AirMessage – Android app to interface with iMessage on a Mac
airmessage.org
airmessage.org
Another thing I've noticed is that delivery of SMS to iPhones is very unreliable. I'm not sure why that is but I'll send SMS messages to our family group chat from my Android Device and my partner's phone will ding almost immediately but it can be up to 24 hours before my teen gets the message on an iPhone X.
Do you think Apple should just ditch the radically superior iMessage protocol and force everyone to go back to 30-year-old SMS, which was developed in the mid-1980s? That's not going to happen.
No, no I don't.
> Do you think Apple should just ditch the radically superior iMessage protocol and force everyone to go back to 30-year-old SMS, which was developed in the mid-1980s? That's not going to happen.
Did my post in any way suggest that?
Apple's iMessage platform lock-in and degraded experience when communicating with non-iMessage users has real world social impact not just on children. Awareness ofnthis fact needs to be raised.
It's obvious why Apple does it, iMessage brings people to the platform and locks them in for fear of social exclusion. This has monetary benefits for Apple in other areas such as hardware sales, iap, and the App store.
If Apple offered RCS Messaging support in iMessage, and the green bubbles only indicated unencrypted communication, many of the social maladies of iMessage would go away and so would the motivation to adopt Apple's platform because people largely don't give a shot about e2e encryption.
> “When I asked a senior Apple executive why iMessage wasn’t being expanded to other platforms, he gave two answers,” reports Mossberg. “First, he said, Apple considers its own user base of 1 billion active devices to provide a large enough data set for any possible AI learning the company is working on. And, second, having a superior messaging platform that only worked on Apple devices would help sales of those devices — the company’s classic (and successful) rationale for years.”
https://www.cultofmac.com/433784/apple-reveals-why-imessage-...
Still updating? Remember me any Android phone with 5 years support?
> Just buy an iPhone, problem solved. Just stay in debt to a major mobile carrier. Just keep upgrading. Just stay locked in.
Price comparison isn't so critical. Are you really need the latest pro model? Google privacy sucks 'cause ads pump - the main reason why I use iPhone and recommend it.
Another way still exists - play with Hackintosh & AirMessage.
Remember MSN vs. ICQ vs. AIM? And then apps like Trillian that just ran three accounts in the same UI.
What other human natures do you try to change?
What are you railing against? Capitalism?
If that’s capitalism then yes, I’m against that. I don’t agree that is or has to be capitalism, though.
I was trying to contribute to the discussion by suggesting possible consideration that might help you reflect on your position, and not to be a contrearian, as your snide remark about internet access might suggest.
In any case, you presented hard problems with no easy solutions. Solutions will always be stochastic, and "to some extent" with any attempt at remedying this stuff.
For example children don't frequently watch commercials directed at them on TV. If you consider that to be a psychological effect with some kind of remedy through regulation, then hey, there you go. An example for you.
Have a nice day.
I live in a place where gambling is illegal. I spent years in private poker games with tens of thousands on the table.
What difference would that have made?
I don't think even those that are complaining are complaining about the colour - just that it's differentiated in any way.
I'll leave the why of that as an exercise for the reader.
In continental Europe youngsters all use Snapchat or WhatsApp or Facebook messenger or Telegram for group chat, all cross platform.
iMessage is never the default one because that would exclude lots who don't have iphones even though Apple's products are a status symbol amongst school children.
TL;DR: you can't make fun of your colleagues who can't afford iphones if you're unable to chat with them ;)
My understanding is SMS never got anywhere as popular in the EU.
At the time, the alternative was to either pay a per message fee or pay monthly for an unlimited text messaging plan.
Unlimited messaging without extra fees was quite a draw.
Anyway, UK was/is a lot more aligned to the fads in the US than in continental Europe to which I was referring to since the UK is no longer in Europe ;) j.k.
Also unlimited messaging plans back then weren’t a thing in Europe yet either.
is a choice.
Nothing is stopping you and your friends from moving to another platform, each with their own """lock-in"""
Nobody forces you to use iMessage. Use Snap, Whatsapp, Telegram, FB messenger, whatever. You don't need to be upgrading with every cycle (or even every other cycle) either. I am on my 4th smartphone since 2008, replacing a battery is cheaper that replacing phones. And if your teen insists on the latest&greatest instead, that should be your problem, not Apple's.
