Hopefully someone comes charging in here to prove me wrong, but it's my understanding that you can't use iMessage on a computer that isn't running macOS without jumping through some crazy hoops (the easiest method seems to be to have a Mac that you leave on all the time so you can remote into it and use the Messages app that way, which is ridiculous). I'm genuinely curious how anyone in this boat finds this acceptable.
The impetus for asking this is a conversation I had with my wife last night. She got an iPhone and a ThinkPad laptop for work a few months ago. She's out of town for work at the moment and sent me a link last night to a sketchy-looking website offering some downloads for applications that purported to let you use iMessage on a Windows machine. So she sent the link and asked if I thought it seemed safe. We had the following exchange:
Maybe I'm spoiled, I don't know. I've been using Google Voice since 2009, so I've had a full ten years of being able to send and receive messages from any computer with a web browser. I've used other messaging platforms in that time, as well: Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Android Messages, and yes, even iMessage. All of them -- except iMessage -- let you send and receive messages from any computer with a browser. Apple only lets you do this if you use Apple hardware. I understand why they do it, but I don't understand why anyone who isn't all-in on Apple products is okay with it (and I honestly don't think the all-Apple crowd should be okay with it either, but that's not the point of this thread).
iOS has ~45% of the mobile market in the US, but macOS only has ~18% of the computer market. That's a LOT of iOS users who can only send messages through their phones. I'm sure there are quite a few people here who fall into the iPhone/Windows combination. For you folks, please see the question in the thread title. Does it not bother you that you have to use your phone for all of your messaging? Am I the only person who finds typing long messages on a phone to be overly cumbersome and awful? Do you feel the pros of using iMessage outweigh the giant con of this kind of usage restriction? Am I just an old man yelling at a cloud?
EDIT: To be clear, I am specifically addressing this being a problem for iMessage. If you are using a different (better) messaging platform, this is obviously a non-issue.
The impetus for asking this is a conversation I had with my wife last night. She got an iPhone and a ThinkPad laptop for work a few months ago. She's out of town for work at the moment and sent me a link last night to a sketchy-looking website offering some downloads for applications that purported to let you use iMessage on a Windows machine. So she sent the link and asked if I thought it seemed safe. We had the following exchange:
Maybe I'm spoiled, I don't know. I've been using Google Voice since 2009, so I've had a full ten years of being able to send and receive messages from any computer with a web browser. I've used other messaging platforms in that time, as well: Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Google Allo, Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Android Messages, and yes, even iMessage. All of them -- except iMessage -- let you send and receive messages from any computer with a browser. Apple only lets you do this if you use Apple hardware. I understand why they do it, but I don't understand why anyone who isn't all-in on Apple products is okay with it (and I honestly don't think the all-Apple crowd should be okay with it either, but that's not the point of this thread).
iOS has ~45% of the mobile market in the US, but macOS only has ~18% of the computer market. That's a LOT of iOS users who can only send messages through their phones. I'm sure there are quite a few people here who fall into the iPhone/Windows combination. For you folks, please see the question in the thread title. Does it not bother you that you have to use your phone for all of your messaging? Am I the only person who finds typing long messages on a phone to be overly cumbersome and awful? Do you feel the pros of using iMessage outweigh the giant con of this kind of usage restriction? Am I just an old man yelling at a cloud?
EDIT: To be clear, I am specifically addressing this being a problem for iMessage. If you are using a different (better) messaging platform, this is obviously a non-issue.
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