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

Given Apple’s frenetic propensity to be extremely resource conscious, I doubt that team even exists any longer.

There’s likely some larger messages team that is itching to replace that app with the iOS version via Mac Catalyst... which despite the poor experience of most Catalyst apps on the Mac, would still make for a marked improvement. Goes to show you how poorly maintained the app is.

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 just-in-time zero-installing the relevant iMessage plugin on recipient hosts.

(For anyone who is wondering why this would be necessary just to display some stickers: there are other kinds of iMessage plugins, e.g. games you can play inside the iMessage window, and not just the "you say something, IRC bot says something" kind of games, but full Canvas kind of games.)

What is the “legitimate” reason for this? Bluetooth accessories that can send messages, ideally from the MFI program?

I wonder if the iPhone will accept photos over MAP....

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

> I've never gotten a single unwanted blue message.

This has not been my experience. While rare I have gotten a few spam messages.

I live in an international home in the US, and every person except the Americans use Whatsapp. The American compromise is usually Messenger or getting eventually strong armed into using Whatsapp too.

What do people use in Europe?

No one uses SMS here (and by extension very few use iMessage). Everyone got mobile data turned on and has for almost the last decade. And then it still cost money to send sms, so other apps won.

I notice that in the International School kids use iMessage more since it's so US/UK oriented and there are too many parents with money.

You should reconsider Windows. A full Linux kernel and apt-get is way better than Homebrew will ever be.

For me, its the perfect balance between the power of Linux and the day-to-day usability of Windows

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, every other messaging app I've used just has't lived up to the UX provided by iMessage. Spam is a major issue on all non-iMessage messaging platforms I've used. No messaging app I've used on any platform has performance as fast and fluid as iMessage on iOS. Competing products are often full with ads and useless features that clutter the user interface and degrade performance. And these platforms often have annoying restrictions on media quality. Facebook Messenger, for instance, has garbage quality images and video compression, while iMessage appears to apply no further compression on media files. Using any other messaging app, either on iOS or Android, has consistently been way more of a headache than its worth for me.

        WITH groupchat_membership AS (
            SELECT cache_roomnames,
            group_concat(id, ', ') AS members
            FROM (
                SELECT DISTINCT message.cache_roomnames, handle.id
                FROM message
                JOIN handle ON message.handle_id=handle.ROWID
                WHERE message.cache_roomnames IS NOT NULL AND message.is_from_me=0
            )
            GROUP BY cache_roomnames
        ),
        unsorted_messages AS (
            SELECT message.ROWID AS rowid,
            CASE WHEN message.cache_roomnames IS NOT NULL THEN groupchat_membership.members ELSE handle.id END AS recipient,
            CASE WHEN message.is_from_me THEN 'Me' ELSE handle.id END AS sender,
            message.date,
            strftime('%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S', datetime(message.date + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime')) AS human_date,
            CASE WHEN message.cache_has_attachments THEN '<Attachment>' || message.text ELSE message.text END AS text
            FROM message
            LEFT JOIN handle ON message.handle_id=handle.ROWID
            NATURAL LEFT JOIN groupchat_membership
        )
        SELECT unsorted_messages.recipient, sender, human_date, text
        FROM unsorted_messages
        NATURAL LEFT JOIN (
            SELECT recipient, max(date) AS latest_date FROM unsorted_messages GROUP BY recipient
        )
        ORDER BY latest_date DESC, date ASC;

I get latest messages with:

```

SELECT handle.id, handle.person_centric_id, message.cache_has_attachments, message.text, message.ROWID, message.cache_roomnames, message.is_from_me, message.date/1000000000 + strftime("%s", "2001-01-01") AS utc_date FROM message INNER JOIN handle ON message.handle_id = handle.ROWID WHERE message.ROWID > #{rowid};

```

and their attachments with:

```

SELECT attachment.ROWID AS a_id, message_attachment_join.message_id AS m_id, attachment.filename, attachment.mime_type, attachment.total_bytes FROM attachment INNER JOIN message_attachment_join ON attachment.ROWID == message_attachment_join.attachment_id WHERE message_attachment_join.message_id >= #{rowid};

```

where rowid is the max rowid from the previous search, and attachments with null mime_types get ignored (YouTube previews, etc). Sending through Applescript still.

Turns out, most of iCloud is not e2e encrypted, critically, notes and pictures and contacts and backups. Apple (and by extension, US military intelligence and FBI/DHS) can read your private notes and see your nudes, and review your address book and message history. I knew I was going to need to switch eventually.

* iCloud device backup is on by default. This syncs all of your unencrypted iMessage history to Apple. It also syncs all of your conversation partners’ message histories, from their phones, to Apple. It is not e2e encrypted so it suffers from the Zoom Problem: Apple has the keys and can decrypt it, for themselves or the government via the illegal PRISM program.

* iMessage (despite being e2e) can be arbitrarily wiretapped by injecting a surveillance key because the client trusts the key list from the server blindly, with no UI notifications for the sender on key changes/amendments.

* I can’t run the client on half of my computers

* Signal works on ios/android and has desktop clients for all major platforms... and critically now supports iPads. It also has the nice property of being e2e without implicit trust in the server, although hopefully the TOFU model can be improved.

I switched. I am now signed out of iMessage on all my computers, and it’s great.

If I can do it, anyone can. I was in as far as one can go.

