There's so many of these but all are in "early access" phase...seems like they haven't figured out how to do iMessages integration and it's just a nicely designed UI with no real product.
+1, the real challenge here isn't UI design, it's integrating with several messaging services that are actively preventing being integrated in such a way.
Exactly
Texts is a live product (landing page has a real screenshot) and it does support iMessage on Mac by connecting to the official process. We've done the most extensive research on it afaik.
How are you integrating? What is the "official process" mentioned? As far as I know, there are no Apple APIs built for these integrations.
Are you just connecting to the local SQLite database?
Official Messages app/process. And we do connect to the SQLite for reading stuff.
Oh as in interacting with the app? I looked a while back to see if it was AppleScript-able but seemed to be no longer supported. Are you using something else? Or are there actually APIs in MacOS to hit?