Yeah check out the MKHB video about it…. It’s not reassuring that you’re logging with your iCloud credentials into a cloud server that then parses your iMessage to the phone. From a security standpoint, that’s a big no for me as all it takes is the provider getting hacked and then its spoofing galore.
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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I kinda blame Apple on this one, they're the one forcing all these kind of insecure workaround in order to gatekeep their platform, ultimately it's more about their bottomline than privacy.
Yeah I don’t get why anyone would want this. Just use Signal or something cross platform? It’s like complaining about not being able to message your friend’s Xbox from your PlayStation. Sure, it’d be nice, but I sure as hell wouldn’t provide a random third party with my PlayStation account credentials to achieve it!
I agree with you, but as always its not that simple. For a lot of people all their friends use iMessage and refuse to use anything else because "it's what I already use". When you have a PlayStation and all your friends use Xbox, then being able to talk to them despite the security implications becomes quite an attractive feature.
In Europe, it’s very normal to use multiple chat apps (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Threema, etc).
iMessage isn’t even that good a chat app! It’s really hard to understand this clearly social issue affecting North America from a non-NA perspective.
Those kinds of apps took off in other places because SMS was expensive, but in the US there has been cheap and/or unlimited SMS for a couple of decades now. So people had no reason to use anything else. That means when iMessage came along and transparently covered up SMS it became the standard.
It is especially bad for teenagers where the iPhone has almost 90% market share. If you are a teen using Android with 9 friends, chances are literally all of them are on iMessage. Good luck trying to convince all 9 of them to install another app just for you. Apple's ~~indoctrination~~ marketing is so powerful that kids are actually bullied for not having an iPhone.
Also your 9 friends might just exclude you from group texts, and therefor activities, because they don't want to see the green bubbles. I shit you not.
They didn't take off just because SMS was expensive, but because they offer a much better experience with many more features
Sure, but pricing was the main driver. There doesn't seem to be readily available historical pricing data but even as late as 2018 the price of SMS in Europe seemed to be €0.07-0.11 per message. Which means it was even more expensive back in the early 2010s when WhatsApp and others were beginning to take off. For the US the price per message is and has been $0. I think the extra features were ultimately just a bonus when compared to being able to send messages for free. The fact the US still hasn't switched is proof enough that it being a better experience is not enough to compel people to change off of the default. Money is a huge motivator.
Since at least 15 years ago, a ton of SMS were included in the contract or add-on packages for your phone, and data were much more expensive comparatively. In my country specifically, unlimited data has only been a thing for 1-2 years, and we have cheap data for less than 5-7 years. But we always had something like 1.500 SMS included in even the cheapest contracts for 10+ years
It’s specifically for the US market I reckon.
I'm European. My whole family (except me) uses iMessage and all my friends use iMessage or Facebook messenger. Its a problem here too.
Because most Apple users don't even know what a phone actually is and don't give a fuck about anything related to anything technical, apart from having the newest (same as always) device. Otherwise they wouldn't be Apple users.
This is a really disingenuous argument even for /c/android. iOS has many pitfalls with the walled garden effect but it also has many advantages with regard to software quality, consistency and performance (particularly at an API level, speaking as a developer for both platforms). If we write them off as bad, dumb or irrelevant then we forego the opportunity to improve our own apps and Android as a platform. Google does not have a monopoly on good ideas nor on technical users - one could note that Android itself is developed on Macs, as Silicon Valley developer workstations are almost universally Apple hardware..
I have something like this, but it's hosted on my Mac mini, so I don't think need to worry about anyone getting hacked other than myself. Obviously you need a Mac to do it this way.
I can't wait for the EU to mandate that iMessage must use RCS under the hood for interoperability with Android.
There's an article out now with Apple saying they will support RCS by next year https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964171/apple-iphone-rcs-support
I'm not gonna get my hopes up too high, because I'm afraid of being let down. But if this happens, I'll be ecstatic.
This is interesting -- I wonder if it could be done using a hackintosh VM
Former Google and current Apple engineer here; this is definitely an insecure workaround with a lot of flaws. I think Beeper is basically doing the same.
The reality is that while we do have a lot of walled garden policies for business reasons (which I don’t love), iMessage and FaceTime are a bit more complicated than that, tightly coupled around the hardware encryption and keystore in the TPM in our devices. Unwinding this would be undesirable from a compatibility perspective as it would break any Apple devices not updated immediately to new OS versions that change the encryption scheme.
So the only way to plug into iMessage per se is a weird workaround like this where you basically AppleScript automate the Messages app on a Mac with its shields down.
There’s not a great way to fix this problem which is largely why we are bringing RCS support to iOS 18 to hopefully make such things moot.
But that said even as an employee I don’t think iMessage is a great example of a modern chat app. I mean, it’s better than SMS which is what it sought out to replace. But compared to an actual chat app - something like Telegram - it doesn’t hold up.
I don’t think iMessage is a great example of a modern chat app.
it's like the default ringtone. people just don't give a damn to change it, regardless how it sounds.
I wish them much success but sounds like a hack.