [https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/303073-pattern-of-
ml...](https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/303073-pattern-of-mlb-main-
logic-board/)

Notably, you need to get this right on the first try (or at minimum the first
try), or Apple appears to get suspicious for requests from your IP.

------
supernova87a
Much as I applaud the effort and ideal to make something open, I guess you
acknowledge that it's crazy to think Apple will ever cooperate.

iMessage, plus pressure on your friends to not break the text thread with
green non-Apple bubbles, Facetime, tie-ins to the Apple hardware, Find my
Friends, etc. are among the most important loyalty factors and moats against
people leaving the Apple ecosystem.

Especially with people getting (as you admit) less satisfied with the
hardware, they would be fools to open this up and let people leave.

------
wilt
I found training a bunch of birds to take notes to people for me to be much
easier. I am in the process of training them how to use the printer and
scanner too so i can text people who on my computer too.

------
baxtr
I wonder what happened to “Business Chat”. It was announced on WWDC in 2018
and I have seen no progress since. It’s a shame. The potential of it is huge I
believe, but Apple has a different focus it seems.

~~~
acwan93
It exists for some retailers, like Home Depot. It doesn’t work like I would
expect though, in HD’s case it looked like it was routed through a Salesforce
extension.

------
forgotmypw17
> the pure simplicity and sheer genius of iMessage’s “SMS backwards-
> compatibility” approach that upgrades iPhone-to-iPhone communications to
> iMessage while transparently falling back to SMS or MMS where iMessage was
> not an option.

This "simplicity" comes with a price. If your primary SMS device is non-Apple
and you sign into iMessage from an Apple device, iMessage will start eating
your SMSes from anyone texting you from an Apple device.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Yup. I temporarily switched from an iPhone to an Android BlackBerry when the
one with the slide-out keyboard first came out and I did not receive SMS
messages from iOS users for the entire duration.

------
gazelleeatslion
iMessage is like 90% the reason I am invested in the Apple ecosystem

------
matthewfcarlson
I'm personally looking forward to the Your Phone making its way to ios.
[https://www.cultofmac.com/546617/microsoft-your-phone-
timeli...](https://www.cultofmac.com/546617/microsoft-your-phone-timeline-
iphone-ipad-build-2018/)

~~~
vips7L
I tried this but it seemed to not work with Signal.

------
Wowfunhappy
Would something like [https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-
imessage](https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-imessage) have not
worked?

I'm almost certain I've seen other implementations too, but I can't find them
now.

Edit: Oh, here was another one:
[https://github.com/RomanScott/weMessage](https://github.com/RomanScott/weMessage)
It's for Android, but you could presumably reuse the server implementation to
create a Windows version.

Edit2: And yet another one, fwiw, but this time it's Android-only _and_ closed
source so less useful. [https://airmessage.org/](https://airmessage.org/)

------
jscholes
I feel like there was probably a way to publish this. Maybe the author
couldn't brand it with their name, logo and other identifying information, and
clearly that's a compromise they weren't comfortable with. That is, of course,
their choice, but the large number of screenshots of the resulting application
felt like a bit much. This work could increase accessibility to iMessage e.g.
for those with physical or other disabilities were there a way to use it, and
the post just ended up feeling like an exercise in navel-gazing to me.

------
sradman
> As someone that has never embraced the mobile craze, I sorely missed the
> ability of texting (or “iMessaging”) from my PC, and came to absolutely
> despise having to drag my phone out of my pocket and text from its cramped
> display, constantly fighting autoincorrect and embarrassing myself with
> typos and misspellings.

An alternative solution is to use a Bluetooth keyboard, possibly with multi-
device support and device switching shortcuts, attached to an iPhone or iPad
sitting on a stand.

~~~
bboygravity
As someone who learned to properly type on a physical (PC) keyboard, it's mind
blowing to me how so many people swipe so many letters on screens.

Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

First I had Blackberry Blend around 2014 (SMS and BBM messaging through PC),
now there's Signal for Desktop and the Your Phone Microsoft thing.

The wheel keeps getting reinvented.

I wonder when peer2peer messaging will become popular again. It's how Skype
started out and became big back in 2003. Offered way better call quality and
privacy, because: no server and peer2peer.

------
brentis
Extremely well written piece.

Btw, I expect Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Amazon to offer you their new
Chief of Messaging Infrastructure role in 4 days.

------
hendersoon
I feel his pain.

I run a whole MacOS VM _exclusively_ for iMessage.