Without their walled garden Apple is nothing but a commodity hardware maker and those do not survive for long on this side of the Pacific.
Also, apologies for getting a bit political, but I came from a country that got screwed up for 100 years because a small group of people who loved "corporation making a few people wealthy beyond all imagination" language got into power in 1917, so I'm quite sensitive to it, so what if instead we say:
"a group of 47,000 Americans who make anyone a little bit wealthier if they buy a bit of AAPL"?
We call them public companies for a reason
Next we'll say that accepting Nike's swoosh is pandering to Nike, and look at all the poisonous affects Nike's swoosh is having on kids with no-brand shoes.
It pays around $12B a year to shareholders, which today comprise a large percentage of the US population.
It has 137,000 employees making an average comp north of $200,000 a year.
It’s the world leader in consumer computer products and leads its markets in customer satisfaction measures.
What is this not much else you speak of?
Paid is very strange term to use to describe it. They sold 3rd party software to users, while taking 30% cut.
Why is this always added as if it's relevant? If I'm selling an app on both stores I care about how much money I can make in total, how many Android phones have been sold globally is just trivia.
If you don’t like the ratio, just say App Store sales are 50% higher than Android.
That $35B didn’t exist until Apple created the iPhone and built its walled garden.
Appstore model is as old as civilization - middle man reselling stuff. Some middle mans are more effective than others, and true, Apple is one of them. But that doesn't change characterization of the relationship. They don't pay developers for their service, they resell their stuff, while keeping hefty profit margins.
The entire mobile app market was not even one hundredth the size of the App Store before it was created.
The walled garden Apple created made safest and easiest app purchase environment ever, which is why it attracts the highest spending by app customers and highest spending app customers.
If Apple had taken the Google play route that $35B a year would be closer to $4B a year.
This isn't a case of fair play among competitors. iMessage, unlike the other options here, is baked-into the iOS SMS client, and it's not obvious to a non-technical use how to opt-out of using iMessage services. It's akin to if Android, as a default, inspected your contacts list and hijacked outgoing SMS messages for delivery via Hangouts.
Someone just needs to meme us teenagers to switch to a better chat client.
I still use iMessage if someone send it to me, but I’m glad to have switched to other chat clients because I have far more affinity toward my friends than I do this half-forgotten messaging service.
Also, integrating SMS with online messaging and giving people free chatting are Very Standard terms of competition for the hot and overcrowded chat app market, and it's precisely this which has gotten some people so bothered.
More to the point, Apple is not responsible for the visibly poisonous affects of classism on children, and Apple is not morally culpable merely because they indicated to you what's free and what's not. The families whose children are hurting each other should gather as a community, look each other in the eye and ask what's happening.
Nike also serves as a symbol of class — should we blame Nike when kids laugh at no-brand shoes?
They (or their parents) are being forced to spend large sums of money just to be locked into this card ecosystem, so that they can play with their friends. The company designs these cards with certain appealing colors and characters, and charges a hefty premium for them.
And anyone who can't afford to buy the cards (or is threatened with copyright violations if they make their own) is left out of that community.
And every year I'm forced to buy a new set of cards just to keep up with friends. Clearly they've engineered some addictive property into these cards to produce that very effect.
---
Is this similar enough? Or maybe it's the NFL or NBA or Nike shoes, or little league hockey, that we should cut/paste in there?
You can print proxies but better yet you can use a program like magic workstation to play any cards for free if you don't post the official wizards one. As long as they don't look like real MTG cards it's ok usually.
Most people offline carry more than one deck too. I don't see any of your issues as a real problem at least in my life its always been fine.
This meme that it's "just about the color of the bubble" has got to die.
Messaging over SMS is way worse in every way. Group messaging breaks inconsistently in ten different ways, you have issues with attachments, you miss a bunch of other features, etc.
When you text in groups as much as teens do, these things matter. Not being able to use half the features you regularly use because one person in the group chat is Android is going to be legitimately frustrating.
What's interesting, however, is why the US population has settled on iMessage for premium messaging features, instead of WhatsApp like so many other countries.
