Message Bridge - iMessage and SMS on retro hardware

[scj312]

Since I am a heavy user of the Messages app on my modern Macs for iMessage and SMS, I wanted a solution that allowed me to send and receive messages from friends and family while using my retro hardware. I found a few different solutions for this while perusing the web, but nothing I found worked quite the way I wanted--so I made Message Bridge!

Message Bridge is an app you run on your modern Mac (macOS 10.15 or higher) which exposes a simple web interface you can load on ancient browsers to send and receive iMessage and SMS!

Visit here for the download and usage instructions:

GitHub - dremin/message-bridge: A solution for accessing iMessage and SMS chats from older computers, implemented as a REST API with a web-based client.

A solution for accessing iMessage and SMS chats from older computers, implemented as a REST API with a web-based client. - dremin/message-bridge

github.com

Here are the current features:

• View your current iMessage and SMS chats, including group chats
• Contacts integration matches phone numbers to contact names
• Automatically-updating view of messages in the selected chat
• Send messages to the selected chat
• See images received inline as thumbnails, or click them to download
• File attachments can be downloaded with a click
• Two different access options: a JavaScript-enabled version for browsers from the late 90s onward, or a basic HTML version for older browsers

Under the hood: How does it work?

• The server is written with the Vapor framework for Swift, providing a REST API for sending and receiving messages.
• Messages are sent via AppleScript commands to the Messages app
• Messages are read via querying the Messages SQLite database
• The web client is simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, avoiding features requiring newer browsers. It uses the server's REST API to send and receive messages.

Feedback is welcome, and feel free to ask any questions!

 

[rollmastr]

Very nice!

 

[scj312]

Released an update today that really improves performance on slower machines (among other fixes).

Works well on Mac OS 8.6 using iCab 3.0.5 Classic

 

[scj312]

New: Added a JavaScript-free "lite" version that allows accessing iMessage/SMS from very old browsers and text-based browsers.

Who needs a phone when you have a Macintosh SE?

 

[rollmastr]

Nice! Now I really need to try this.

 

[scj312]

I've released a pretty substantial update to Message Bridge, timed for use during this year's PPC Challenge! Here's the improvements:

• URLs in messages are now displayed as clickable links (except on the 'lite' client)
• Image attachments are resized to a thumbnail on the modern Mac, which makes things much snappier for older systems.
• HEIC images are now visible! The modern Mac converts them to a JPEG for the thumbnail.
• I also worked around a Messages AppleScript issue causing messages to not send in some chats. For some reason, Messages is not exposing all chat conversations to AppleScript, so it can't be used to send a reply (on my system, only ~200 of ~1000 chat conversations are available in AppleScript). Working around this by sending as a "new chat" seems to work in this situation, as Messages ultimately merges the chats.
• Greatly improved the performance of checking for new messages, both for the old system and the Mac running Message Bridge.

 

[fehervaria]

This is amazing! Thank you!