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Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
- redsolver 3y agoI like what they are trying to do, but unfortunately it breaks the E2EE (end-to-end-encryption) and their website isn't clear about that.
- Shekelphile 3y agoThis is extremely unethical to offer as a service. Apple account credentials have to be stored as plain text to continuously reauthenticate with apple's servers and the broken e2e means they can store whatever they want from your messages (as well as all other parts of your apple account, like photos and icloud backups). If they wanted to do this properly the answer is to reverse engineer whatever protocol imessage uses under the hood and make their own client - this is most likely just a simple rebrand of the few FOSS tools that already do the same imessage relay thing. And of course, when apple inevitable does fight this, the average person will chimp out thinking it's apple doing apple things when in reality no other company would allow a third party to harvest their user's credentials and data in this manner.
- natdempk 3y agoThe nothing website claims: > Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you're sending and receiving. > Nothing is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird's architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey. Messages are not stored on Sunbird's servers and are only live on your device – once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device. From: https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats The Verge claims: > Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “...it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.” From: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-imessage-android-phone https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-i... It seems to me like if they are doing the typical thing of using a bridge like https://github.com/mautrix/imessage https://github.com/mautrix/imessage then that isn't really E2EE, the messages are being stored, and could be accessed by Sunbird. I don't really see how their claims could be true. Does anyone know? Am I missing something?
- EthanRDoesMC 3y agoHey, I worked on that bridge! (I’m the Brooklyn guy). I highly suspect that they’re doing a sort of Matrix hosting thing and can then claim E2EE because Matrix encryption or whatever. But based on how the bridge works (or used to? it’s been some time), then yes - there IS a point in time in which it has to be a plaintext string. Unless they somehow managed to reverse engineer iMessage’s encryption - in which case, well shit, there’s bigger problems now - eventually you have to tell IMCore/imagent and/or ChatKit what it is that you want to send, and who to send it to. And thus it can’t be E2EE otherwise it would be unintelligible to the recipient. Curious to know if they’re actually talking to imagent and using chatkit (and thus have iMessage features ie typing receipts, sending reactions) or if they’re just using AppleScript and reading the sms db… God I should go back and rewrite Brooklyn. Now that I’m more than halfway through a CS degree and know how to make a binary search tree and how to not leak memory. lmao
- metadat 3y agoTrivial for Apple to shut them out, unfortunately. It would be great to have an easy to use, low friction messaging platform that wasn't controlled by FB or the Telcos. I like Signal but haven't been able to get my family members on board. Edit: Alternative ongoing discussion I noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268184 (3 comments)
- 650REDHAIR 3y agoI’m slowly but surely converting everyone to Signal.
- dmitrygr 3y agoThat platform or exists. It is not free. The price of admission is buying an apple device. Part of the price pays for the platform. All of that seems reasonable
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoNone of that is even slightly reasonable. A messaging platform that(for no technical reason) only works on one hardware platform is a complete non-starter.
- k4rli 3y agoSeems irrelevant. Who cares about the bubble color?
- FalconSensei 3y agoapparently, a lot of american teenagers do. But I think it's because when a message uses iMessage, then there are reactions and other features available, where messages from Android are regular SMS and will lack those
- lotsofpulp 3y agoI asked a bunch of teen to 30+ year old friends and family, and every one would say that for the purposes of dating, they would require iOS usage due to the perceived probability of an Android user being an incompatible match being too high.
- LoganDark 3y agoI imagine that I'd also be incompatible with someone who cares about which device I use to message them. I also happen to use Android. Go figure.
- wilg 3y agoThe system works!
- Our_Benefactors 3y agoThis is very “You can’t fire me, I quit!” energy
- LoganDark 3y agoIt literally does. I'd imagine the kind of people that they don't want to associate with are exactly the kind of people who wouldn't like them anyway. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- meepmorp 3y agoDo most Android users actually care one way or an another? IMO, it seems like there's a small, if vocal, minority of folks with a deeply weird inferiority complex around blue bubbles and most people don't care at all. None of my Android using friends seem to give a shit.
