imessage VS airmessage-web

The nothing website claims:

> Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you're sending and receiving.

> Nothing is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird's architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey. Messages are not stored on Sunbird's servers and are only live on your device – once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device.

From: https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats

The Verge claims:

> Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “...it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”

From: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-i...

It seems to me like if they are doing the typical thing of using a bridge like https://github.com/mautrix/imessage then that isn't really E2EE, the messages are being stored, and could be accessed by Sunbird. I don't really see how their claims could be true. Does anyone know? Am I missing something?

If you're willing to dive deep into self-hosting, the open source chat protocol Matrix.org has support for an in-development iMessage bridge. Once you get it to work, there's a Matrix.org client on KaiOS devices called Chooj (sideloading guide) made by Farooq that you can use to access the chat.

iMessage bridge

The disadvantage of not offering an API for iMessage is that there is no easy way to block clients. Apps like Bluebubbles have to work by being installed on an actual Mac and scraping messages from iMessage and Beeper uses a similar architecture[0]. Presumably they have a data centre full of actual macs (or VMs).

[0] https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

I have an old Mac Mini rotting on a shelf in my cupboard which is my bridge to the world of Apple shit. It primarily runs two bits of software: OpenHaystack, which I used to run my own object trackers over the Apple Find My network and Mautrix iMessage which I used to access iMessage via Matrix on my Android and Windows devices.

I've switched from iPhone to a de-googled Android device, and am generally trying to extract myself from google and apple ecosystem lock-in. The last piece for me is trying to find a reasonable bridge for iMessages - but the baseline requirement is to have a Mac PC running 24x7 to act as a bridge for matrix or airmessage. Here's my question: the hardware and software requirements for iMessages are pretty minimal. MacOS Big Sur implemented a few messaging bits like inline replies which I'd like to keep, so that's my OS baseline. Has anyone managed to strip down a hackintosh hardware installation to absolutely minimal proxmox hardware demands (e.g. ram/cores)? If so, got a recommendation on an efficient build process?

I know how crazy it is in America, but I think at leat the HN crowd wouldn't be participating in that madness.

If you are disparate enough, you can use a matrix bridge to get blue bubbles from anywhere

https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

Yes, tulir works for beeper. But I think they stopped doing that iPhone thing, and if you use iOS there are less features available: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

I have an Android phone and if you're desperate you can buy an old Mac Mini and set up an iMessage bridge over Matrix (https://github.com/mautrix/imessage) or BlueBubbles to work around this. I do not recommend it though as it locks you into a facet of the Apple ecosystem.

What I do is have a Mac Mini acting as a server and run Airmessage on it, you can access your iMessages via a webpage on any device: https://web.airmessage.org/

If you have a mac in your house, you can install BlueBubbles on it and give yourself nearly full iMessage capabilities on any non-Apple device. AirMessage a a simpler but less featureful alternative. My wife and I have ours set up on a mac mini and can happily use any device we want without facing the ire of friends and family - as long as you add your email address instead of your phone number to conversations.

When I launched web.airmessage.org and signed in with MS Edge, it said "hey theres a windows app for this on the store, do you want to download it?" And I did, and its great! In my case both the web interface and the app show conversations that Im not sure how to delete, and yet they have been deleted on my iphone. They are spam texts

I use AirMessage for this. I installed the server app on an old iMac I have, and open a tab on my Windows computer pointed to web.airmessage.org

should I set this in web.airmessage.org ? i can't find Settings here. neither in AirMessage server.

Everything is working, except for one thing. I cannot seem to get AirMesssage For Web (web.airmessage.org) to work on my iPad and/or iPhone. What happens is that when I go to that URL, it loads the website with the "Sign In To Google" button. Sometimes when I click on the button, nothing happens. Sometimes when I click on the button, it brings up the Google Accounts chooser, but then when I click on the account that is connected to AirMessage, it just brings me back to the AirMessage For Web page with the "Sign In To Google" button again. It never loads up my iMessages and keeps me in a sign-in loop.

Why it's not flawless: Occasionally the Android app doesn't want to connect to the server for whatever reason, but in that case I just go to web.airmessage.org and text from there using my phone's web browser. It usually resolves itself in the app within a few minutes, Sometimes the app doesn't want to send/download pictures/videos as well. For that, I use the same workaround as before and just use the web text service. I have never had a situation where I wasn't able to get a message out through either the app or the website. I only have to manually fix the server maybe 2-5 times a year when the computer crashes or a power-outage occurs.

Way easier to just run it in a browser https://web.airmessage.org/

Hey guys! My web.airmessage.org is bugging out. it wont save any new messages, and when i refresh the page, it just reverts back to "yesterday morning". doesn't download any new messages.