All work

Web app · messaging

Web Messaging

iMessage on any computer, even a locked-down one.

Status
Live, in daily use
Built for
Reading and sending texts from a computer, with no iPhone at hand
Runs
A browser, a relay server and a small agent on a Mac
Web Messaging in a browser, with pinned contacts and the chat list on the left and a group conversation with grey and green message bubbles on the right. Every name and message is blurred.

What it does

iMessage and text messages in a web browser, on any computer. A Mac kept signed in to the account does the sending and receiving, and the web app matches the iPhone’s Messages app: chats in the right order, contact names, group chats, tapbacks, replies, and photos and files to view, download and send. It opens instantly from a local copy and then fetches only what’s changed, and it loads nothing from outside servers, so it works on a locked-down work PC that blocks them.

Worth knowing

  • Delete, forward or mark a message as junk, and anything deleted on the phone disappears here too
  • Three parts working together: the web app, a server that relays everything, and a small agent on the Mac
  • About 20,000 lines of code, with every font and emoji served from its own host

Next step

What’s the job you’d like to stop doing by hand?

Describe the problem in a few sentences. Within one working day you’ll hear whether software would fix it, roughly what it would take, and what we’d look at first.