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

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

#251

Post by monadic2 » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:21 AM UTC

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…

You’re absolutely right, that is a large part of why I keep using iOS. It’s also a very common exciting part of switching from android based on my own social circle.

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

#252

Post by tomc1985 » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:22 AM UTC

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.

Nobody's paying street price for an iphone in that demo. They get it with their contract

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

#253

Post by monadic2 » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:27 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #6

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 main selling point of Zoom seems to be their handling of large group conferences though.

Absolutely a good point. You can’t have “FaceTime” parties in the same way you can on zoom.

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

#254

Post by sgt » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

"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.

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

#255

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:30 AM UTC

anoncareer0212 wrote: post #232

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…

Ok, to distill my point: I think the author is going beyond a complaint that the system is proprietary and claiming that Apple has purposefully made the code difficult to reverse engineer, which I something I dispute based on the level that the author was working with, which were fairly standard (might I say comparatively well-packaged) private APIs. I say this because I know there is actual Apple-proprietary code that the company has actually put effort into obfuscating; things like FairPlay (and closer to iMessage, IDS, though I have only heard rumors of the latter not having looked at it personally). Thus, at the moment I think Apple is preventing third-party clients of the type described just by virtue of the literal barrier of “this is a compiled blob that I need to interact with and I don’t have source to” rather than “Apple added obfuscation/prevents you from attaching a debugger/encrypts the code at rest with a Blowfish key that is undone when the kernel maps the process into memory” (all of which are things that Apple does actually do in cases where they half-care). Basically, I’m removing the attribution of malice I felt from the article. Does that make some sort of sense?

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

#256

Post by oarsinsync » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:31 AM UTC

ta17711771 wrote: post #246

saagarjha wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been mentioned many times in the other comments, those force you to download something, perhaps make an account, make sure everyone has it…whereas 90% of the people might already have an iPhone, which might be better than the number for anything else.

> 90% of the people might already have an iPhone 85%+ of the world's on Android, think outside your social circle =]

The whole point is to be about your social circle. If 90% of my social circle is on iPhone, they're on iMessage.

What the rest of the world outside of my social circle does isn't really relevant to my conversations inside my social circle.

I've run up against this reality multiple times. I personally prefer signal & whatsapp for group chats than iMessage. If only because I can mute them and not get an annoying red bubble telling me about the hundreds of messages I'm trying to not react to in real time when I'm busy.

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

#257

Post by sgt » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:33 AM UTC

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…

iMessage is ABSOLUTELY brilliant if your family and friends are all on iPhones, which I'm pretty sure is fairly common in most Western countries.

Regardless whether you agree with that, it is super practical for me and my family. It also means we don't have run other chat software like WhatsApp.

The whole experience is just so seamless and well integrated across your devices. Everything from regular messages, voicenotes, sending cute animojis to your wife, or doing a FaceTime with my 102 year old grandmother. I do that on a daily basis. And I can easily continue a conversation from my computer, or even respond from my Apple Watch when exercising.

I am still on WhatsApp though as there are millions of users worldwide, but I keep notifications off and check it only once a day.

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

#258

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

carlyfan wrote: post #238

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. Thi…

> 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?

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

#259

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #248

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…

I'd read about an article how there is a significant "dark" black hat companies which do nothing but dig up into the open source codes to find the exploits. They invest big time to develop proprietary tools for autonomous scanning of latest vulnerabilities. Such exploits then get sold for millions of dollars. They do open source code scanning to everything from popular Python packages to popular Chrome extensions to…

Lack of source code is not stopping bad actors from looking at iMessage.

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

#260

Post by copperx » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 7:35 AM UTC

hnick wrote: post #122

harpratap wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My mid-30s colleague went back to Tinder in recent years and he mentioned he got questioned by his target market about not having a blue bubble. They were all Asian (but mostly Chinese) women in their late 20s who moved to Australia.

With reference to a recent HN thread, I wonder if saying "I'm a developer/security expert/working on a classified government project and HAVE to use a special phone" would garner sympathy or admiration and stop the questions.