blueferry

The linked blueferry doc is excellent. Back in 2020, inspired by a comment on HN, I looked into writing a proxy to send and receive iMessages on Linux through an iPhone connected with Bluetooth Message Access Profile (MAP). I was able to send and receive messages, but I ran into the problem mentioned in the doc in the "Group metadata side channel" section: the bMessages in the inbox included the message originator, but didn't include the recipients, even though the MAP standard says that it "shall" be included (see page 22). I didn't know about ANCS, so it didn't occur to me to use that channel, and without any way to tell what context a message was sent in, I couldn't do threading, so I decided it wasn't worth pursuing. The group messages were the biggest problem, and that's what made me give up, but there were some other issues: - Sh

Hey; Blueferry is an app that connects to your iPhone via Bluetooth to expose an iMessage bridge to your Linux desktop. It supports receiving and sending text-based messages, either 1:1 or in group threads. It requires no phone-side software or jailbreak - just Bluetooth pairing. It accomplishes this by using an undocumented? behavior where enabling ANCS via Bluetooth LE (via https://github.com/pzmarzly/ancs4linux 's technique) causes the phone to accept message capability requests over standard Bluetooth. ancs4linux indicate that they've had mixed success with different BT chipsets on the Linux side, though all of the machines I've been able to test it on have been able to negotiate the connection.