~~~
ZacharyPitts
Woah, that’s a thing?

~~~
hendersoon
Yes, works fine. It's a bit silly to run an entire VM for a single
application, but it does the trick.

[https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM](https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-
Simple-KVM)

~~~
Yizahi
It's like running a copy of entire complex web browser just to draw pretty
chat GUI. Oh wait... :)

------
JanSolo
Anyone know the reason why there's no iMessage for windows? Is it supposed to
act as some kind of gateway drug into the Mac ecosystem?

Apple seems to have quite a few of these 'unspoken unfeatures'. Perhaps
someone can tell me why there are no web browsers allowed on AppleTV devices?

~~~
Polylactic_acid
Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can
invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the
feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android
users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so
they eventually buy an iphone.

~~~
mulmen
SMS is colored differently (green) than iMessage (blue), regardless of the
device on the receiving end. I'm not sure how they would even know the
recipient is on Android.

If I send an iMessage to a friend's iPhone when they do not have service it
automatically downgrades to SMS from iMessage. My brother didn't run iMessage
for years so group chats that include his iPhone were still SMS based.

In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I'm
not sure how else it would even work?

It doesn't discourage talking to users with an Android or any other phone. I
do that all the time, it's all in the same app. If they wanted to put up
barriers they could do that but instead it's totally seamless.

~~~
kelnos
> _In a group chat with non-iMessage users everyone gets downgraded to SMS. I
> 'm not sure how else it would even work?_

I was thinking that there might be a way around it: send iMessages to people
who are iMessage capable, and send MMS to people who aren't. The people who
have to send MMS will just send their replies to everyone in the group over
MMS, and the messages app on the iPhone would just figure out that the
messages belong to the correct group.

But then I realized that I don't think there's an analog to the "reply-to"
header for MMS. So there might not be a way to send that group message to the
single MMS recipient without sending it to all recipients over MMS. In order
to get replies to go to the entire group, each group member has to be in the
"to" field for the MMS-using phone to know all the group members.

It's a shame, because my understanding is that the MMS protocol is actually
pretty similar to email in some ways... and yet they apparently left out
"reply-to".

~~~
mulmen
Ok but why go through all of that complication? Right now I just type a bunch
of names in a box and send a message, job done.

------
ag56
Having had this problem myself, my first thought was VLC or some other kind of
Remote Desktop solution. Surely I can ‘stream’ a window from my OSX host and
not care about the implementation or boobytraps?

In the end Windows was a complete fail for me so I never pursued it.

------
quijoteuniv
« A year and a half ago, I heeded the growing warning signs that indicated the
looming demise of macOS, née OS X, as a platform for developer and true
computer enthusiasts, and set about trying to find a new ecosystem.» The power
of synthesis

------
pkz
If there was an easy way to get iMessages in Windows 10 I guess it would just
increase the number of people who consider switching from Mac? Maybe Apple
can't fit that into their business model?

------
2fast4you
It’s weird to see a project you’ve thought about for so long actually
completed. I’ve toyed with it a little, but I only dug as far as AppleScript.

This gives me a bit of hope, I might take another crack at it sometime.

------
dvduval
I have been a Windows user and an Android user for a long time, and I never
seem to have the need to venture into the Apple ecosystem. I actually did have
an Apple phone for several months and it was okay. No complaints. But there's
just not an ecosystem that I need. I have everything I need without the Apple
ecosystem. There's nothing that gives me passion to use something that is
exclusively an Apple product. In a way it's kind of weird. I'm not sure what
I'm trying to say here. But I'm sure there's other people like me.

------
Kronen
Who the heck uses SMS for messaging in 2020, USA?

------
ds
So, I may be missing something, but...

You can get imessage for windows with way less effort and full functionality.
Just have a VNC window to a mac with imessage on it. There you go, every
functionality of imessage on windows. All it requires is a mac mini.

~~~
stevewodil
That's _not_ iMessage for Windows.

"You can get Adobe Photoshop for Linux, just run a Windows machine and use RDP
to connect to it. All it requires is another machine entirely and for you to
be on the same network."

------
sys_64738
Steve said iMessage would be an open standard way back in the 2000s. Still
waiting.

~~~
dhosek
IIRC, it was Facetime he said that about. I believe it ended up there were
legal obstacles (plus he allegedly made the statement off the cuff), but I
could be wrong.

~~~
sys_64738
You probably are. He was on stage during a presentation so no 'off the cuff’
pretense occurred.

------
ubermonkey
>A year and a half ago, I heeded the growing warning signs that indicated the
looming demise of macOS, née OS X, as a platform for developer and true
computer enthusiasts,

I stopped reading there.

