You will never get iMessage on Android. You can run a relay on your Mac, or someone else’s Mac, and that’s it. That’s your only option.
It should have been obvious before Beeper Mini, but if you ever find a way to actually get iMessage on Android, its because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in iMessage’s security, in which case they will have it “patched” within days.
You can get iMessage on Android perfectly fine, as long as you can extract a key from an iPhone or a Mac. It’s just a chat protocol. There’s a bit of fancy pants encryption and signatures going on, but I the end it’s nothing special.
There are practical limitations (Android requiring workarounds to maintain a connection to the Apple notification servers, for one) but with enough reverse engineering, it’s quite possible to set up a bit perfect iMessage client that Apple cannot detect. Hell, in theory someone could set up a lightweight VM that runs select versions of the native iMessage app.
Until Apple starts doing remote hardware attestation (which I believe they still don’t), there will be workarounds. When they do switch to remote attestation, many of their own devices will stop working.
Beeper went wrong because they didn’t implement an undistinguishable client. They didn’t want to, either, it seems. They got what they wanted, though: news outlets published about their app everywhere, and even the American government now cares about Apple’s American chat monopoly.
You will never get iMessage on Android. You can run a relay on your Mac, or someone else’s Mac, and that’s it. That’s your only option.
It should have been obvious before Beeper Mini, but if you ever find a way to actually get iMessage on Android, its because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in iMessage’s security, in which case they will have it “patched” within days.
You can get iMessage on Android perfectly fine, as long as you can extract a key from an iPhone or a Mac. It’s just a chat protocol. There’s a bit of fancy pants encryption and signatures going on, but I the end it’s nothing special.
There are practical limitations (Android requiring workarounds to maintain a connection to the Apple notification servers, for one) but with enough reverse engineering, it’s quite possible to set up a bit perfect iMessage client that Apple cannot detect. Hell, in theory someone could set up a lightweight VM that runs select versions of the native iMessage app.
Until Apple starts doing remote hardware attestation (which I believe they still don’t), there will be workarounds. When they do switch to remote attestation, many of their own devices will stop working.
Beeper went wrong because they didn’t implement an undistinguishable client. They didn’t want to, either, it seems. They got what they wanted, though: news outlets published about their app everywhere, and even the American government now cares about Apple’s American chat monopoly.
Okay but…you can’t.