So that's what I wonder about -- why did the US not bother, but the rest of the world did? What was different about the US?
> So that's what I wonder about -- why did the US not bother, but the rest of the world did? What was different about the US?
Not sure about the rest of the world, but India specifically, has more whatsapp users because we have more Android users. iPhone is considered more of a luxury here, even now and with millions using android devices, ios users do end up downloading a common app that everyone has. Also helped by the fact that there's no standardisation of message apps in android, though Google messages is trying RCS, more than half the phones don't ship with Google messages, even the close to stock ones like OnePlus have their own implementation, so a third party became standard for even android to android communication.
I think you have to switch your assumptions around. The cross platform solution of a communicator should be considered more likely to win out in a competitive duopoly.
You can’t use iMessage if most other people you are interacting with are using WhatsApp.
There is a real need for better messaging than SMS and MMS. In particular easy sharing of photos and videos is the crucial and central feature. Easy group messaging is probably another important aspect.
So both WhatsApp and iMessage provide these valuable features, however the best messaging service is of no use if you can’t communicate with the people you want to communicate with.
Because of the Android and iOS duopoly I would typically expect the cross platform solution to win out for such a use case, even if it is a bit more inconvenient.
What iMessage has going for it is that it has a relatively transparent fallback mode – I think that made it even possible for it to compete.
However, the US is still the clear aberration here, not the rest of the world. It seems to just have worked out there in a way where the critical mass of iOS was there to make this happen and last (at least for a bit).
Still, I can’t see the big crime Apple supposedly committed here. Their approach of building on top of SMS is completely valid and makes tons of sense.
iMessage defaults to SMS on Android- and SMS is legacy technology in Europe. Thats what stopped iMessage gaining traction.
When you add 1 phone number to a groupchat and now you can’t: Name the group Kick someone out Mute the group at night Send attachments at not potato resolution
Yeah it leads to some resentment
Think about it like this. You're low/middle class but your kid goes to a school where almost literally everyone else comes from a millionaire family. All the other kids play golf or some other expensive hobby. You're either forced to start paying for that as well or risk the fact that your kid will most likely be left out and ostracized by the rest.
If you _chose_ to send your kid to that school and it had nothing to do with education standards or prestige of being at a "better" school, then you effectively chose to bear the extra costs associated with it, but if your kid just goes to that school because it's their only real option, would you think it fair?
But I have also found this true working with clients. They'd be like "you don't have an iphone?" and I'd have to show them my beautiful purple Xperia 1 to demonstrate why, but that should be redundant.
But what I have also found is Android's negelgence. The standard Messages for Web was broken for myself, and is broken for many people (will keep disconnecting from phone). They seem to have introduced new "chat features" but they had yet to show up.
Worse yet, my international Xperia wouldn't send group MMS properly with the standard Messaging app. But it would work on other apps.
That is why I would highly recommend the Pulse app. It has dual sim support as well as a snappy web interface. It really should be the standard.
I find joy in customizing my phone and figuring these things out, but the defaults need to be more sensible for android users. Nothing could be worse than cheaper phones subsidized by bloatware (ux wise).
You picked iMessage here but you could have picked clothing lines, cars, jewelry, or any other status symbol item.
In 2010 the've introduced FaceTime (revolutionary back then, especially on poor connections) and wanted to make it open, open standard etc. But they got half a billion lawsuit from a patent troll over P2P patent infringement.
In 2011 they've introduced iMessage that also relies heavily on p2p too.
It is 2020 and they are still fighting this troll in court over facetime 2010.
search: apple vs VirnetX
Knowing that, I just don't see this as clear cut as you on Apple being sneaky on teen psychology
> Apple decided to redesign how it did FaceTime on a technical level as a way to bypass the patents (in essence, it stopped using an IP address as final authorization when creating a VPN between two devices and instead uses a push token, certificate and session token).
https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/25/apple_facetime_patent...
Apple is known for many things, and they make pretty damn good products, but open standards isn't one of the things they're known for.
Apple made a successful product (arguably part of the most successful non-consumable product in human history!) that lots of people use, and prevent the competition from interoperation.
