Remember when I helped a friend switch to Android but he only lasted three days without his iPhone because he couldn’t bear to “live life as a green bubble“? He might’ve stuck with the Android phone I spent hours helping him choose if he had access to weMessage at the time. Well, he might’ve stuck with it for a few more days, at least.
The good news is that weMessage is a new app that brings Apple’s closed messaging system iMessage to Android, and it works surprisingly well. The bad news is that it might not work for very longer.
First, the fun part: weMessage is an app and server combo that was created by 16-year-old developer Roman Scott. He posted about the new messaging solution on Reddit over the weekend, and it obviously drew plenty of attention. Here’s an excerpt from his post:
My name is Roman, and I am a 16 year-old app developer. I have recently published my first app to the Play Store, called weMessage. weMessage is an app that allows you to use iMessage on your Android phones or tablets. I created weMessage due to the inability of people on Android to use iMessage’s ecosystem. Although it is allows you to use iMessage on your Android device, I cannot close the gap between Android and Apple completely because weMessage is reliant on an Apple computer, which I will explain below.
weMessage is composed of two pieces of software: the Android app itself and a messaging server that I called the weServer. In order to use weMessage, you need to install the weServer on a Mac computer. The weServer acts as a “bridge” between the Mac computer and your Android device. The weServer is a messaging server that processes and relays iMessages to and from the Android device. The reason why an Apple computer is needed is because the iMessages need to be sent through an Apple device in order to be delivered. The iMessages need to be sent through Apple’s servers, and the only way to do this legitimately is to use an Apple device. If the weServer supported Windows or Linux, I would not only be violating several EULAs but would be relying on an exploitation that would likely be fixed in the future.
Now, there are a few important things to note here, but the most important is as follows: this has been done before. Using an app running on a Mac computer as a server that relays messages to the Android device is a very smart way to make iMessage work on Android, where it is not technically supported. Of course, the problem is that developers who have done this in the past have seen their solutions blocked by software updates from Apple.
In the comments section of Scott’s Reddit post, he says that he will try to succeed where other developers have failed by continuing to support his app and updating it if Apple blocks it. It’s a nice notion, but if course there’s no way to tell if he’ll eventually hit a wall that cannot be circumvented. Until that happens, however, weMessage is a terrific way for Android users with Macs to avoid being a green bubble.
You can learn more in the Reddit post, and you can see how to download and install the solution on the weMessage website.
