Hacker News Reader

Comment by Solvency | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity couldn't one recreate Twilio just by running an extended version of this from a Macbook?

You could read all inbound messages from the Messages app and reply as well. You could even hook it up to a local LLM and run a small support agent.

Is there ANY reason a small business owner couldn't do this and avoid paying SaaS fees?

View on HN

Unfortunately no, Apple has usage limits on iMessage / SMS relaying. Many people hack around this, SendBlue.co being the only long running service, but it's full of the graveyard of folks trying to do this.

What does this mean in practice? I leave my Messages app on my laptop open all day and correspond entirely through it with family. Since I'm typing I send messages rapidly at volume. I've never once hit a limit. Think hundreds of responses a day.

If an app running on my machine has subclassed the Messages app and is reading strings and sending hit strokes to the (Send) button on my behalf, how can Apple possibly rate limit this?

It's probably like those email providers that allows you some number of outbound emails per, but it's like 200 - 1000. High enough that most users won't ever notice, but low enough that there's no way to use the service commercially.

It means test on prod and find out

(lose your main iCloud account... 'bold move Cotton')

By number of different recipients?

It only works for iMessage texts, unfortunately.

But the Messages application can send texts to non-iPhone numbers...

I tried sending to a non iMessage number, it failed to send, but there may be a way.

Might work in areas with huge iMessage market share like North America - I know probably two people with the "green texts"

It can also work for SMSs with some changes in the applescript. We made a very similar tool that use to send automated SMSs to experiment participants 2 times per day. The setup is similar and there is a bash script that is called using cron twice per day and calls a matlab script (similar to the python script here) that calls an applescript. This is the applescript that, in practice, sends iMessage to those with iphone and SMS to those without

https://github.com/earlychildcog/automate_sms_to_participant...

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”

People (and corporations) will pay a lot of money to have someone else manage and maintain their infrastructure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com