- gizajob 3y agoAndroid users don't, but apple users do. Part of Apple's "moat". It might seem trivial to you, but people do care about such things.
- olyjohn 3y agoWell fuck those people. Glad I don't know any of them. They sound shallow as fuck.
- acdha 3y agoIt’s an Android thing – Apple users are just getting on with their lives, most people outside of the US use an app like WhatsApp, WeChat, or Telegram (iMessage isn’t even in the top 5 globally). Google is pouring millions into a big marketing campaign trying to get people to think of green bubbles as inferior because they’ve accepted catastrophically botching their messaging play and are hoping to get the EU to bail them out. The more they can get Android users to feel insecure about iOS using the same color it’s always used, the more likely that play is to succeed. Consider that if Google’s goal was actually interoperable messaging they could have opened up their own services at any point since they shut down federation for XMPP, and they could right now be offering E2EE as a free community standard rather than something carriers pay Google to get. They spent money buying Jibe and are hoping to use RCS adoption to make that more profitable.
- FalconSensei 3y agoIMHO, you can tell that Google's also at fault because there's no Android messaging besides SMS. Android users outside of US (where SMS is not used) have to rely on Whatsapp/Line/Kakaotalk/Facebook Messenger. If Android had invested in that, they would have something that's very commonly used in everywhere except US.
- rc5150 3y agoAs a small business owner who relies on SMS for coordinating repair pickups and drop offs, as well as media transmission, just seeing the blue bubble means I can instantly ascertain whether their hardware is capable of in terms of shared features like location sharing, compatible media sharing, etc. When I see a green bubble, often times I don't bother trying to send hi-res photos via SMS and I just go straight to emailing or using another platform like instagram or what have you.
- dvngnt_ 3y agoyou can always use beeper app too and sign into IG, FB, WhatsApp, imessage, signal, telegram in one app
- onlyhumans 3y agoIs that secure though?
- vineyardmike 3y agoObviously not. You have to hand over your plaintext credentials to a third party to explicitly copy over each and every text.
- pyr0hu 3y agoBeeper can be self hosted, so you can use the gateways without passing credentials to third party. I think the iMessage bridge is using libpurple
- dvngnt_ 3y agoI trust beeper eula more than meta's.
- smashah 3y agoMake sure you get your dog or a random stranger to accept Metas terms and conditions on the accounts you may or may not be using otherwise they will try to send you legal threats based on their overbroad terms and conditions
- onlyhumans 3y agoTrusting only metas Eula’s is better than trusting both meta and beeper
- dvngnt_ 3y agoyou don't have to add meta to beeper
- shiroiuma 3y agoWhat kind of people still use phone numbers to send messages to people? This is exclusively an American phenomenon; the rest of the world moved away from SMS ages ago. I don't think any of my iPhone-using friends or acquaintances even know what iMessage is.
- realusername 3y agoSame for me in France, nobody uses iMessage, part of the issue is the lower share of iPhones and the other part is iMessage being branded as an SMS app will mean it will never take off since SMS are dead.
- shiroiuma 3y agoExactly my point. No one outside the US (not sure about Australia) uses SMS any more, it's a ridiculously antiquated technology. I guess Americans still cling to it because it's a huge country and they can send SMS to everyone they know in the whole world for free, since everyone they know is in America. For everyone else (or Americas who actually have friends outside America), SMS is stupid because sending them internationally is horribly expensive.
- realusername 3y agoYes that exactly what happens. iMessage became the "your package is being delivered" app since pretty much only parcel delivery company are sending SMS.
- shiroiuma 3y agoYep, that, and 2FA, are the only times I get SMS messages. No actual humans use them now where I live, just automated systems run by businesses.
- pestatije 3y agoAdd to America Europe and Australia, the two places i know of
- increscent 3y agoI was just thinking of doing this myself. I'm hoping Apple doesn't shut it down. I recently switched to an iPhone because all of my friends use iMessage (I'm in the US). I'm not happy about having to switch, but it's how they choose to communicate and it's a heck of a lot better than SMS/MMS. I'm planning to buy a used Mac Mini and connect it to some messaging gateway or build my own. Then I can use whatever phone I want (used to be a pinephone user).