People don’t protest because that once was (still is?) the career goal of most people in business. This website is also an adjunct of a Silicon Valley incubator whose members dream of building something with this level of influence.
After switching from Android I disabled iMessage for precisely this reason. A green bubble I shall proudly remain.
I needed that working so I could create an real iCloud account that would allow me to use iMessage first on the VM and then again on the android app. Before Apple let’s you use iMessage you need to convince them you bought Apple hardware.
The VM constantly wanted to restart for updates, which I was scared to do because of the tenuous nature of the VM I had set up. I ended up having to re-do the Vm 3-4 times because I would inadvertently break something with a small tweak.
Th VM wanted to be rather directly exposed to the outside world. Of course there were ways to try and make things more secure, but I didn’t really try.
I would have to sync messages from the VM to my phone if for some reason the VM went down because of a restart or power outage. The VM was running on a Windows 10 box, and windows likes to update and restart whenever it feels like it.
I had to use the AirMessage app, which of course makes sense, but the texts didn’t integrate with a native android message platform. Again this makes sense, it was just a little annoying sometimes.
People had to know to iMessage me with the email address I had connected to iCloud. I couldn’t connect my phone number. So everyone who wanted to iMessage me needed to both know and use the email address instead of my number. I’ve had this number for about 20 years, and trying to sort that out with everyone seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
There iMessage features that I remember not working, all the “likes” and whatnot on a message. Sending pictures was pretty slow and painful, and didn’t always work.
There are probably a few more things I’m forgetting. I really want to convey again, I applaud the author for what they’ve accomplished and I think it’s really neat. Perhaps some/all of these pain points are resolved. I tried to give feedback in the private reddit when that was a thing because I really wanted this to be my way to iMessage on an android.
What virtualisation software were you using? Snapshots should have had you covered against breaking changes.
Thanks for the review.
AirMessage leverages the power of your Mac computer in order to route messages to and from Apple's iMessage servers. The server is to be installed on a computer at home, and will pass messages to and from your smartphone to allow the usage of iMessage and other installed services.
Plus, you can always run a Hackintosh or use macOS in a VM, although that can be a lot of work depending on your computer hardware.
I'm not very familiar with the workings of iMessage but why can't an Android device copy the protocol and make the relevant API calls directly?
It presumably also integrates into the OS at a deep level: the system that pushes messages to the computer is not iMessage specific, it’s OS-level. So you’d need to reverse engineer that, too.
Is that possible ?
I'd like to be able to send/receive "imessages" (and prompt typing ellipses, etc.) from a twilio number. It's low priority, but an interesting problem ...
Is imessage an open spec somewhere wherein you could use API credentials and interface with it, arbitrarily ?
It's the same gripe I have with iOS keyboards, unless something has changed there. The feel and layout of every third party keyboard is the same as the default keyboard. During my short period with an iPhone I gave Gboard for iOS a try, tweaking it as much as I could to get a similar experience to what I was used to on Android. In the end it still felt like the system keyboard more than anything.
And the "long-press top row for numbers" option wasn't available so had to switch back and forth between keyboard and "numpad" when typing something like passwords or strings with a lot of numbers.
And the default SMS app being fine? Such an annoyance every time I had to use it. Don't remember specifics (as I was just trying to get away from it ASAP) but there was at least some kind of cringy emoji bar always visible.
Horrible experience all in all and I'm so glad to be back on Android.
For a lot of people, it comes down to being to run uBlock Origin/cosmetic and dynamic ad and content blocking (e.g. not a simple blacklist) and running other extensions and customizations.
It lets any third party messaging system become a viable SMS replacement (like Hangouts and Signal does on Android), by making it seamless to send all messages from one app.
Like iMessage and only iMessage does seamlessly on iOS, because Apple has given it a monopoly on handling SMSes.
It’s anti-competitive as fuck.
Choosing Signal over iMessage. Signal can serve as your primary messaging app, prioritizing the Signal protocol but falling back to SMS as necessary per contact.
Except that it can’t, because iOS won’t route SMS to it.
What do you mean by "have better support for cross-OS applications"?
What other file functionality do you need on a mobile phone?
I want spywares/adwares to be allowed without any restriction so I can install a adblock pro to block them.
