And from what I’ve looked through so far of the pypush code it seems pretty legit.
IMessage being only for iPhones is officially over.
This isn’t something Apple can just block or patch without also affecting every iPhone that doesn’t download the patch update beforehand. Any device that isn’t patched in advance will also lose access to iMessage.
It’s actually quite impressive how it is done and it’s truly innovative. It’s very much a significant step forward compared to the implementations we have seen before.
No, this works completely different. The iMessage protocol has been reverse engineered so there are no 3rd party servers and the app communicates directly with apple.
Exactly. I don’t understand the interest and effort put in these makeshift solutions to integrate into a closed ecosystem managed by a company with so little interest in building interoperable solutions.
They’re a cancer to the computing industry that is metastasizing, let’s not help them at that.
I don’t disagree with you, but open source has a long history of this sort of hostile forced-interoperability. Look at stuff like uBlock, there’s a real case to be made that it shouldn’t need to exist, and yet someone built it. Hostile “patching” of proprietary systems is not ideal, but fix barriers help in the short term.
Exactly, either setting themselves as an alternative to Twilio, or to be acquired by them. Companies will pay more than $2/month/user for customer engagement on all platforms.
I’m not sure what the business model is here (I have no interest in iMessage) but unlike the previous ones this solution doesn’t require a Mac mini farm. Messages are sent directly from the Android device.
So it doesn’t require a monthly fee to be profitable.
When people don’t know how things work, and can only associate bubble color with bad images, video, and group messaging issues, then bubble color is meaningful.
It has become for teens. It’s like wearing the right brand. To then, if you’re a green bubble, shame on you.
Of course it originates from the degraded experience, but at the moment, it all came down to the color of the bubble without taking into consideration the features/experience.
Total time spent between all of the discussion, hand-wringing, programming, and reporting, this has got to be be pretty high on the list of colossal time-wasters.
It’s not the color of the bubble. It’s the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn’t iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
The discussion shouldn’t be about what phone has subpar MMS support, it should be about why we’re still using MMS/SMS in the first place. Google has developed RCS and Apple has developed iMessage. The difference is that Apple has already decided not to release an iMessage client on Android, while Google has made public and private attempts to get Apple to adopt RCS instead of using MMS as a fallback.
Just as a side note, I don’t think either corporation are the “good guys”, but my desire to get E2EE and full resolution photos and videos cross platform make my goals temporarily align with Google in this particular case.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
It’s obvious they’re restricting the quality but it could be that they implemented the MMS handling in 2008, when other phones could only support 3gp and the carriers couldn’t handle high bandwidth. I’d bet they haven’t bothered to update it since, and do the absolute bare minimum to keep it compliant with the carriers.
Over MMS? Without quality loss? To someone not on the same network?
No way was Verizon allowing 10MB videos over MMS in 2006. They don't today. And that was the really early days of MMS when you were lucky if anything got delivered.
It's not gaslighting to be skeptical. There's way way too much misinformation, guesswork, misinterpretation, etc happening in this thread . Yeah, I'm real skeptical. I even sent you links from Verizon about their limits that you've ignored. That's not "gaslighting".
Verizon says they currently supports 100MB MMS if you're using their proprietary app. What are you using? And you're not using RCS for this "unlimited" Verizon->Verizon texting you've done recently (since you're saying today they support unlimited)? That also seems weird.
I can also send a 50MB file over ATT MMS. It doesn't arrive 50MB.
I just had my Samsung-using friend send me (Motorola) a video on MMS . The quality suuuucked. We're both on AT&T.
Its totally valid I think to blame Apple for not supporting RCS earlier (and for their reasoning behind it - platform locking). But blaming them for MMS quality sucking is pretty wrong. That's almost entirely on the carriers.
Edit: actually I'm not even sure it's fair to fully blame Apple. Google is supporting it via their Messenger but only because they're paying for a ton of the infrastructure themselves (and likely justifying it by scraping every single message people are sending with it). Carriers have been notoriously bad about supporting it.
