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iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

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Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#81

Post by xenospn »

kelnos wrote: post #40
est31 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 wo…

For me - it's simply a question of reliability. SMS is not reliable in the US, and I live in an area with poor coverage. My preferred mode of communication is texting but SMS is a no-go.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#82

Post by hendersoon »

ZacharyPitts wrote: post #66
hendersoon wrote: post #47

I feel his pain. I run a whole MacOS VM _exclusively_ for iMessage.

Woah, that’s a thing?

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

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#84

Post by klodolph »

sandeeps_ wrote: post #69
improv32 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage has read receipts, faster and more reliable delivery, higher quality images/videos. More than just the color of the bubble

Looks like you have never used Whatsapp!

Comparing against SMS. Nearly every messaging platform other than SMS has that feature set.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#85

Post by ericlewis »

aantix wrote: post #48

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/

Cloud + a probably similar method, but, the process the author used is not efficient in figuring out the private frameworks work. You could do a few things I think that would allow you to debug the framework calls & iMessage itself to understand what is actually going on / how it’s used.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#86

Post by mwlp »

megraf wrote: post #65

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 han…

I've been working on a new version of [my iMessage bot](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) 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.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#87

Post by harpratap »

philistine wrote: post #53
harpratap wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You know, for a tech site, people sure do love to forget that iMessage is preferred because it brings features instead of mere social status.

Whatsapp brings the same features, if not more. iMessage craze is a purely American phenomenon, the rest of the world has moved on to other IMs

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#88

Post by ceocoder »

slivanes wrote: post #57
ceocoder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

oh yeah, those are just beyond irritating. Fortunately, I have very few friends who actually use "Liked", "Loved", "Haha" reactions.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#89

Post by spike021 »

chrischen wrote: post #60
gkoberger wrote: post #19

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 mes…

Is there a chance you publicly reveal your other IM contacts? Because as it stands I pretty much never get spam on Instagram, Whatsapp, Line, nor Messenger (FB). I don't even get spam in the "Message Requests" of FB messenger.

I get spam all the time on Instagram. Even the private account of the two that I have constantly winds up in random group spam messages. I'm assuming some spammers use scripts or other code to just comb through tons of high-profile account pages' follower lists and then randomly groups userid's to send mass messages to. It's completely frustrating.

The thing I wonder about iMessages, and Apple, is how I don't get spammed at all with iMessages when I have my ID linked to my normal email addresses, which do get normal email spam. You'd think spammers that do email spam would also be smart enough to try sending to iMessage accounts using those email addresses. But I'm guessing it's a limitation on the sender-side vs. the client side and maybe it's not easy to do due to how iMessages is such a closed-system.

Re: iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see light of day (2018)

#90

Post by ahmedalsudani »

kccqzy wrote: post #52
gkoberger wrote: post #19

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 mes…

I, unfortunately, have sent spam messages via iMessage a long time ago. I did it by faking a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to an iPhone and starts typing out phone numbers and addresses fed from a computer. I did it to mass-send a message to about a couple hundred people.

That’s decent rate limiting.
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