> Will the app be open source?
> Some of the messaging community believes that software that is open source is more secure. It is our view that it is not. The more visibility there is into the infrastructure and code, the easier it is to penetrate it. By design, open source software is distributed in nature. There is no central authority to ensure quality and maintenance and by putting that responsibility on Sunbird, development would not be feasible. Open source vulnerabilities typically stem from poorly written code that leave gaps, which attackers can use to carryout malicious activities.
Not sure I’d be willing to trust them with my Apple ID credentials.
Security by obscurity has failed every time it's been attempted. every. time.
Honestly this is a bad example, given the Linux kernel maintainers shitty attitude towards security bugs, and that Windows these days does have a good security design and has had since Vista/7.
> From other sites, it seems it uses a Mac Mini in a server room as a proxy for iMessage to accomplish this, with the massive drawback of having to provide Nothing your Apple ID credentials.
No thanks, I’m good.
So in their minds, closing the source automatically leads to well written code? And conversely, if they decide to open their (presumably well-written and secure) code in the future, it will somehow magically turn into poorly written and exploitable code? smh
As for why blue bubbles? No idea. Best guess is it's seen as a status thing - green bubbles are non-iPhone users. The only other theory I have is that iMessage is cross-platform with other Apple devices, but that is a strong argument for other messaging apps IMO.
I think I've cracked it though. I've noticed that Apple's service inside the U.S.A. is different to the level of service they provide outside of it (briefly; it's better). This led to the 60%+ market share there, whilst the rest of the world is Android dominated.
iMessage was adding cool features, and it makes sense that if most people you know already have it, there's no reason to look at things like WhatsApp. The rest of the (Android dominated world) had to look for something else for the same fun, which is why WhatsApp is the de facto messaging platform in Europe.
It's completely absurd on so many levels of course, but it appears to be some sort of status attribute.
Another alternative for iMessage is Beeper: https://www.beeper.com/imessage
They both have a waitlist at the moment, but Beeper seems to be opening up to a lot of new people.
I like Signal but haven't been able to get my family members on board.
Edit: Alternative ongoing discussion I noticed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268184 (3 comments)
Let the competition dictate it. No need for the government to get involved. Maybe Google can spend $50 billion to create and market an alternative to iMessage if they truly care instead of these half-ass attempts once every 2 years.
Let's be real here. The only reason Google is pushing this is because they're losing Android users to iOS in the US due to the green/blue bubbles. It's a huge thorn for Android in the US. There is absolutely no reason any government, particularly, EU to push private messaging services to open up so Google can make more profit.
It is letting the competition dictate it by leveling the playing field for a behemoth like Apple with every single other messaging app developer/company.
Large tech companies vertically integrating by using their walled gardens as a weapon is literally the point of the EU regulations. For EU regulators, its not taking a side in apple vs google. Its taking a side in mega corporations vs any other company or person
Apple users are as far as I can tell happy the way it is.
Lots of providers implement RCS, lots of people use it. Perhaps none of the people in your particular region/circle of contacts do? My contacts almost all use signal. The exceptions where there are people that don't have any third party messaging apps, they use RCS. To those people, it's "just like a better MMS", they don't know any different, it just improves their messaging with no effort.
At least for the region I know, there are _a lot_ more Android users than iOS users, and third party messaging is really common. In practice, SMS is the last resort if you have nothing else.
Also I wonder if there is any feature disparity between nothing/songbird and iMessage. In my experience, dealing with these bridges is far from perfect. Especially if one or more of them is closed source like imessage. Never know when a change will happen and break your flows
> Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you're sending and receiving.
> Nothing is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird's architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey. Messages are not stored on Sunbird's servers and are only live on your device – once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device.
From: https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats
The Verge claims:
> Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “...it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”
From: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-i...
It seems to me like if they are doing the typical thing of using a bridge like https://github.com/mautrix/imessage then that isn't really E2EE, the messages are being stored, and could be accessed by Sunbird. I don't really see how their claims could be true. Does anyone know? Am I missing something?
I highly suspect that they’re doing a sort of Matrix hosting thing and can then claim E2EE because Matrix encryption or whatever. But based on how the bridge works (or used to? it’s been some time), then yes - there IS a point in time in which it has to be a plaintext string. Unless they somehow managed to reverse engineer iMessage’s encryption - in which case, well shit, there’s bigger problems now - eventually you have to tell IMCore/imagent and/or ChatKit what it is that you want to send, and who to send it to. And thus it can’t be E2EE otherwise it would be unintelligible to the recipient.
Curious to know if they’re actually talking to imagent and using chatkit (and thus have iMessage features ie typing receipts, sending reactions) or if they’re just using AppleScript and reading the sms db…
God I should go back and rewrite Brooklyn. Now that I’m more than halfway through a CS degree and know how to make a binary search tree and how to not leak memory. lmao
Not to be confused with Mozilla's (if anyone remembers that one):
Their piece about E2E seems especially misleading. I can see how it's "technically true" i.e it's E2E from their servers to the clients + iMessage being E2E itself, but consistent omission of what the E are sounds designed to mislead into thinking that it's device to device. The consequence of a hosted server being pwnd would be catastrophic, essentially meaning full access to the iCloud account.
One of the unspoken underpinnings of iMessage not being available on Android is that the endpoint (the phone) might not be secure, so iMessage had a sort of guarantee that its E2E wasn't compromised via that endpoint. Now I wish Apple would just get an iMessage app on Android out of the door.
I also don't see how they plan to have this be free forever (and what the business model is), especially given the costs associated with hosted Macs.
IMO, it seems like there's a small, if vocal, minority of folks with a deeply weird inferiority complex around blue bubbles and most people don't care at all. None of my Android using friends seem to give a shit.
Consider that if Google’s goal was actually interoperable messaging they could have opened up their own services at any point since they shut down federation for XMPP, and they could right now be offering E2EE as a free community standard rather than something carriers pay Google to get. They spent money buying Jibe and are hoping to use RCS adoption to make that more profitable.
(I'm sure someone out there knows a clique of European iMessage partisans, but that someone is not me!)
I'm curious what people think the game plan and business dynamics is for this decision?
Follow the wind and self-police before more lawsuits are filed or regulations are imposed.
All the cool kids are (finally) starting to do it.
To this day, the best solution for imessage on Android is BlueBubbles or Airmessage. I use both for redundancy. It does require having my Sim in an iPhone, and having a Mac, for everything to be bulletproof.
I don't recommend it to people who aren't technical, but it's helped me with my dating life to have blue messages...
If they wanted to do this properly the answer is to reverse engineer whatever protocol imessage uses under the hood and make their own client - this is most likely just a simple rebrand of the few FOSS tools that already do the same imessage relay thing.
And of course, when apple inevitable does fight this, the average person will chimp out thinking it's apple doing apple things when in reality no other company would allow a third party to harvest their user's credentials and data in this manner.
The following statement from Sunbird makes no sense, and only serves to imply that they don't practice code review: "There is no central authority to ensure quality and maintenance [of open source contributions] and by putting that responsibility on Sunbird, development would not be feasible."
If they're worried that open source contributions will sneak flaws past code review, then they clearly aren't ready to review existing closed source contributions either.
But I think it's because when a message uses iMessage, then there are reactions and other features available, where messages from Android are regular SMS and will lack those
Sending video from iPhone to Android generally gets hypercompressed
I think bubble color implies that SMS and iMessage are interchangeable applications, but they are not.
Bring back the old days, please.