- jaimex2 3y agoThink different indeed
- withinboredom 3y agoLook up BlueBubbles. It’s pretty easy to setup a server on a Mac with almost all the features. It’s how I get iMessage on my work laptop (linux), so I don’t have to pull out my phone when my wife messages at work.
- jaimex2 3y agoPhones just had one job... It's pretty funny where we ended up.
- cozzyd 3y agoHopefully the EU (or, in an alternate reality, the US) will eventually force Apple to finally implement RCS messages (or, less likely, open up iMessage).
- happymellon 3y agoWhy? No one uses RCS in the EU, who would Apple users talk to?
- AniseAbyss 3y ago[dead]
- korhojoa 3y agoArguably false. Are you trying to imply that Apple users are the only common users of messages other than text or that Apple users use third party messaging instead? Lots of providers implement RCS, lots of people use it. Perhaps none of the people in your particular region/circle of contacts do? My contacts almost all use signal. The exceptions where there are people that don't have any third party messaging apps, they use RCS. To those people, it's "just like a better MMS", they don't know any different, it just improves their messaging with no effort. At least for the region I know, there are _a lot_ more Android users than iOS users, and third party messaging is really common. In practice, SMS is the last resort if you have nothing else.
- tigroferoce 3y agoI’m curious about your region and your social circle (genuine question, not provocative). Absolutely zero of my contacts use signal. Some use element. Zero use iMessage. Almost 100% use WhatsApp. I’m in Europe, middle class, family with kids, both parents working here.
- happymellon 3y agoAnd RCS being worse, as people don't even know it exists so they don't even accidentally use it.
- smashah 3y agoThey should also add WhatsApp support
- alternatex 3y agoThen you just have Beeper. It costs a lot of money to maintain bridges to these messaging apps. It's not sustainable to have all of them in a single app.
- aydyn 3y agoyou dont need a single app, you need a single protocol. For something so relatively simple, the only reasons to not unify standards are anti-competitive reasons.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> the only reasons to not unify standards are anti-competitive reasons It's spam.
- teakie 3y agoyou can do iMessage to Android.
- Elena120 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smnrg 3y agoBut how so? Encryption? Will it break at every other small change from Apple?
- pokey96 3y agoFrom other sites, it seems it uses a Mac Mini in a server room as a proxy for iMessage to accomplish this, with the massive drawback of having to provide Nothing your Apple ID credentials.
- richdougherty 3y agoSite not loading for me, but probably this: https://nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats https://nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats
- xyst 3y agoSite doesn’t work. But I suspect backend might be a matrix bridge.
- darkstar_16 3y agoUses the Sunbird app https://www.sunbirdapp.com https://www.sunbirdapp.com. Requires one to sign in using their Apple ID which, I presume, is actually stored/signed in on an actual server somewhere in their DC.
- lloeki 3y agoAFAICT this is the thing enabling the "blue bubbles", which the Nothing Phone bundles: https://www.sunbirdapp.com/ https://www.sunbirdapp.com/ Not to be confused with Mozilla's (if anyone remembers that one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Sunbird
- Ographer 3y agoFYI for others, MKBHD just did a video on this and he warned that when using sunbird you are signing onto a physical mac mini somewhere, giving it access to your apple account which isn't great if you keep important things on there. https://youtu.be/ji5HwS3bhlU?si=2iW4zELhePyzV0rj https://youtu.be/ji5HwS3bhlU?si=2iW4zELhePyzV0rj
- lloeki 3y agoShort of someone having fully reverse-engineered iMessage I didn't see it any other way given the way it operates (e.g messages in browser). Their piece about E2E seems especially misleading. I can see how it's "technically true" i.e it's E2E from their servers to the clients + iMessage being E2E itself, but consistent omission of what the E are sounds designed to mislead into thinking that it's device to device. The consequence of a hosted server being pwnd would be catastrophic, essentially meaning full access to the iCloud account. One of the unspoken underpinnings of iMessage not being available on Android is that the endpoint (the phone) might not be secure, so iMessage had a sort of guarantee that its E2E wasn't compromised via that endpoint. Now I wish Apple would just get an iMessage app on Android out of the door. I also don't see how they plan to have this be free forever (and what the business model is), especially given the costs associated with hosted Macs.
