There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works

Exactly. I don't understand the interest and effort put in these makeshift solutions to integrate into a closed ecosystem managed by a company with so little interest in building interoperable solutions.

They're a cancer to the computing industry that is metastasizing, let's not help them at that.

Fuck apple and their walled garden.

The hardest thing about switching communication apps is that you have to convince everyone you talk with to switch as well. I'm stuck in WhatsApp because that's what my friends and family all use.

There's been some social discrimination occurring around people who don't have blue messages being excluded, or being seen as poor. Not a great use base but the fact I am even aware of blue Vs green messages means some people do.

iPhone users be like "but I paid $1200 for this blue bubble!"

I'd love to, but none of my friends use it unfortunately

At this stage in the game, isn't that basically the only difference?

I've never understood how this became an issue of shaming and exclusion.

Literally just star bellied sneetches.

Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it always seems to me that kids are living in a world where they need to as present in their digital realities as much, if not more than, their actual ones. At work it seems like they are trying to be in two places at once sometimes.

It's what naturally happens when smart people have free time. And teenagers have a lot of that.

Most kids are clueless with tech to be honest. Yes they know how to use it, but they have no idea how it works behind the scenes. This has pretty scary consequences on how they are easily manipulated or scammed.

Some of them are very smart, sure, but on average I'd say they are less tech savvy than Gen X and millennials who grew up at a time you couldn't use computers without some kind of knowledge of how it works (and smartphones didn't exist).

It's the status symbolism of the green bubble vs blue bubble. Here in America we try to show off how rich we are by driving fancy cars, live in giant ridiculous houses, and buying all the latest most expensive tech the day it's released.

You can see me in a fancy car or in front of my mansion, but how do you know i spent way too much money on the phone i text you from? If all texts arrived on your phone in the same color you wouldn't be able to immediately identify which kind of phone i sent the text from.

Now here's the magic: if i send your iphone (bc let's be real, if you don't have an iphone you aren't someone worth talking to) a text, you know it came from an iPhone because the text bubble is blue. If you ever received a text and it was this hideous radioactive snot/puke green... Just delete. Just don't even bother. I can't believe I'm even typing these letters, it feels so gross... But that green bubble means you received a text from someone with an.....Android. 🤮

So there ya go! 😀

Most Americans aren't obsessed at all. They just want to use whatever is easiest, and iMessage is preinstalled and mostly works fine with pretty much everyone. The bias toward default is strong.

It's not the color of the bubble. It's the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.

Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn't iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.

Only happens in Muricaland.

Might be good for business owners, having a single inbox.

Mostly because the iPhone's dominance has led to iMessage being a very popular service over here. But Android users on the receiving end of messages from that service get images and videos in much lower quality, among many other quality losses.

It's not, it's a superficial opinion on color and functionality that apple and Google want you to think is a big deal but in reality it's two companies using two different protocols and they want you to pick up their product over the over. Even Americans don't know why it's a big deal, they see green in iMessage and freak out.

Sunbird just relayed messages back and forth using a Mac mini in a warehouse. They probably had something that read the messages app on there and sent to their app on the phone through their servers, and seemingly forgot to encrypt anything during this process.

This is actually sending messages as iMessage. It’s been reverse engineered which is an incredible feat, iMessage has been out like …10+ years? And no one figured it out yet until this 16yr old rocks up.

Kind of, but it's more complicated. I'm not sure if the app itself will be open source, but currently, the method they use is. Either way, the hardest part is already done, but you still need a client (maybe; they might open-source it) and a notification server. I'm planning to attempt to build a Matrix bridge if I have enough time and it's not beyond my skills, but if you don't want the messages to be decrypted by the server, making the notification server and maybe client would be really difficult.

Don't see why not. Whats the timline on this?

Facebook Messenger? Dawg... That shit will cripple your phone

1. It's primarily not an active choice. For most iPhone users, it's just what's installed, so it's what they use. The idea that there might be other options doesn't really occur to them; iMessage came out before any of the other options really became popular, it worked well enough, and it was preinstalled, so that's what people learned to use.
2. I don't know what sort of people you are getting into group chats with, but for me it's not exactly people I can just decide to block on a whim. Family groups, employer groups, friends I was already friends with and would lose contact with if I blocked. I'm not going to torpedo my job and all of those relationships by making a big deal over what messaging service we use, even if their use of iMessage makes my experience worse.

I've just gotten set up with it and it appears to be functional. I don't have anyone awake to test with though. I'll report back tomorrow.