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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)

#231

Post by lioeters »

est31 wrote: post #11
monadic2 wrote: post #3

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 i…

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…

> What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous?

Right, I'm trying to understand Apple's motivations, and this question applies not only to iMessage but their general approach regarding macOS, apps, app store, the proprietary/locked-down nature of their software and hardware.

The opposite of ubiquity would be "exclusivity" - and that does explain a lot. The reasoning must be that there is value in making their apps exclusive to their own OS(es). The same way you can't (easily) run macOS on any old PC, or the way their hardware doesn't allow users to repair or extend it.

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

#232

Post by anoncareer0212 »

saagarjha wrote: post #206

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 becau…

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"

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

#233

Post by on_and_off »

monadic2 wrote: post #3

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 i…

the state of messaging is quite depressing. You have apple doing its own thing and with apparently no intention to have its communication service on all the major platform.

Google doing what google does and running like an headless chicken creating a new service every minute instead of creating one good one.

Last time I tried to launch WeChat, you had to surrender to it a disgusting amount of personal information to even launch the app.

You have some outliers like Telegram or Signal, but good luck getting all your contacts on there.

As a result I just have a dozen of messaging apps installed on my devices.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

saagarjha wrote: post #184
lotsofpulp wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it conveys status when used iPhones are cheap, and brand new ones start at $400 now. My lowest paid hourly employees all have iPhones, even the ones who don't speak English.

But iPhones sell themselves as expensive, and that's really what lingers in people's consciousness, doesn't it?

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by matsemann »

aphroz wrote: post #141

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…

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I had to check, and on my phone I have ever only sent 3 SMSes. I got lots received, but that's like "your token for service xxxx" or "your parcel is ready for pickup" kinda stuff.

No one uses SMS here (and by extension very few use iMessage). Everyone got mobile data turned on and has for almost the last decade. And then it still cost money to send sms, so other apps won.

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

#236

Post by fulafel »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #166
collegeburner wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HS senior here. Maybe a little, but it's mostly status/class. It's the twenty-first century equivalent of wearing expensive clothes to school.

I don't see how it conveys status when used iPhones are cheap, and brand new ones start at $400 now. My lowest paid hourly employees all have iPhones, even the ones who don't speak English.

You are talking about people with jobs.

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

#237

Post by giancarlostoro »

randomdata wrote: post #34
monadic2 wrote: post #3

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 i…

Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

Patent troll strikes again!

Maybe we should call it patent fraud and make this kinda thing illegal? Patents should be for companies actually making products to get a market edge of sorts. Not a portfolio of things you never intend to build but instead berate other companies for cash over. Its okay if they are actually still in the process of building the thing but if your company has one single employee and 0 products...

Also wondering where WebRTC stands against that patent.

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

#238

Post by 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 (WT41+ESP32)|(Pi0+BlueZ) MQTT broker 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...

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

#239

Post by giancarlostoro »

joshspankit wrote: post #138
randomdata wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

Apple set up colocated servers across the world and changed the Facetime protocol significantly to work around a single patent (a patent for direct device to device communication of all things). I can’t imagine a patent dispute actually stopping them if they were firm on making FT an open standard.

How that patent is even valid astounds me. It saddens me more Apple did not challenge the patent!

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

#240

Post by gsich »

Larrikin wrote: post #198
saagarjha wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment mentioned some of the reasons why it goes beyond the normal "lol you're too poor to buy an iPhone". SMS chats are majorly crippled compared to iMessage ones, and this is technical functionality, not just bubble color. You can't really change the people in an SMS chat, iMessage features don't work (in some instances hilariously: you'll get a text like "so-and-so liked this message" instead of a reac…

But people can just use LINE, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, messenger, etc and get all the features and more which in my experience as an android user is what actually happens than this weird shallow world of green and blue bubbles I've heard about on the internet. Different friend groups may prefer different platforms, but it's pretty rare where someone new to the group refuses what the group is already using, whic…

And people do. At least in Europe.
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