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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Might regret it but I just ordered an S23 after trying it out at BestBuy. I saw that Samsung had a Black Friday deal for $200 off with trade-in of an old device. I have an old Galaxy S7 just sitting in a drawer and was amazed to see it on the list of accepted devices.

    I’ve really been wanting a smaller phone as my OnePlus 8T gets really uncomfortable to hold after a while. Love everything about it except the size.

    I also looked at the Pixel 8 but the S23 felt like the better choice with less compromises. Pixel 8 Pro is even bigger than my 8t, so no-go there.

    Really wish the S23 was rootable (in US at least). That’s prob the biggest drawback for me. Will see if I can live without that.







  • For the technically skilled, there is BlueBubbles to get iMessage on Android. I set this up recently and it works quite well. I’m running a MacOS Ventura virtual machine using docker-osx on one of my personal servers and pretty much all iMessage functionality is available. I modified the Android (flutter) project locally to get my own push notifications working using my self-hosted ntfy instance as a UnifiedPush provider instead of needing to use Firebase.

    There is also Beeper which bridges iMessage and many other chat services in one app, but I wanted something fully open source that I can manage myself, plus I think there’s still a wait-list and I didn’t want to hand over my Apple ID to a third party.

    It’s hard trying to convince people (esp. iPhone users) to use a cross platform solution because they perceive us Android users as the problem and they know iMesssge just works. And for the non- technical, that’s understandable even if frustrating. So as a software engineer, I am the one making accomodations so they can still use iMessage. But it also made for a fun project for me to learn about.