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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

I find it utterly bizarre that an engineer/team competent enough to reverse engineer iMessage can release such a shitshow. Almost parody level.

Is this some sort of weird “they trust me, dumb fucks” social experiment?

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But they didn't reverse engineer anything, afaik. Their Android app is just talking to a Mac Mini somewhere in a closet, logged in with the users Apple account (or so was stated in one of the interviews).

Does anyone know how many users a single Mac Mini handles? While I admire the hacker mindset, this solution seems incredibly wasteful so I am curious of its carbon footprint.

Why does it seem so wasteful?

Because I assume that Apple put a fairly low limit on the number of accounts that can be tied to a single computer.

Okay, automating Apple account logins on a fleet of macOS VMs is still rarely treaded territory, so it takes some real technical chops, even if it’s mostly stitching together other people’s work. TLS termination on the hand takes <1hr following a guide, if you haven’t done it hundreds of times before…

Naah, if I would to attempt it my first try would be something like VNC (out of the box support) and Automator (out of the box support), or then some other tool to control mouse & keyboard.

The hardest part is probably keeping the duct-tapped stuff running.

How are you keeping all those sessions updated in real time? How are you parsing messages sent from others to be able to forward them to the user? How are you handling 'reactions' and 'threaded replies' and attachments?

You are dismissing a very hard problem with handwaving.

Some of the early research found "BlueBubbles"[1] mentions in some places, and the lack of TLS is almost definitely because BlueBubbles currently doesn't support TLS on its own.

1: https://bluebubbles.app/

iMessage just stores messages in SQLite on macOS. They have a server process that runs on macOS and reads that database. So it’s not like they reverse engineered the protocol; they just read a local database in a standard, open-source format.

There are open source bridges for iMessage. So I’m not convinced they did.

Example: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

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