sparky , 8 months ago

Former Google and current Apple engineer here; this is definitely an insecure workaround with a lot of flaws. I think Beeper is basically doing the same.

The reality is that while we do have a lot of walled garden policies for business reasons (which I don’t love), iMessage and FaceTime are a bit more complicated than that, tightly coupled around the hardware encryption and keystore in the TPM in our devices. Unwinding this would be undesirable from a compatibility perspective as it would break any Apple devices not updated immediately to new OS versions that change the encryption scheme.

So the only way to plug into iMessage per se is a weird workaround like this where you basically AppleScript automate the Messages app on a Mac with its shields down.

There’s not a great way to fix this problem which is largely why we are bringing RCS support to iOS 18 to hopefully make such things moot.

But that said even as an employee I don’t think iMessage is a great example of a modern chat app. I mean, it’s better than SMS which is what it sought out to replace. But compared to an actual chat app - something like Telegram - it doesn’t hold up.