Hi, I've actually tried to run a similar (and now completely shut down) service a few years ago. If you look at my github I have several public iMessage-related projects. The biggest thing I ran into was getting my services rate limited or even blacklisted from iCloud for large periods of time when attempting to scale up. At low scale things worked fine and I am still running some iMessage bots (similar to classic IRC bots) for group chats with some friends without issue.<p>The only way I was able to mitigate rate limiting and black listing was to use actual physical Macs, only host a low number of users on each Mac, and put each Mac on its own physical internet connection. I also had to rate limit users and prevent them from sending the same message to many recipients as that would cause the machine to get blacklisted. Because of this I determined it would be nearly impossible to scale up without charging exorbitant amounts of money, which you seem to have avoided with your $20/mo rate which seems very reasonable.<p>Can you share answers to any of these. Totally understand if some of these are secret sauce and you can't answer:<p>- how you are preventing or mitigating blacklisting and rate limiting?<p>- what are you doing to detect when you are blacklisted?<p>- what is your remediation once you've detected that you are blacklisted?<p>- how are you handling scaling up your numbers of users?<p>- how are you sending/receiving the messages? (I'm curious: did you write your own solution that talks to iCloud services or are you abusing Messages.app and its corresponding SQLite database?)<p>- has anyone from Apple contacted you? are they okay with it?<p>Anyways, cool service, good luck!
Hi all! Like many people here we wanted to reduce our monthly expenses given the time, and found Twilio to be one of the highest line items. When we dug into the data, we found that 80% of our users were iPhone users and thus could receive iMessages.<p>Thus we built Balto - an API to send iMessages, and were able to transition our entire customer list successfully (as well as take advantage of iMessage features like unlimited messaging, read receipts, apple pay, etc.)<p>Would love HN thoughts/feedback! We also have a customer facing version if you’re not a developer (<a href="https://usebalto.com/" rel="nofollow">https://usebalto.com/</a>) and wrote a blog documenting the journey for those interested (<a href="https://usebalto.com/blog/balto-origin-story%20" rel="nofollow">https://usebalto.com/blog/balto-origin-story%20</a>) :)
What happens if user has disabled iMessage, does your API notify your enterprise customers with an error?<p>I can see this useful if the following is possible:<p>send iMessage, if fail then send text via twilio<p>But otherwise couldn't see the use case (at least for reliable delivery rate)
Amazing work! I have been selling a product using a WhatsApp chatbot for some time now. iMessage would be a great addition to this so I will definitely get back to you once I find some more time to work on the project. Great work in getting this setup!