Might be more valid to blame Apple for never opening iMessage to other platforms. You could also say the same about other messaging system interop limitations, too.
No… When you send a “blue bubble” photo on an iPhone the file size is around 1.5MB. When you send a “green bubble” photo I think they’re resized down to less than 300KB.
Any photo larger than that won’t be delivered by some carriers. Also while iMessage photos default to HEIF format - the same compression algorithm as Blue Ray videos - MMS uses JPEG which doesn’t have a target file size feature. All you have is the width/height in pixels and an arbitrary “quality” scale.
To guarantee your photo will never be over 300KB you need to set the width/height/quality to a number that will often be under 100KB… and that’s what Apple does.
Android has a size setting, and you’ll get a delivery failure error if you set it too high for the recipient’s carrier… a lot of carriers do support larger photos… But Apple doesn’t bother with that - they want it to “just work”. Which means 100KB for green bubble photos.
The reality is quality is always going to suffer - converting an image from HEIF to JPEG is a bad idea - it’ll never look anywhere near as good as the original no matter what resolution or quality the compression is set to.
Also… iPhones don’t even take ordinary photos… by default every “photo” is a short video. When you send those to another iPhone, they get the video. Green bubbles either get a still image or worse a 100KB five second video.
If you own an iPhone, when you’re texting with a person who uses iMessage, your outgoing messages have a blue background. When you’re texting with someone who doesn’t or can’t use iMessage (usually because they use an Android device) your outgoing messages have a green background. And since the message backgrounds are kind of shaped like speech bubbles from comics, they’re called bubbles.
The design is noticeably worse for the green bubbles; the contrast isn’t as good and the color scheme doesn’t seem to match as well as with the blue bubbles. And the fact that it’s the iPhone users’ outgoing messages—not the message of their recipient—that show up in this lower-fidelity way has a pretty powerful psychological impact.
Ostensibly the color difference is so that users know when their messages are being encrypted. But in reality, it seems pretty clear that Apple keeps this in place as a marketing tool, to encourage peer pressure so that users encourage other users to get iPhones.
And it works. Studies and reports keep coming out showing that, among high school students particularly, peer pressure against Android users is considerable; and even for adults, it’s not uncommon for Android users to be left off of group texts entirely.
There are other, more meaningful differences: like the fact that non-iMessage users receive photos and videos in much worse quality (which Apple’s upcoming RCS support should fix), and chats are only end-to-end encrypted between iPhones (which Apple’s implementation of RCS probably won’t fix). But the green and blue bubbles (which RCS definitely won’t fix) are, by Apple’s design, the thing that everyone is hung up on.
It’s still an iPhone issue of butchering quality when sending over MMS. Carriers are partly to blame, but even on Verizon which has no apparent MMS size limit, iPhones till butcher images.
See my other comments. I’ve tested this. It’s Apple making anything non-iMessage seem inferior. Not that they have to, but it makes people think iPhone is superior when it’s by design.
Nah I’m good. I’m not getting paid to be your tech support here, if you’re not going to pay enough attention to understand plain English that’s on you.
It’s cool silly, at least I’m able to write cogent statements.
Original statement was
It’s not the color of the bubble. It’s the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn’t iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
All you said was a half-coherent statement about sending a link instead, to which I attempted to respond. Now you can’t handle getting called out for having spaghetti for neural pathways, and here we are. Let me know if I need to buy you some crayons for further explanation.
When you send an MMS, it’s uploaded to a server via http where a link is generated. Then the link is sent to the other phone, where the MMS service retrieves the file via that link. We just don’t see it happening.
Yes, but iPhone people are typically pretty tough to convince. The “it just works” branding is so strong that they think any flaw must be in the non-iPhone user.
Yeah, my sister-in-law has an iPhone and all of my wife’s pics and videos turn to garbage in transit. For the longest my SIL just thought Android cameras were terrible and it locked her in to iPhones at upgrade time - which is exactly what Apple intended.
And Apple forcing shit quality on ALL MMS, even when the carrier allows higher quality/size.