But in 2020 where their computing products have left so much to be desired this whole system just starts to fall apart. I'm forced over to Windows because they don't make a machine to fit my work needs and when I'm there in Windows I'm not thinking how much I miss iMessage and I wish I'd sacrificed performance and GPUGP just for iMessage, I'm thinking maybe I should stop using iMessage because WhatsApp works great everywhere.

Then now I've switched to WhatsApp well there's one less reason I have to buy an iPhone next time.

I don't give a f#%k about the color of my messages but being able to see them from a website/windows desktop would be useful. This doesn't achieve that.

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

Ignorance is bliss I suppose.

First I had Blackberry Blend around 2014 (SMS and BBM messaging through PC), now there's Signal for Desktop and the Your Phone Microsoft thing.

The wheel keeps getting reinvented.

I wonder when peer2peer messaging will become popular again. It's how Skype started out and became big back in 2003. Offered way better call quality and privacy, because: no server and peer2peer.

That's why it's best to think of Apple not as a software company but as a vertically integrated hardware company: Apple provides services (iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Siri) to add value to their software (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) in order to add value to their hardware (Macs, iOS devices, Watch, Apple TV).

To answer the question of why web browsers aren't allowed on Apple TV, it's because Apple does not deem that they add value at any of those levels — the Apple TV is not positioned as a general purpose computer but more as a sort of console, suited to consuming multimedia and playing games but not for general purpose web browsing.

But it isn't as though Apple hasn't anticipated the desire to see web content on the big screen. That's why macOS and iOS devices support AirPlay Mirroring.

I think there are a couple of generations that are unused to the idea of vertical integration in technology and view it with suspicion. Once upon a time, say the 80s and prior, it was the norm: you bought a computer, could only use their OS, and in certain cases could only use their software.

IBM PCs and MS-DOS broke the industry free of that mould in a major way, but Apple has proven to have some success with it — in fact, it's almost the entire value of what they propose: tight integration between hardware and software to provide, as Apple sees it, the best experience.

To come back to the first question: iMessage is both a service and software. It benefits Apple more to use iMessage to sell Macs and iOS devices; there's no benefit to Apple for people to use iMessage on Windows (or Android, Linux, etc.). Apple is, remember, not a services company; it is a hardware company. iMessage "sells" macOS and iOS which, in turn, sell Macs and iOS devices.

In fact, I don't even think Apple sells hardware. Apple sells experiences. That might sound airy-fairy, but it corresponds well to their approach.

Contrast this with iTunes. iTunes exists on Windows in order to sell iPods (and later, iPhones and iPads) and multimedia content to Windows users. This benefits Apple in a way that allowing iMessage on Windows would not.

Same reason why Apple TV+ and Apple Music are available on competing television devices and on Android: selling subscriptions to non-Apple users still provides Apple with a benefit (and valuable opportunity to advertise) that iMessage on other platforms would not.

This approach exists in sharp contrast to both the Microsoft of the past and present, as well as web-based service companies. Their goals are different.

Microsoft made MS-DOS and Windows available on as many types of computers as possible in order to sell Windows licences; Apple tried this once in the 90s and didn't make enough money to justify the operation.

Services like Facebook, that freely provide their messenger services on practically all platforms, have a different measurement for whether or not there is any benefit: they aren't trying to sell you on hardware, they're trying to sell data to advertisers.

There are other examples: LINE, for instance, doesn't necessarily need to sell users' data to make money; instead, LINE operates a content store selling additional functionality.

Therefore, it's impractical to compare Apple's approach with iMessage to that of competing messaging services. The apps and associated services serve different purposes to meet different ends.

To conclude: iMessage is there to make you buy an iPhone.

"You can get Adobe Photoshop for Linux, just run a Windows machine and use RDP to connect to it. All it requires is another machine entirely and for you to be on the same network."

I don't disagree with the ideological position but personally I find it harder to argue with the economics without having also created and operated a billion dollar services and hardware business.

Interestingly I can't find recent authoritative DAU/MAU stats for iMessage or FaceTime; the last time Tim Cook seems to have quoted numbers was in 2014: https://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/02/apple-handles-40-billion-i...

Note that I'm arguing from Apple's perspective here. From my own I believe they should absolutely open it up.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/06/make-facetime-an-open-standar...

Unfortunately all are proprietary and it was the previous generation, iChat and Google Talk, that were based on the open XMPP standard.

Google doing what google does and running like an headless chicken creating a new service every minute instead of creating one good one.

Last time I tried to launch WeChat, you had to surrender to it a disgusting amount of personal information to even launch the app.

You have some outliers like Telegram or Signal, but good luck getting all your contacts on there.

As a result I just have a dozen of messaging apps installed on my devices.

One might think that opening the source will lead to code reviews by many and fix security bugs. In my own experience with open sourcing few projects, I've not seen that happening. Vast majority of contributors aren't willing to spend a lot of time in reviewing security issues and fixing for you. In fact, virtually all contributors will send you patches that are often half assed and have security issues which you might unknowingly accept because all tests are passing, you don't have much time and in code reviews everything look ok. For things like iMessage, I suspect billions of dollars worth of important decisions are made by everyone from Jeff Bezos to the President of USA. In my opinion, open sourcing something like this would give a handsome payday to many black hat hacking groups including state owned agencies.

Probably one of us running an old OS or something (All devices are recent) but whatever why should I waste my time debugging that with my elderly parents when Zoom just works.