- pseudalopex 3y ago> I can see how it's "technically true" i.e it's E2E from their servers to the clients This is not E2E. Their servers are the middle. Not an end.
- 3y ago
- mdasen 3y agoIt looks like this is powered by Sunbird: https://www.sunbirdapp.com https://www.sunbirdapp.com. Another alternative for iMessage is Beeper: https://www.beeper.com/imessage https://www.beeper.com/imessage They both have a waitlist at the moment, but Beeper seems to be opening up to a lot of new people.
- modeless 3y agoI have Beeper. It works well, except that it doesn't support registering your phone number without an iPhone, so you can only use iMessage with an email address. I believe they are working on fixing that now.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoHow could they work on fixing that? iMessage currently requires a cell phone to activate a number on the iMessage network. Are you saying they're partnering with Apple to change this? Are they going to sim clone your number?
- modeless 3y agoThe entire integration with iMessage is reverse engineered. They need to reverse engineer the phone number registration part to get it working on Android phones.
- icy 3y agoLooks like Nothing is partnering with a US-based third party called Sunbird to build this service. From Sunbird’s site (https://sunbirdapp.com https://sunbirdapp.com): > Will the app be open source? > Some of the messaging community believes that software that is open source is more secure. It is our view that it is not. The more visibility there is into the infrastructure and code, the easier it is to penetrate it. By design, open source software is distributed in nature. There is no central authority to ensure quality and maintenance and by putting that responsibility on Sunbird, development would not be feasible. Open source vulnerabilities typically stem from poorly written code that leave gaps, which attackers can use to carryout malicious activities. Not sure I’d be willing to trust them with my Apple ID credentials.
- jtriangle 3y agoWhat a crock of shit
- 0xd1r 3y agoThis reiterates the same fallacious argument large corporations use to put one over open-source. And since it sounds plausible to the layman, it is parroted by them. Quite shocking to see another example out and about.
- idle_zealot 3y agoHow gross and disingenuous. If they want to keep their source proprietary to create a moat then just say so. Lying about open source software being shoddy and insecure just totally puts me off.
- charcircuit 3y agoThey are not wrong that it is easier to penetrate open source software, but in regards to a messaging app security is not a big issue due to the most risky stuff being handled by platform provided api and mobile operating systems having a modern security model.
- zahrc 3y agoComment from another poster (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pokey96 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pokey96) down below > From other sites, it seems it uses a Mac Mini in a server room as a proxy for iMessage to accomplish this, with the massive drawback of having to provide Nothing your Apple ID credentials. No thanks, I’m good.
- tetrisgm 3y agoReally don't encourage using an external service to use imessage. Giving your apple credentials and also the dependency on Sim cards to make it stable is just trouble waiting to happen. To this day, the best solution for imessage on Android is BlueBubbles or Airmessage. I use both for redundancy. It does require having my Sim in an iPhone, and having a Mac, for everything to be bulletproof. I don't recommend it to people who aren't technical, but it's helped me with my dating life to have blue messages...
- SwiftyBug 3y agoIs this a US specific thing? Why do people want to have their messages seen in blue bubbles so much? Why not just use another messaging app such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc?
- droptablemain 3y agoIf you're trying online dating in the U.S. it is not uncommon to see people, primarily women, saying that your message bubbles must be blue. It's completely absurd on so many levels of course, but it appears to be some sort of status attribute.
- jwestbury 3y agoBecause iMessage seamlessly integrates into SMS/MMS, and very few Americans rely on alternative apps for their primary messaging platform. As for why blue bubbles? No idea. Best guess is it's seen as a status thing - green bubbles are non-iPhone users. The only other theory I have is that iMessage is cross-platform with other Apple devices, but that is a strong argument for other messaging apps IMO.
