This has the same limitations of every other 3rd party iMessage client. It needs a companion app running on a Mac so that it can interface with iMessage running on that Mac. Basically it’s an iMessage proxy/client.

I would love to transition to a Linux for most things but I can’t give up the ability to text via my mac desktop. It’s so much faster and I barely suffer a context switch.

Having to stop and pick up my phone to type with my thumb is just agonizing. And not everyone I deal with is on slack.

There are obvious problems with bringing iMessage to other platforms (basically the standard for any proprietary platform).

But a few other issues are these various cryptographic ties to things like appleid etc, which are likely harder to deal with.

I believe old black hat demos from 5+ years ago when they found some protocol flaws were constructing the message content manually, but still sending them through the messages xpc service (which is afaik responsible for wrapping things in protocol goo)

There are other issues as well nowadays: all apple hardware for many years has been able to store keys in the Secure Enclave (or element? One is for crypto, one is for javacard, and I can never remember which), so there’d be a loss in security posture relative to apple hardware (I would put money on the SE/SEP being more secure than any hardware crypto wallet - it’s just you can’t unplug it, so you lose the very real security of an air gap)

With KDE Connect I can send SMS right from my desktop. It ain't iMessage, but I have maybe one or two contacts who use it anyways. Anyone who wants more features can message me on Telegram or Slack.

cplusplusfellow if your contacts transition to the likes of Signal [0], you can then message from phone or computer. They have software for Windows, Mac and Linux.

[0] signal.org

Given how long it's existed, I'm surprised no one has RE'd and written a compatible 3rd-party implementation.

I think the challenge is more related to extracting ever-changing encryption keys and trust models.

This package would be pretty trivial to port to Linux, and you could make some pretty large improvements running on a more modern system

The problem is you still have to have a Mac to do the actual work, but then the M1 mini is fast and reasonably priced so maybe could be set up with a cross compiler so you could have it doing something else useful rather than being (despite the price as a computer being reasonable) a very expensive messaging client :)

Obviously assuming linux is your main environment so a single Mac wouldn’t have additional use otherwise. If you did also run a Mac anyway having the proxy/forwarding to any machine you were working on would be super nice (similar to text forwarding to your desktop so you don’t need to get your phone all the time)