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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)

#441
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#442

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…

A bit of a shameless self-plug, but it took me 4 weekends to implement iMessage message receiving with BlueZ[0]. Sadly, all I learned about Bluetooth LE and Apple's ANCS will be completely useless when it comes to sending messages, since MAP works over Bluetooth, while ANCS works over Bluetooth Low Energy, and these 2 protocols are almost nothing alike.

[0] https://github.com/pzmarzly/ancs4linux

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for making my point. iMessage is not texting. I'm responding to this. "Why would you download an app for the basic functionality of a phone? Texting is an integral part of phones and I haven't met a person in the US without unlimited texting in years."

> Thank you for making my point. iMessage is not texting. I'm responding to this. To your average iOS user they are one and the same, which is why US iPhone users don't generally download secondary chatting apps unless they have to.

I don't actually think this is true. Is there any verification that most iOS users do not have a single one of the most popular messaging apps in the world?

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

#444

> 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…

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

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

#445

> 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…

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.

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thank you for making my point. iMessage is not texting. I'm responding to this. To your average iOS user they are one and the same, which is why US iPhone users don't generally download secondary chatting apps unless they have to.

I don't actually think this is true. Is there any verification that most iOS users do not have a single one of the most popular messaging apps in the world?

I never said they don't have anything but if you ask someone to download an app specifically to contact you they're going to be very bothered by it. It's like how as streaming services proliferate there are only so many services people actually want to subscribe to, or how pre-unlimited calling people were very judicious about calling people not on their network.

Anecdotally, in my social group:

- Snap: withering on the vine.

- Messenger: generally declining with the declining popularity of Facebook in my age cohort

- Instagram: everyone has it, but messaging is definitely a second class part of the app and no one really uses it other than to send instagram memes

- GroupMe: I downloaded it once for one person, most of the people in the chat have iPhones anyways, and people don't really use it other than to contact the non-Apple users specifically.

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

#447

> 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…

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

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.

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

#448
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duo came out too late, and Google has a reputation for changing things. Years ago, I tried setting up my family with google’s apps, and they kept changing, and it burned me and wasted my time. So years ago, I switched everyone to Apple, and haven’t wasted any time since. WhatsApp is really nice, but you need a phone for it, which some of the older grandparents don’t have. But they do have cheap iPads, so everyone use…

I find it astounding that the grandparents have iPads before phones. Most elderly people I know have cheapo Android phones or a few with "accessible" android phones target at people with sight or mobility problems (usually amounts to buttons and a skin with large icons). A few still have older Nokia phones, but these are the ones least likely to have iPads and more likely to have an old Windows 9x/XP computer hanging…

The iPads are usually bought by the adult children to replace the aging computers because they are both much simpler to use and much harder to screw up. I gave my parents an iPad and added them to my plan for $20/month unlimited data. They don’t have to worry about WiFi or anything.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#450

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...

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 product…

They should just expire much more rapidly. 20 years is an eternity in the software world, and 10 years, or even 5 years, should be enough to develop a lead, profit a bit, and fund your next invention(s).
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