- ghusto 3y agoThen the question becomes: "_SMS?!_". Nobody in Europe uses SMS. I think I've cracked it though. I've noticed that Apple's service inside the U.S.A. is different to the level of service they provide outside of it (briefly; it's better). This led to the 60%+ market share there, whilst the rest of the world is Android dominated. iMessage was adding cool features, and it makes sense that if most people you know already have it, there's no reason to look at things like WhatsApp. The rest of the (Android dominated world) had to look for something else for the same fun, which is why WhatsApp is the de facto messaging platform in Europe.
- jwestbury 3y agoI think I have some unique perspective here, actually, as an American who's been living in the UK for the past year. I think you're right about the feature set. It's a big historical win for iMessage, and it took a while for Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. to catch up. I think the other thing here is that a lot of people in Europe have friends from other countries, or travel outside of the country often, and European phone plans don't generally offer good international rates. In the US, most plans offer unlimited SMS/MMS, including international messages -- it wouldn't cost me any more to send SMS to people in Europe from my old American plan (i.e., it would still cost me nothing beyond my base plan price). For Europeans, using WhatsApp is a convenient runaround for this issue. It's a single platform that works internationally, with no particular hurdles aside from "Do you have WhatsApp?" As an extra little anecdote about the challenges present here, I had to get a Google Voice account and transfer my American number to it, and I now use the Google Voice app to message my family back home. It's pretty annoying, and generally a terrible experience for me, but getting people in the US onto another messaging platform is pretty much a lost cause at this point. I have all of the major messaging apps on my phone - iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, etc. But I just text with most of my American friends, except some of the more privacy-conscious tech nerds who use Signal.
- daeros 3y agoas to the rest of you like you have to share your Apple ID with Nothing/Sunbird and are like that's a disaster waiting to happen not for me, I barely used my Apple ID and actually since their cloud service wasn't end to end encrypted and zero knowledge I started disabling my cloud backup and deleting what was in my Apple cloud before I went over to Android. I told people my Tech Tip was not to to use them but use SpiderOak, Very little has changed. Only problem with my advice is like, Write your password down and put one in a secure deposit at the bank because if you forget it they can't help you.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoCountdown to Apple sending them a strongly worded cease and desist letter.
- Nextgrid 3y agoEveryone is concerned about providing their Apple credentials but I think you can always create a throwaway Apple ID on a separate e-mail (or move yours off your primary email) so that there's nothing sensitive in the account besides the messages themselves?
- xyst 3y agoI would be cautious of using this with an Apple ID that has any purchases or oauth sign ins. Could be a EULA violation. Then suddenly lose access to all data. No recourse. Thanks, Walled In environment! Also I wonder if there is any feature disparity between nothing/songbird and iMessage. In my experience, dealing with these bridges is far from perfect. Especially if one or more of them is closed source like imessage. Never know when a change will happen and break your flows
- Sephr 3y agoTechnically and legally this should be possible. Unfortunately there are both ethical and technical reasons to avoid Sunbird. The Sunbird developers are spreading a FUD hit piece against open source software[1], which rubs me very wrong. They also clearly don't understand software development best practices. The following statement from Sunbird makes no sense, and only serves to imply that they don't practice code review: "There is no central authority to ensure quality and maintenance [of open source contributions] and by putting that responsibility on Sunbird, development would not be feasible." If they're worried that open source contributions will sneak flaws past code review, then they clearly aren't ready to review existing closed source contributions either. 1. https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1648471196680478720 https://twitter.com/sephr/status/1648471196680478720
- magicloop 3y ago9to5Mac.com are reporting that Apple are going to support RCS messaging soon: > Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users. I'm curious what people think the game plan and business dynamics is for this decision?
- swatcoder 3y ago> I'm curious what people think the game plan and business dynamics is for this decision? Follow the wind and self-police before more lawsuits are filed or regulations are imposed. All the cool kids are (finally) starting to do it.