Have any of you android users setup an iMessage server such as BoueBubbles or AirMessage? Or some similar?
If so, how well does it work? Is only an apple account required? Do apple users send your email an iMessage? Also, was it easy to setup?
Thanks!!!
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I own a Mac and a pixel 8. I use blue bubbles. It works great. Don’t have any issues with it. When you send messages through it, it goes through your email associated with your iCloud account
Does your mac need to act as a server?
Yeah. There’s an option with blue bubbles on the Mac that keeps it awake. I just always keep the lid open
Nice! Thanks so much!
I set up AirMessage, and it is very glitchy. I can’t message some people because I get an error every time. You need to own a Mac to set it up, and it needs to always be awake. So if you have a laptop, it doesn’t really work. There is an option to give your apple login info to a third party, and they will run it on their Mac, but I don’t trust that at all.
Nah. Fuck em. I don’t need iMessage.
Agreed. However, iMessage is better than sms. And I am trying my best to remove sms from my life
Signal
Again agreed, however some people either won’t switch, or it would be more convenient to just use iMessage
Well yea, any IP-based messenger is better than SMS. iMessage is just Apple’s implementation which only works with Apple devices.
Seems to me the people who have a comm issue are the ones choosing to use a messenger that only works on one platform.
I’m not on that platform, and neither is ~80% of the world.
It’s mostly a north american problem as far as I know. In Germany more than 80% of the people use WhatsApp. Almost no one uses sms anymore.
If the alternative is sms I understand why people like iMessage so much.
Edit: Some more data, it seems like iMessage has about as many users as Signal, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/867539/top-active-social-media-platforms-in-germany/
It’s been on my agenda for a while to set up a Matrix server with an iMessage bridge with the idea I could interact with all of my message protocols from one place. I haven’t gotten around to it, but it might be worth a look.
I just use Beeper. I had my own Matrix server up but getting all the bridges to work was cumbersome.
Hmmm how is Beeper? Isn’t it run on someone’s Mac instead of your own? Is it FOSS?
Beeper’s software stack is partly open source. They develop the mautrix bridges for WhatsApp, Signal, Discord and many more as open source.
What they keep closed source is their clients (and probably infrastructure).
The documentation to host their bridges is great [1] and the bridges works with most server implementaions (I know of Synapse, Dendrite & Conduit).
I’m running signal and whatsapp bridges for years now without problems, but it’s definitely simpler to pay for Beeper.
The problem with these bridges is that they have to decrypt messages and encrypt them again with matrix. This means anyone who controls the server running bridges has access to your messages. Self-hosting means I’m still in control of my data.
