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Comment by TechRemarker | Hacker News Reader

FAQ says iOS under development and Android on road map. Under what do you support it says: iMessage (only on macOS), SMS (with iMessage), WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, IRC, Slack and Discord DMs. It says only on macOS for iMessage. But not for any of the the others even though not on iOS for any of those either. Does this FAQ mean that once iOS app is out it won’t be able to support iMessage? Assuming so, that is pretty major and imagine a major factor for people whether to consider this app if they know it will never support iMessage on iOS because of limitations. That should be clearer in faq.

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iOS app is in alpha, it's being internally tested right now.

In the first version of iOS, I don't think we'll be supporting iMessage. Texts runs on your device and not our servers (this is how E2EE is properly supported for example), this comes with some limitations.

We are working on solutions though, it's in the roadmap to support all popular platforms, on all devices.

We'll try to make the FAQ more clear ^^

> In the first version of iOS, I don't think we'll be supporting iMessage.

Isn’t this pretty much impossible as things stand? There is no public API for reading iMessage information and all third-party apps are sandboxed on iOS.

Are you counting on some kind of policy change from Apple?

It's almost guaranteed that iMessage info is being read at the desktop (requires at least one Max) in the hop and relies on the fact that all chat clients don't encrypt at rest.

The minute that changes / the minute further sandboxes come in to prevent reading of the unencrypted chat at rest, these are at risk.

It does seem like even automattic is counting on putting more people into a common address-space before that happens so they can continue to build out their network and support protocols that are platform and device independent.

Buying beeper probably would have been better then? Apps already exist and iMessage is supported. https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-work

Automattic likes Text because it's serverless.

> "Just as an engineer, I can’t ethically support" the cloud-first model, Mullenweg says.

Beeper includes a web service as part of the deal, so if you're good with that then yeah it'd be better, especially since it's ready now and it the faq you linked says they don't store your chats via the service.

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