Comment by derefr
6 years ago
> 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.)
You would presume incorrectly. iMessage extensions use native code + rendering. It is probably the main reason why these things aren’t available on macOS.
The extensions do that on iOS, yes. But the extension has to show up as something when a macOS client sees it, similarly to how Slack add-on messages have to be delivered as something to non-Slack UAs, e.g. bots.
It'll show a static image and some additional supporting text: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/messages/msmessage...