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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

This is a significant trade-off, of course, but it is also the only secure way to use iMessage on Android as I understand it. Otherwise, you would have to trust a third party with your Apple ID credentials and iMessage signing key.

Plus, you can always run a Hackintosh or use macOS in a VM, although that can be a lot of work depending on your computer hardware.

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> it is also the only secure way to use iMessage on Android as I understand it

I'm not very familiar with the workings of iMessage but why can't an Android device copy the protocol and make the relevant API calls directly?

Might be a violation of ToS

IIRC, it’s more than just an API, Apple has implemented device specific signing that isn’t possible to replicate in this way, as far as I can recall. I don’t know the full details but I know this is part of the reason nobody has really even attempted to fly under the radar this way. It’s part of what’s downloaded on fresh installs of the operating system (hence why it sometimes works in a VM, though I’ve heard with each release iMessage is harder to get working in a VM)

Yes, but you could emulate that too. If a Hackintosh can validate itself as an authentic Apple computer, an app that replicates all the same calls to Apple's servers that that Hackintosh makes should be able to do just as well.

I suppose it’s certainly possible. But a Hackintosh operates at a very low level, making macOS believe it is running on supported hardware. It doesn’t need to know how the OS authenticates itself to iMessage. My suspicion is that disassembling that whole process would take a lot of work (and be very brittle, because Apple would probably deliberately break it)

It presumably also integrates into the OS at a deep level: the system that pushes messages to the computer is not iMessage specific, it’s OS-level. So you’d need to reverse engineer that, too.

iMessage needs to support older versions of macOS and iOS, so I suspect someone who cracks however identityservicesd works will have the ability to make this work "permanently".

This has been done in the past, but it's a violation of their ToS and gets shut down fast.

"Otherwise, you would have to trust a third party with your Apple ID credentials and iMessage signing key."

Is that possible ?

I'd like to be able to send/receive "imessages" (and prompt typing ellipses, etc.) from a twilio number. It's low priority, but an interesting problem ...

Is imessage an open spec somewhere wherein you could use API credentials and interface with it, arbitrarily ?

Both the a hackintosh and VM solutions are very hard if you want full app store & I message support. Getting the OS running is fairly easy, but passing all the security checks is very hard.

It sounds like it's a been a while since you've played around with Hackintosh. I have an AMD/OpenCore system running with full App Store, iMessage, handoff, continuity, etc working flawlessly. Assuming you find a serial number that is not already in use, it should all be functional on first boot.

Yep! There are even tools (mentioned in the OpenCore install guide) that automate finding serial numbers and board IDs and all of the other parameters required for that functionality to work. Even though I couldn't get my graphics card working at first boot on my computer, it still logged me into iMessage automatically.

Not true anymore for "modern" Hackintosh with OpenCore or Clover. Of course you need to set some parameters correctly, but it is way, waaay more easy and stabile than in the old days.

Not sure about iMessage but the App Store has always worked fine in hackintosh and in virtual machines, at least in my experience.

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