Sunbird beta to relaunch and rejuvenate iMessage for Android

That’s easy: unlimited SMS was common on most mobile plans in the US as early as the mid-2000s. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans had no financial incentive to use WhatsApp.

@9point6 @ardi60 Cross-platform, sure, but most are still controlled by single vendors, like the two billion people using WhatsApp (Meta), the 1.3 billion using WeChat, the 930 million using Messenger (Meta again), etc…

They don't care so much about it. They're just lazy. iMessage is the default messaging system, and it always works because it has SMS fallback. And Apple doesn't allow you to use any other messenger with the same functionality. So they were essentially forced into it.

Other countries only moved to other platforms because carriers charged per-message for SMS.

It wasn't some smooth-brained European collective brilliance.

Because Americans are obsessed with iphones, as a status symbol and "American" product and it's a default...no effort required.

i assume you're using the metric system too then?

Most of my family here in Australia use iPhones, and by extension, iMessage. Granted, they also use FB Messenger, Snapchat and all the rest, but mainly iMessage. It's the default and it works for them.

I can assure you that this is not a thing exclusive to the US.

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.