If you pick up a used iPhone X, it is impossible for Apple to prevent you from sideloading whatever you like on the device.
Nope. The SOC on the iPhone X has an unpatchable Boot ROM flaw.
There is nothing Apple can do to prevent you from sideloading anything you like. This will work with any future version of the OS.
However, those things aren't an issue for iDevices.
> I dislike iOS because of the locked-down nature
If your overall issue is wanting the ability to sideload anything you like on an iDevice, there is a simple solution.
I'm still not sure why I'd go through all the hassle of iOS when I can clearly do the same in a superior fashion with even non-rooted Android. Is it just that you like iOS more than Android? It seems by your comment history that you're only commenting on Apple-specific threads and topics.
Not really? iPhone X still blows flagship Android devices out of the water.
You'll have a better device that will get more years of support.
Tbh, after a year of slowly fiddling with my setup, it is quite inconvenient. It’s so close to being amazing, but there are enough small things that make it annoying.
Apple set up a page years ago that lets you manually disable iMessage to avoid this issue.
And yeah, I personally dislike iMessage as a concept. But I use it a lot every day and it’s simply better than SMS. So I don’t blame the creators for doing what they’re doing.
Exactly, why is a page needed in the first place? I'd bet more than 99% of users don't even have a clue that exists or even know about the underlying problem.
How many regular users do neither of these things and just shove their old phone in a drawer or let their kid watch YouTube on it?
Google isn't much different. Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome 10yrs ago were obvious venues to extend their advertising channels. Chrome is their nuclear option in case hardware or other legal issues prevent their current ad insertion techniques.
Does it really, though? I'm an iPhone user but have friends and family who have moved to Android without too much drama. Our chats just moved to other messaging apps with barely a second thought.
If we lived in a world where WhatsApp and other cross-platform messaging apps didn't exist, then there would be a strong lock-in effect. But as it stands the iMessage lock-in is weak, at best.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114
If you want to get mad, get angry at our outdated and abused patent system.
EDIT: 2010 WWDC keynote (1:37:01) where Jobs mentions open sourcing FT as open source protocol - https://youtu.be/UjUd0VSM2RA
iCloud/iTunes is available for Windows because most people who have iPhones (and iPods before) have Windows.
There is no financial reason for Apple to make iMessage for Android.
I expect Apple would release iMessage for Android in a heartbeat if the effort were invested to make it truly user-proof with crypto-locked bootloaders and proper defenses against rooting. However, that day is not today, and that day seems unlikely to ever occur for the wider Android ecosystem. So iMessage likely won’t either.
(Footnote: This thread and its usual focus on “iMessage should be open to non-Apple hardware” has been repeated on HN many times a year for the past several years. No one has yet offered an alternative solution to “identifiable Apple hardware only, with hardware bans for anyone that spams” that would as effectively protect iMessage against spammer. Especially before the first message is sent, and without heuristic false positives.)
Why doesn't it work well between multiple devices?
It is. I currently can't use WhatsApp because my phone is broken, meanwhile I can happily chat away via Telegram. Same thing when my phone is off. Back when they didn't have WhatsApp Web you couldn't even use it on another device at all, but as slick as the UI it's still not really a proper solution.
Meanwhile Telegram has real FOSS clients for any platform you can imagine (there's a CLI version).
You should try Signal than because there it's possible.
> Meanwhile Telegram has real FOSS clients for any platform you can imagine (there's a CLI version).
Just FYI: I'm not arguing for Whatsapp. Just against the usability argument against Signal.
Signal is great for enforcing end-to-end encryption, but doesn't yet have the mechanisms in place to sync across devices automatically to make it user-friendly. Telegram is great for most messaging, and if you want end-to-end, it has that too but is mostly limited to mobile devices.
Would be great for someone to implement GPG on top of their cloud-based messaging though.
What is the problem with that exactly? I have both. Both look like messengers and do messenging.
> If you break/lose your mobile device then the messages are gone forever.
Where? On Whatsapp? Because on Signal you don't need the device. It can be powered off.
> Signal is great for enforcing end-to-end encryption, but doesn't yet have the mechanisms in place to sync across devices automatically to make it user-friendly.
