Yeah sorry :/ There isn't an iMessage API to talk to, so the only way that anyone has found to bridge with iMessage is to have an instance of macOS running, logged in as you, and to send messages through the iMessage app via AppleScripts and to watch the filesystem for incoming messages. It would be great if there were some API you could use to send messages through, but Apple has worked hard to keep iMessage locked down to Apple devices.

Having said that, I bought an old Mac Mini off of ebay for about $100, and it's been working pretty well for the past year or so. It's not an easy solution, but as far as I know it's the only solution for using iMessage on an Android or non-macOS desktop.

Yikes that’s a lot of work to keep messages synced, but kudos to you for engineering around Apple!

There's (still) no sanctioned way to run os x in a VM (on non apple hw)?

I’ve been wanting to do this since I run a Linux desktop and laptop.

What software did you use to make it work?

https://github.com/matrix-hacks/matrix-puppet-imessage is the main one; i've used it at points and it worked pretty well :)

If you're willing to ditch iOS, Android has Messages for Web (an official service by Google) which lets you view/send SMS from any browser and supports file attachments etc. It's pretty great.

Now this just needs a matrix bridge

It's great. I use it all day, for just the reasons outlined above.

If you are willing to wade in gray, you can make a virtual machine Mac for this.

given iMessage's DRM looks superficially to stretch down to the silicon, I'm wondering if a hackintosh or VM actually solves the problem here...

At the moment there are still supported Macs without hardware security, a Macbook Pro 2013 for example. It should work OK for the time being.

As someone actively blocked by Apple's restrictions on development, care to share a link to an up-to-date, working guide on how to do this?

The best solution here is to convince your friends to move to Matrix too.

Pulse sms does that with android, don't know if it exists in iphone.

You can switch to a protocol like signal. It had a desktop client.

imessage: not even once