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
What’s really frustrating is MMS is just a web server on the other end. Since the time of data connections (~2005) vendors could’ve easily made it so MMS on data-capable devices is transported to the web server over data rather than through the voice channel frames (which is what SMS and MMS do).
Though if you had a data-capable device back then, you had to get a data plan to send MMS, so apparently this is what they were doing. They just don’t want to upgrade the MMS hosting servers and have the extra traffic.
I mean, I have the same problem on Android talking to android friends who don't use an rcs-coompatible messaging app. Which is more rare than it used to be, but still.
Because Apple decided all media over SMS should be sent in a shitty downgraded form.
This is all on Apple wanting to make iMessage look better than SMS, and Apple look better than everyone else (and to be fair, iMessage is the right approach to the SMS issue, just not as a walled-garden version).
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
Its already available for download and use, but I can’t find the source anywhere other than a Python proof of concept project that beeper purchased the rights to to make this app.
Kind of, but it’s more complicated. I’m not sure if the app itself will be open source, but currently, the method they use is. Either way, the hardest part is already done, but you still need a client (maybe; they might open-source it) and a notification server. I’m planning to attempt to build a Matrix bridge if I have enough time and it’s not beyond my skills, but if you don’t want the messages to be decrypted by the server, making the notification server and maybe client would be really difficult.
All messages/etc are sent using iMessage encryption directly between your phone and Apple’s iMessage servers.
But there is no Android push notifications from Apple’s servers.
So in order to be notified about new messages in a timely manner without killing your battery/data plan a cloud server is required to trigger your phone that a message has arrived so your phone can then request the message from Apple’s servers.
This is actually a really common implementation, many apps use Firebase or similar to handle push notifications that are only used to trigger a “pull” of a larger chunk of data.
The push notifications being used here don’t contain any private data, they just tell your device when to collect that private data securely.
This is very different to the technology used in the free/wait-list Beeper Cloud app and all the other previous attempts at an iMessage for Android app.
To summarize:
All messages are sent directly between your device and Apple’s servers. You do not even need an AppleID. There is a cloud server involved but it’s only job is to send push notifications to Android so they app knows when to download new messages (securely with iMessage encryption) from Apple’s servers.
No message contents are sent through the cloud server, it just notifies your device when there are new messages. This is necessary because Apple servers obviously do not support Android push notifications.
Running BlueBubbles at the moment, eagerly awaiting someone to build a self hosted implementation of this so I can stop relying on my macos VM.
This implementation I think also allows you to use the phone number of your android device, which is a feature that not even the BlueBubbles method has been able to do.
Running BlueBubbles at the moment, eagerly awaiting someone to build a self hosted implementation of this so I can stop relying on my macos VM.
Beeper Mini does not require a Mac VM or any Apple products. There’s no cloud proxy to self host. It registers your phone number directly with Apple’s servers, you don’t even need an AppleID at all, just like on an iPhone.
It’s indistinguishable from an iPhone on Apple’s end and your iMessage encryption keys never leave your phone
It’s a bridge for notifications. Since Apple’s APN notification servers require a persistent connection to work, meaning that the application must be running continuously to receive notifications, the Beeper servers push those notifications (messages) to your phone.
This means that the application does not need to be running continuously to receive messages.
Exactly. They host the Apple equivalent to GMS, which is called APN (or is it ANP? Apple Notification Protocol? I forget, but the Bubbler Mini devs explain it well)
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it always seems to me that kids are living in a world where they need to as present in their digital realities as much, if not more than, their actual ones. At work it seems like they are trying to be in two places at once sometimes.
Most kids are clueless with tech to be honest. Yes they know how to use it, but they have no idea how it works behind the scenes. This has pretty scary consequences on how they are easily manipulated or scammed.
Some of them are very smart, sure, but on average I’d say they are less tech savvy than Gen X and millennials who grew up at a time you couldn’t use computers without some kind of knowledge of how it works (and smartphones didn’t exist).
Right, I have to teach shortcuts to our young intern the exact same way as i had to do with my grandma. All the ui’s are so smooth now that even a context menu is too much.