What are you talking about? I have the same messages on my phone and on my desktop client. I don't need to do anything. Just launch either.
> Telegram is great for most messaging
What is exactly "great" about it compared to the others? You can send the same stuff as you do with Signal.
> , and if you want end-to-end, it has that too but is mostly limited to mobile devices.
So it is worse.
Telegram is way snappier and is more peformant all around. Same reason why people complain about Electron all the time.
> Where? On Whatsapp? Because on Signal you don't need the device. It can be powered off.
No, compared to Telegram. Messages you send via Signal on mobile are not available on desktop, and when you sign-in on desktop you need to first link with mobile. When they become out of sync the messages you had previously are no longer available.
> What are you talking about? I have the same messages on my phone and on my desktop client. I don't need to do anything. Just launch either.
Again, as long as your device is linked but if you lose/break your phone then the E2E messages are not longer available on desktop after a period of time.
> What is exactly "great" about it compared to the others? You can send the same stuff as you do with Signal.
Telegram has a lot of great features that are not available on Signal. I suggest you try it out if you haven't already, and if you have then maybe you don't care about those features but it is much more widely used than Signal for that reason.
> , and if you want end-to-end, it has that too but is mostly limited to mobile devices.
That doesn't make it worse per say. The process of linking on desktop for Signal is cumbersome. I don't think Telegram is perfect, which is why I think GPG would be a great solution for encrypted cloud messaging.
I can't replicate that. Telegram uses 20MB more RAM on my W10 computer and takes longer to launch. I see people complain about Electron because it's Electron and it's cool to complain about it.
> No, compared to Telegram. Messages you send via Signal on mobile are not available on desktop, and when you sign-in on desktop you need to first link with mobile. When they become out of sync the messages you had previously are no longer available.
Where do you get all this?? Yes, you have to link the desktop client with Signal. Once. Afterwards never again. Messages you send via Signal ARE AVAILABLE ON DESKTOP. Did you even try it? You can even send messages to yourself. They don't become out of sync. There is everything wrong about this.
> Again, as long as your device is linked but if you lose/break your phone then the E2E messages are not longer available on desktop after a period of time.
If you lose your phone number you lose your Telegram account. Your Telegram account is your phone number.
On Signal, you can use your desktop client as long as nobody else registers with your phone number too because as I've said several times over: the phone is not required.
> Telegram has a lot of great features that are not available on Signal.
I have it. Why are you unable to name one?
> I suggest you try it out if you haven't already, and if you have then maybe you don't care about those features but it is much more widely used than Signal for that reason.
It's widely used because people use it for porn, piracy and conspiracy bullshit already. All this doesn't make it a better messenger altogether or Signal worse. It's just something a certain group of people like and spread within those groups of people. Just because Signal isn't popular in the porn, piracy or conspiracy scenes, doesn't make it worse.
> The process of linking on desktop for Signal is cumbersome.
Why are you constantly lying? You scan a QR code. That's all. There is nothing cumbersome about it.
> That doesn't make it worse per say
Of course it's worse. It can't do a thing. So it's worse.
Its security is more questionable than Signal's for sure, but it comes so much closer to a cross-platform iMessage than Signal does that for 99% of day to day communications it's hard to care.
Some highlights are their lightweight, open-source, blazing-fast client (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop) and compatibility with all major platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux.
I'd recommend Signal but it's not as user friendly.
“All you have to do is convert everyone you’ve ever known to use a different app” is... not the proposition some people think it is. Kudos to anyone that’s pulled it off, but I won’t.
Discussing alternatives are always relevant and popular on HN.
Like talking about macbooks on Thinkpad topics. Everyone knows macbooks exists, it's still fine to talk about them in non-macbook topics.
I think it help that SMS had been basically free even before iMessage arrived, so people never care to look into alternatives to save money.
Speaking about preferences (and excluding privacy question because I have no expertise there) I would pick Telegram because while on mobile it is essentially the same as Whatsapp, desktop client for Telegram is miles better. Whatsapp client was crashing constantly and regularly, every few days. It's just junk.
It is the one thing I truly miss from my switch to running Linux as my primary operating system on my work laptop.