imessage

I didn’t research it that much, but a good place to start would be AirMessage [1] or Mautrix [2]. Both of these require a Mac to work – it might work on a Hackintosh, though, or maybe using same tricks those forks of OpenHaystack use to run without a Mac (no pointers here, sorry). Hope this helps! [1]: https://github.com/airmessage/airmessage-server [2]: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

Nothing/Sunbird lied about how their bridge worked, while Beeper has an open source matrix <-> imessage bridge implementation with docs. Technically they are similar with both using macs in a server farm for their hosted offers. [0] https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

There are open source bridges for iMessage. So I’m not convinced they did. Example: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

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

That option exists today. The iMessage bridge needs to run on a Mac, for obvious reasons, but not only can you self-host it, but you can plug your self-hosted bridge into the public homeserver/client entirely through their settings panel. Here is the bridge repo: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage (tulir is employed by Beeper)

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

You can self-host with https://github.com/mautrix/imessage and https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/

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 . A Mac with SIP disabled is now the recommended method (apparently this can be a VM too!) That iPhone thing was something they did in the beginning, before they used the name Beeper, I forget the name they used. I like the idea of Beeper but self-hosting is important to me, so I use the ansible playbook instead. For hosted services there's also Element One by the way, though that doesn't include the iMessage bridge.

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.

https://github.com/mautrix/imessage That's the bridge Beeper uses. I've got it running on a 2011 MacBook Air on MacOS 10.13, almost zero issues.