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

Two of my main gripes with iMessage is the fact that if you scroll back up to read the past it becomes progressively slower and slower to scroll and each time the lag to get a new “page” of history takes longer. The other gripe is search being almost completely useless. Search for say “apples” and it just lists the entire conversation instead of relevant messages containing apples. And then you are left scrolling up endlessly to find said message with the aforementioned slowdown bug being front and center.

I've been developing for Mac and iOS before the App Store was released, and have experience the author names - in broad strokes, your argument is valid, but it's not correct - errors slip in when describing the Applescript interface as just a reflection of Applescript sucking, describing his issue with Apple having _fragile_ private APIs when his conclusion is the problem is _private_ APIs, and reducing the problems inherent in the walled garden as "making you dig through class-dump output"

> The iMessage team for macOS

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.

> as well as its fairly strange usage of a web view (actually the long-deprecated one…) for the main content

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.)

I got the same feeling reading the post. Seems like it was difficult because iMessage is a private API and a little crufty as all long-lived APIs are. This was more of a lesson in what the code usually looks like inside any software org - messy, full of historical cruft etc etc. but it works and powers a very important feature, so there's little to gain / lot to lose by trying to refactor.

A bit of a shameless self-plug, but it took me 4 weekends to implement iMessage message receiving with BlueZ[0]. Sadly, all I learned about Bluetooth LE and Apple's ANCS will be completely useless when it comes to sending messages, since MAP works over Bluetooth, while ANCS works over Bluetooth Low Energy, and these 2 protocols are almost nothing alike.

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

The only problem is that any messages that the iPhone received while the middleman was out of range won’t get to your PC, but this’d still be extremely useful for quick replies.

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

Does it support group threads? That’s one of the biggest limitations to Tesla’s implementation of this.

Can you _send_ messages this way though? I wonder why Smartwatches don't make use of it. I can't send iMessages from my Pebble, only read them.

> What you need to have is a Bluetooth adapter with MAP (Message Access Profile) support. When you send a message from the MAP protocol, then your iPhone will treat all messages as if they are sent from the Messages app.

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

This would be extremely useful. I can imagine the only reason why it doesn't exist yet is because few people were aware of this. Thanks for sharing.

Has anyone tried putting this into a Windows app yet?

I, unfortunately, have sent spam messages via iMessage a long time ago. I did it by faking a Bluetooth keyboard that connects to an iPhone and starts typing out phone numbers and addresses fed from a computer. I did it to mass-send a message to about a couple hundred people.

Are you implying that a closed ecosystem eliminates spam?

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

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

How does it matter if the spam message is blue or green when it's going to the same app? I get the most amount of SMS spam on iMessage BY FAR. Have never seen one on WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.

Is there a chance you publicly reveal your other IM contacts? Because as it stands I pretty much never get spam on Instagram, Whatsapp, Line, nor Messenger (FB). I don't even get spam in the "Message Requests" of FB messenger.

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I had to check, and on my phone I have ever only sent 3 SMSes. I got lots received, but that's like "your token for service xxxx" or "your parcel is ready for pickup" kinda stuff.

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.

Yeah, a very US specific thing.

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.

Texting was relatively expensive in Europe while it was almost free in the US. Then the iPhone was always more popular in the US as well making it something of a standard.

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.

So people don't use SMS outside the US? I knew WhatsApp was big in other countries, but didn't realize no one even uses SMS not iMessage.

What do people use in Europe?

In the US I would say it's not only "used" but is the default and almost only message system that most iPhone and Mac folks use. It works really well and it's built into the phone... that, and network effects are strong I guess.

I'm in the usa but I don't have an iphone. So I use SMS with certain friends but facebook messenger with other friends.

> Remember all those years when we dreamed of a Unix with a proper UI? Well, it exists. Windows doesn't even come close.

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

Catalina is a significant downgrade in quality but it's still better than the alternative so your point still stands. My worry is what this means for the future, whether it will keep going downhill.

Yep, it absolutely depends on industries and countries, because 100% of developers I work with use Windows.

WSL2 on my Desktop is competing with my MacBook as my favorite development environment. Remote-WSL on VSCode works excellently and allows me to do all my development in a seamless Linux environment.

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

The only way I see macOS surviving as a professional environment is if they make it available for PCs. Their walled garden style just doesn't work in the open-source world Microsoft is pushing.

Vendor lock is real, but would that not be rendered moot of other players could offer a superior user experience? Especially when you consider that Facebook, Google and others have a far larger base of potential users than iMessage. As far as I understand, the only iMessage feature that competitors couldn't emulate due to first-party entitlements is the SMS fallback functionality, which while nice, is definitely a feature that people could live without.

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.

Same for me, but with my primary number on Google voice. Google dropped the ball here with an option to compete with iMessage, whether with Voice or Hangouts/Gchat

I've been working on a new version of [my iMessage bot](https://github.com/inculi/Sue) recently. Previously it was using Applescript handlers on Sierra, now sqlite calls to iMessage's chat.db (I have to give credit to another bot, [Jared](https://github.com/ZekeSnider/Jared) for help in this area).

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.

I did something very similar, extracting the iMessage database. It works by you making an iTunes backup of your phone, and then accessing a specific file in the backup. I ended up with a query that looks like this (only tested with iOS 8, as I sadly lost interest afterwards):

        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 was in exactly this same boat for a long time. I bought maybe a dozen iPhones through the years to upgrade friends and partners from Android just so I could iMessage them.

