Hey everyone, I’ve got a software suggestion for all you hatters of closed gardens. It’s basically an all-in-one messenger. It will aggregate multiple messengers on android (whatsapp, facebook messenger, sms, rcs, discord, signal) including imessage! NO MORE GREEN BUBBLES!!! Best part (other than imessage), they’re going to keep it free for as long as they can. (at least that’s the vibe I’m getting from the discord server). This app looks so freaking cool! Currently they’ve just got it open to some alpha testers but they will start releasing it to beta list soon. Let me just say, the alpha’s screenshots of imessage are looking very nice. You can use this link to sign up for the beta https://sunbirdapp.com/?r=jVmdy
Update: Ok everyone, as far as my legitometer is a curate, they’ve got a ten. I got into the alpha testing and have been successfully sending imessages to people for a couple days now. This is incredibly impressive and I am so looking forward to its completion.
So… is Android finally catching up to 13 year old Maemo in having unified contacts and messaging subsystem? (-:
It seems like a proprietary implementation that’s trying to cash in on “exclusiveness” of iMessage and trying to hype it up in the process. Wouldn’t trust it as far I can throw it.
I don’t know, I’ve been on their Discord channel from the early stages and they seem pretty legit. Mind you I could be wrong, we all get taken into scams every now and then. I just got into their alpha testing so I will provide some feedback on how well it works. Honestly, it’s fixing a problem that shouldn’t be there. All of these walled garden messengers can’t stand the test of time. We have to switch to something more federated like xmpp or something else. Even signal, while awesome, can’t communicate with anything else. We need some good, secure, FOSS, instant messaging protocols.
Have you taken a look at SimpleX? I ditched Signal in favor of it - AND it’s FOSS!
I have looked at it. It looks really cool! However, it does not have the user base of signal and does not have an easy unboarding for beginners. If I’m going to switch a person to an encrypted instant messenger I would do Signal. It is by far the simplest and the most widely used. The more widely it is used the easier it is to sell it to people. For the most secure I go with Session. But I do agree that SimpleX is on to something.
Yeah I find no mention of being Libre on their website. It looks like “just another” proprietary message app. The concept is interesting but if it’s proprietary then it’s just another garbage (and this nonsense about green and blue bubbles is ridiculous of course).
I say this as someone who could use a “unified messenger” like Pidgin in the old days. I currently use some set up with bitlbee+libpurple+quasselserver running on a personal server. It would be nice to eliminate all those middlemen and just have a libpurple based application that can run locally or on a server. I suspect if they’re advertising support for all those protocols then they’re probably using libpurple behind the scenes anyway.
XMPP with Slidge or Matrix with Mautix bridges can do more now already and are both fully FOSS.
Dang, that looks like a really cool combo! Only draw back, no imessage, which is unfortunately what most people use. But still looks pretty dang cool.
Mautrix has an imessage bridge: https://github.com/mautrix/imessage
But Apple being Apple, you need to run software on a Mac to link it. Luckily, hardly anyone around here uses iMessage, so Apple can go f*ck itself.
Happily, I know no one who uses Imessage. :)
Lucky.
Thanks for the post but this is a no go for me, will not recommend this to friends. From their FAQ :
Sunbird is not open source. Some of the messaging community believe that 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.
We are currently undergoing a third party audit (not Danny’s other company), that will validate our security, encryption and data policies.