Sunbird just relayed messages back and forth using a Mac mini in a warehouse. They probably had something that read the messages app on there and sent to their app on the phone through their servers, and seemingly forgot to encrypt anything during this process.
This is actually sending messages as iMessage. It’s been reverse engineered which is an incredible feat, iMessage has been out like …10+ years? And no one figured it out yet until this 16yr old rocks up.
Doesn’t iMessage require some sort of Apple-issued device id? A key, unique to a device, hard-coded in the SoC? (which is easy to block if over-used).
Which is why hackintoshes used to require crazy workarounds to get this working, even with Apple’s own software, if I remember correctly (never tried myself, could be wrong).
It does, the article actually mentions that. Yes, they did get around or reverse-engineer it. The article does not describe how, though I imagine it’s doing the same sort of workaround that Hackintoshes have to do. Honestly, it’s quite a feat.
It’s not the only difference. It indicates the difference in experience parties receive. Higher quality pictures & video, E2E encryption are some of the differences. I’m not shamed for being on android but I can’t have the same quality conversations without convincing lots of people to use something like signal (which I do use with those I have convinced).
After 3 years of use of signal, I have converted my Mom which cares about privacy too from shows she seen. Which allowed us to convert my Brother, with it being the main discussion app. I also converted my SO because of a problem we had on messenger that was scary, finally I was able to move my Best friend, which is also a member of the DND group I started which moved to Signal because others (Brother, Best Friend) where already on Signal
I got lucky. Back when that privacy scare with Whatsapp made mainstream news my Aunt asked in the extended family chat what alternatives there were. I responded that I use SIgnal with my friends (all 2 of them on Signal at the time) and just like that everybody switched. 2 hours later my entire paternal family are on Signal, and still are.
Damn I should have pushed harder when that incident with WhatsApp was all over the news. Only a few of my friends and a couple of family members switched.
Right now someone in my family is in China, and has been there for a decade now. For that, and because more where in China before, our family group is on WeChat. And the years left of work for them in China is coming slowly to an end, and I am extatic for the day I’ll propose we move to Signal and away from this 2,71GB app
I have to convince every one of my friends to switch because they all use SMS/iMessage. Outside of the US, you would have to convince every one of your friends to switch from WhatsApp.
The hardest thing about switching communication apps is that you have to convince everyone you talk with to switch as well. I’m stuck in WhatsApp because that’s what my friends and family all use.
Right? I feel it’s really snobby and disingenuous to just snap back and say “just ditch that and use so and so messaging app”, as if messaging platforms didn’t require your direct peers to also use them. As long as messaging platforms operate as walled gardens, we have little say on what apps we use. We’re at the mercy of the general populace and that’s all there is to it, at least until the DMA changes things. I really tried to make people jump ship from WhatsApp to telegram during what seemed like a mass exodus from even businesses (yeah bad choice but I didn’t know back then), ended up back on WhatsApp some 3 months later with my tail between my legs, nobody stayed on telegram even though a ton of people downloaded it and jumped in. Now imagine trying to get them all to use a privacy-focused app that gives them a hard time using it in multiple devices. Convenience is the reason why Meta, Apple, Google, MSFT, etc. are on top. You can’t expect the general populace to sacrifice it for privacy, not after continuously giving up freedom and privacy for the sake of convenience for decades in the digital space.
People who say that are essentially saying “stop using the messaging app that allows you to talk to everyone regardless of platform and use a proprietary walled garden where you can only talk with those people also using that same app.”
At least the iPhone messages app lets you send SMS and iMessage, switching seamlessly.
I just said fuck it one day, deleted WhatsApp and explained to family and friends why I did it. Slowly but surely, almost everyone switched.
But I do realize this will not work for everybody. Your contacts have the same right to use their phone as they see fit as you do, after all. And this kind of freedom is something super important, too.
Gotta find the compromise that works for both parties. If there is one to find, that is.
There’s been some social discrimination occurring around people who don’t have blue messages being excluded, or being seen as poor. Not a great use base but the fact I am even aware of blue Vs green messages means some people do.
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