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.

Apple's refusal to support Windows in any real way and have inferior experiences with iTunes etc was absolutely fine when they had best in class solutions for all your work and home needs.

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.

My wife & I switched to Telegram, which has quite good browser support.

Android only.

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.

This software requires a server component to be run on a mac. It's not self-contained.

Are iMessage communications signed with an apple device specific key? I imagine part of the reason that it has proven to be so difficult to reverse engineer, is that it somehow utilises an apple devices secure enclave?

This appears to be the option he didn't want to use, an always on mac functioning as a proxy server.

No API for airmessage?

Cloud + a probably similar method, but, the process the author used is not efficient in figuring out the private frameworks work. You could do a few things I think that would allow you to debug the framework calls & iMessage itself to understand what is actually going on / how it’s used.

I'm curious if they have a farm of iPhones somewhere to host this off of. They are sending the iMessages from phone numbers -- not email addresses, which means they didn't just get a bunch of Mac Minis and do it the (probably easier) way.

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

Guessing that they are using Apple Business Chat. We've looked at using it, too.

The information was circa 2017, I do believe the kexts and bootloaders for hackintosh configurations have since improved significantly.

Yup. I temporarily switched from an iPhone to an Android BlackBerry when the one with the slide-out keyboard first came out and I did not receive SMS messages from iOS users for the entire duration.

It exists for some retailers, like Home Depot. It doesn’t work like I would expect though, in HD’s case it looked like it was routed through a Salesforce extension.

I used it a couple months ago with Delta Airlines, and it was a great user experience. I wish all companies would use it.

It still exists; Apple themselves uses it for support and I hear some third parties have adopted it. (Though I haven't heard of many people actually using it…)

I tried this but it seemed to not work with Signal.

As someone who learned to properly type on a physical (PC) keyboard, it's mind blowing to me how so many people swipe so many letters on screens.

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.

I did that, actually! Ran into some problems with the ux and lots of issues switching between soft and hard keyboards. I don’t know if the situation has improved since.

In 2017, a macOS VM (even on Mac hardware, iirc) would function impeccably with the sole exception that iMessage would be blocked. Hypervisors (and kexts) have improved considerably since then, however.

Woah, that’s a thing?

Its because they use peer pressure to get you to buy an apple device. You can invite an android user to an imessage group but it apparently downgrades the feature set of the group for everyone, they also color messages from android users differently. Its all designed to discourage talking to android users so they eventually buy an iphone.

Apple is caught in the constant push/pull of "we're compatible with stuff" vs. "there's a reason why you buy a Mac." Curating apps and keeping iMessage for Mac users falls into the latter category right now. Might be different tomorrow.

Apple is the biggest example in the tech industry right now of vertical integration; that a company controls not only the end product that they sell but also the component parts.

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.

It's the same reason BlackBerry refused to make BBM available on other platforms (although I believe they actually did just that a couple of years ago when no one even remembered what BlackBerry was, perhaps after the company name was sold to a different manufacturer).

That's not iMessage for Windows.

"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."

Facetime was announced as an open standard to be. It is speculated that it never came to light because of a patent dispute[1].

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

iMessage motivates people to people buy iPhones instead of Android when everyone else in a social circle has it. Why should Apple give up on that? What will Apple gain from making it ubiquitous? It would in fact disappoint many people as now they can't use their phone to distance themselves from the people who don't have that blue circle.

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

Who's "we all" here? The "wider software community"? There are certainly tens of millions of users of FaceTime; I'd wager more than the entire population of the "wider software community".

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...

Absolutely have been saying this for years. It’s ridiculous for iMessage to be a walled garden. How would it be if emails from iPhone could only go to other iPhones? Yet shrink the email and put a blue bubble around it and that’s just fine.

I think Google Duo and WhatsApp are the competitors to Facetime. Zoom is more of a competitor in the video conferencing space along with Google Meet, Skype for Business and Cisco WebEx. Regular Skype is more of a competitor in the all-in-one consumer messaging space along with Google Hangouts.

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

the state of messaging is quite depressing. You have apple doing its own thing and with apparently no intention to have its communication service on all the major platform.

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.

Apple built iMessage and FaceTime to move Apple devices. Why would or should they open it? Not to mention, it is probably tied into the hardware at a deep level — it clearly works much better on more modern phones, and better on iOS than MacOS.

I'd read about an article how there is a significant "dark" black hat companies which do nothing but dig up into the open source codes to find the exploits. They invest big time to develop proprietary tools for autonomous scanning of latest vulnerabilities. Such exploits then get sold for millions of dollars. They do open source code scanning to everything from popular Python packages to popular Chrome extensions to Office plugins to Linux kernel to open source phone apps.

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.

Even in an all Apple ecosystem my family is using Zoom because we can't add multiple Facetime people to a call for some reason and there is no messaging explaining why.

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.

The main selling point of Zoom seems to be their handling of large group conferences though.

Is't facetime pretty must a standard softphone (eg: sip/srtp) using h264? i wonder if it's only "closed" due to authentication concerns there's not much else to "open up" that's not already

IIRC, it was Facetime he said that about. I believe it ended up there were legal obstacles (plus he allegedly made the statement off the cuff), but I could be wrong.