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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)

#421

Post by nxc18 »

lorenzhs wrote: post #319
nxc18 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp sucks. Message delivery/notifications are unreliable, the interface is hideous, it lacks the Tapback/reaction feature which is heavily used in iMessage, and it dumps pics from group chats into your photo library automatically, as if you took them yourself. Idiot posts racist meme to a group chat? It lives in your photos library forever until you notice and manually delete. Notifications being sporadically (a…

1. Settings → Chats → Disable "Save to Camera Roll", done. 2. WhatsApp has rock-solid message delivery, otherwise it wouldn't have 2 billion users ( https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w... ). It's the default messaging app in most of the world. You don't become that popular with unreliable message delivery.

Notifications only seem to work if WhatsApp is actively running, unlike every other app on the iPhone.

I checked again, and yup, a bunch of messages in a group chat I never was notified for.

That behavior is fine if it’s your primary app, but it sucks if you’re not constantly checking.

Also, 2 is a bad thought in general. Consider: “Windows has a billion+ users, of course it doesn’t crash. You don’t get 1 billion+ users with bsod and forced updates.”

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

#422

Post by derefr »

monocularvision wrote: post #414
derefr wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as well as its fairly strange usage of a web view (actually the long-deprecated one…) for the main content iMessage (at least on iOS) allows for arbitrary plugins to generate content for it, right? I presume it does that by having the plugin emit a web-component-like bit of HTML+CSS+JS, that is then embedded into the conversation for all participants, and which can be further rehydrated after initial rendering by j…

You would presume incorrectly. iMessage extensions use native code + rendering. It is probably the main reason why these things aren’t available on macOS.

The extensions do that on iOS, yes. But the extension has to show up as something when a macOS client sees it, similarly to how Slack add-on messages have to be delivered as something to non-Slack UAs, e.g. bots.

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

#423

Post by criddell »

eitally wrote: post #216
klodolph wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duo: A simple app with a confusing name, released four years ago to compete with another app that Google made that did the same thing but more, and released as a matched set with a different app which also had a confusing name but is now discontinued. Forgive me if I’m getting old and can’t keep up with this shit. I make video calls through four different apps depending on who I’m talking to, and I just can’t be both…

I think Duo is here to stay. Google is even tightening the integration of Duo with the Android dialer, while at the same time doing things like dramatically improving group calls and integrating it with Google Home devices.

> I think Duo is here to stay.

I'm going to bookmark this comment for the inevitable sunsetting blog post three years from now. :)

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

#424

Post by plttn »

cgriswald wrote: post #283
collegeburner wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think it’s just Android users who see it. I’m on iPhone and in a group text with a mix of Android and iPhone users I see it that way too. Maybe I’m on the cusp of being old and cranky but it seems a silly thing to worry about.

Because it's a group MMS instead of a group iMessage, it falls back to sending those as messages instead of sending them as metadata.

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

#425

Post by lorenzhs »

nxc18 wrote: post #421
lorenzhs wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Settings → Chats → Disable "Save to Camera Roll", done. 2. WhatsApp has rock-solid message delivery, otherwise it wouldn't have 2 billion users ( https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w... ). It's the default messaging app in most of the world. You don't become that popular with unreliable message delivery.

Notifications only seem to work if WhatsApp is actively running, unlike every other app on the iPhone. I checked again, and yup, a bunch of messages in a group chat I never was notified for. That behavior is fine if it’s your primary app, but it sucks if you’re not constantly checking. Also, 2 is a bad thought in general. Consider: “Windows has a billion+ users, of course it doesn’t crash. You don’t get 1 billion+ us…

Have you given WhatsApp notification permissions?

Your comparison to Windows is probably more appropriate than you think. When is the last time Windows crashed on you (and it wasn't a dodgy third-party driver that caused it)? It works fine for nearly everyone using it. So does WhatsApp.

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

#426

Post by jamescostian »

DarknessFalls wrote: post #380
jamescostian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now you've got me curious. Are these people in the tech industry? What would their age range be, roughly?

Most of this happened while I was in high school, and now I am currently 22 years old.

Exactly zero of the people who have said any of these things are in the tech industry

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

#427

Post by gnatman »

weaksauce wrote: post #399
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…

Two of my main gripes with iMessage is the fact that if you scroll back up to read the past it becomes progressively slower and slower to scroll and each time the lag to get a new “page” of history takes longer. The other gripe is search being almost completely useless. Search for say “apples” and it just lists the entire conversation instead of relevant messages containing apples. And then you are left scrolling up…

They've actually fixed that second part: search now shows individual messages mentioning the search term (even if there are multiple in the same thread).

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

#428

Post by megraf »

mwlp wrote: post #86
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.t…

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

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

#429

Post by ComputerGuru »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #120
ComputerGuru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same reason BlackBerry refused to make BBM available on other platforms (although I believe they actually did just that a couple of years ago when no one even remembered what BlackBerry was, perhaps after the company name was sold to a different manufacturer).

BBM was released on Android and IOS in 2014 (six years ago), but it never caught on. It's still around in the enterprise space, but barely. And the company name was never sold to a different manufacturer. BlackBerry allowed TCL and an India-based company (I can't remember the name) to sell BlackBerry-branded phones running BlackBerry software, but that's all.

Time flies!

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

#430

Post by mulmen »

kelnos wrote: post #59
mulmen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 mes…

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.
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