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Comment by viggity | Hacker News Reader

If someone at Apple is reading this, please, for the love of god, let me pay to have iMessage on my windows machine. I'd easily pay $100/year.

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I can't see them loosening access to iMessage willingly. It's like the App Store: a moat to keep users confined to the Apple ecosystem. Allowing users choice and freedom is anathema to Apple's business model.

Apple seems to be on friendlier terms with Windows these days. Their apps are getting better on Windows, and they are looking to support their PassKey infrastructure on Windows. With paid subscription services like Apple TV and Apple Music they have an increasing reason to support all of a user's devices and mixed ecosystem devices are statistically the norm.

iMessage is not its own subscription service yet, but the days where it was explicitly an Apple hardware moat may be drawing to a close the more that Apple finds increased relevance (and shareholder appeal) in software as a service. I expect that if that were to happen, Apple might try to make a good marketing effort of "works best on Apple hardware" and Apple might never support iMessage on Android, but Windows support sounds oddly plausible in 2023.

The strongest arugement I heard that Apple will not open iMessage to other platforms at this point is spam-prevention. When was the last time you received a spam iMessage compared to an SMS? That spam prevention hinges on real Apple hardware.

Outside of political spam, I receive far more iMessage spam than SMS spam.

I would at least be content with Apple allowing an iPhone to be tethered to a Windows iMessage app through an official channel, similar to how Signal Desktop works.

A year or so back there was an HN discussion about a service that offered an all-in-one messaging app for most of the major services (including iMessage), but for the life of me I'm having trouble remembering their name. As I recall, they were using a pile of older iPhones that could still be jailbroken and a custom shim to get messages from the phone to their server. Clever, though that method would eventually hit a wall if jailbreaking stopped being feasible.

That was Beeper. https://www.beeper.com/ There are a few others like AirDroid out there now too. All are still not really great as if you were on the native platform

The jailbreak way is more an easy way for you to do it if you want to host it yourself. When you have them do it you're Apple account is signed in on a Mac Mini hosted in a datacenter (not sure if it's theres or through one of the many services to do that through). This is not only much easier to scale but is done in macOS where you can just straight up disable OS security if you tell it you really want to.

My iMessage bridge is hosted on "Beeper Mac #84" according to my Apple account page which shows logged in clients.

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