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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)

#451

Post by mmcnl »

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…

Does it? iMessage is really US thing. The consequence of this strategy is that no one uses it outside the US. Whatsapp is a lot bigger and the leader in this market. Zero chance that will change because of this strategy.

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

#452

Post by jedieaston »

WatchDog wrote: post #269
rrdharan wrote: post #4

Meanwhile, https://airmessage.org/ seems to have existed for quite some time now...?

Are iMessage communications signed with an apple device specific key? I imagine part of the reason that it has proven to be so difficult to reverse engineer, is that it somehow utilises an apple devices secure enclave?

It uses some combination of the serial number and the NIC (at least on Macs, probably not on iOS) to authenticate with Apple. That's why it's fiddly on Hackintoshes.

They couldn't use the enclave because not all currently supported Macs have it, but maybe in 10 years when all of the old ones fall off the support tree.

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

#453

Post by jedieaston »

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/

I'm curious if they have a farm of iPhones somewhere to host this off of. They are sending the iMessages from phone numbers -- not email addresses, which means they didn't just get a bunch of Mac Minis and do it the (probably easier) way.

Jailbroken iPhones where you can automate the UI and (maybe?) access any private Messaging API Apple left laying around would make this scalable though.

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

#454

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

schoolornot wrote: post #130
013a wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People definitely do. The worst part is, an excellent upgrade exists. The RCS experience between Android users is pretty much as good as iMessage. Apple could support this; not to replace iMessage, but to upgrade SMS conversations. My tech-illiterate mom's Galaxy S negative 12 has it. Of my contacts, every single Android user I text (maybe a dozen) has RCS. Its standard. When I put my iPhone XS and my S20 Plus side-b…

RCS: no e2e, multi-device support, or any 3rd party application APIs on Android. In other words, gimped by Google. Google's messaging department has been chasing it's tail for 10 years. Unless they clone iMessage from the inside out, RCS has no hope. Personally, I want to see RCS fail. It's a lousy spec with few privacy protections built-in. I had it enabled on my phone for a while and there was no indication as to w…

Google's been unable to build a iMessage competitor because they don't have the same leverage with the phone carriers that Apple does - because they don't even sell what few phones they manufacture in the carrier's stores.

They built out a technology and gave carriers the option to implement it themselves, or they could just piggyback on Google's servers. Carriers obviously opted to implement it themselves because they don't want to become dumb pipes, then dragged their feet for years.

As I understand it, Google wants to get a basic version in place with all the major carriers first, then start rolling out many of the other features you've mentioned.

Apple's been holding out on supporting it because it's not encrypted, but it'll be interesting to see how they respond to carrier-wide adoption of encrypted RCS when that comes. Will iMessage chats fall back to RCS with Android phones? Or will they continue to fall back to unencrypted oldschool SMS?

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

#455

Post by aaomidi »

saagarjha wrote: post #182
aaomidi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More of a reason not to be friends with them.

Sadly, this is not how relationships work and exactly how entrenched social networks come into existence.

In a way, toxic behavior like this is an indicator of how your future relationship with this person will go.

If they're going to be this basic, then I'm probably going to extrapolate how these people will behave in the future.

Although, maybe thats why I only have a very few select close friends.

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

#456

Post by fao_ »

the_snooze wrote: post #169
fao_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly this seems like a feature of the social circles involved. I can't really imagine being, or even wanting to be, around people who are so shallow they won't have someone in a group because they can't change the chat name, or at least, people who wouldn't be willing to move to other types of software to accomodate people in the group. It seems like basic human decency that when someone in the group says "I can'…

It’s often not malice or conscious choice as you seem to think. It’s that technical designs have effects on social dynamics. Here’s an example I wrote elsewhere: > Social dynamics are subtle. For example, group SMS doesn’t support contact names. If you add someone to a group SMS, the other people only see a phone number unless they go out of their way to add the new guy to their contact list. Likewise, the new person…

But how difficult is it to move to whatsapp or something that everyone has supported, and most likely has on their phone anyway?

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

#457

Post by [deleted] »

jtbayly wrote: post #178
kelnos wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You literally answered your own question. “... though MMS for group texting is ridiculously unreliable so I try to funnel people to Signal.” Group texting between iPhones just works. Add an Android user to the group and all of the sudden it doesn’t work. Ergo, don’t add them.

[deleted]

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

#458

Post by harpratap »

scarface74 wrote: post #339
harpratap wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because tying your company to one product is an economic disaster. It's very clear that drop in iPhone sales causes a very direct impact on Apple and the reason why they started moving towards SaaS model. But their SaaS isn't big enough yet. If today China retaliates with ban on Apple, the company is pretty much dead because no other country is capable of manufacturing at the scale Apple needs it to.

According to their last earnings - 50% of their revenue was outside of the iPhone. You also have to remember even the Mac by itself brought in higher revenue than all but the top 100 companies in the US and it’s only 10% of Apple’s revenue. The watch is a bigger revenue generator than the iPod ever was.

The Apple watch, Airpods and everything else except Macs are tightly coupled to the sale of iPhones. If you stop making iPhones, the rest is pretty much dead too.

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

#459

Post by aantix »

jedieaston wrote: post #453
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/

I'm curious if they have a farm of iPhones somewhere to host this off of. They are sending the iMessages from phone numbers -- not email addresses, which means they didn't just get a bunch of Mac Minis and do it the (probably easier) way. Jailbroken iPhones where you can automate the UI and (maybe?) access any private Messaging API Apple left laying around would make this scalable though.

The phone farm has to be the approach. I don’t see any other way.

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

#460

Post by fckapple40 »

sgt wrote: post #254

"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 develo…

The only way I see macOS surviving as a professional environment is if they make it available for PCs. Their walled garden style just doesn't work in the open-source world Microsoft is pushing.
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