I am very much enjoying my experience using Beeper, a Matrix-based chat application to tie all your chats together. Particularly the way that they have managed to actually bridge iMessage so that I can respond to it natively from my Android or Linux machine.
Beeper is a universal chat app. It’s a single app to chat with friends on 15 different chat networks. We’ve added chat superpowers that make it the best chat app on earth.
— Beeper
It does exactly what it says it’s going to do on the tin — allows me to have a unified app to message across most major chat applications. The setup is pretty user-friendly, though I will mention that it will load all your past messages from some services (Facebook Messenger in particular) on initial setup, so just be ready for that. It’s a one-time inconvenience, and I think the opposite behavior — not pulling in old messages — would be an even bigger problem.
If you’d like to give Beeper a spin, I have a referral link right here (it’s good for five invites a day): https://refer.beeper.com/iX38q6
At present, there’s really only two concerns that most folks might have.
The service is free which, let’s face it, cannot continue forever. However, the quality of the service and the responsiveness of the team is such that I would be perfectly happy paying a subscription for the service. On their jobs page it says "We [will] charge our users a $10/monthly paid subscription service. Our pricing model allows Beeper to deliver a great product and service, while eliminating any need to profit by monetizing user data." I think that when they switch to that model, the service is actually worth it.
Secondly, it is piping all of your communications through a central point. While 2FA must be enabled for all bridges that support it (including iMessage) and as much encryption is employed as possible, there is a possibility of a man-in-the-middle attack or snooping where the bridges interface between services. For the vast majority of my messaging, this is not a problem; YMMV.
You can, if you like, self-host your own Matrix server and connect to rooms, host bots, and the like from there as well. Beeper open-sourced all of their bridges, so if you’d like to set it all up on your own, you can definitely give it a go yourself.
But the improvements Beeper has made to the experience are rather nice. Files upload and show up properly on the far end of the bridge, not as links to the homeserver. Suddenly I am able to get decent-resolution videos from my Apple-brainwashed (er… using) friends and significant others … on my phone and on my desktop and show up as "blue bubbles" for those who care about that sort of thing. The UI of both their desktop and Android client are slightly different from stock Element (an interface for "regular" Matrix), but in ways that I think are going to make it more appealing to "regular" users.
And perhaps most importantly, I do not have to handle all the fiddly bits myself. Their team has been rolling out updates on a regular basis with new features and making the whole experience smoother.
If you’d like to give Beeper a spin, I have a referral link right here: https://refer.beeper.com/iX38q6 . The code is good for five invites each day.
A few technical notes for those of you who may be edge cases like me.
For those of you using bauh to manage your AppImages, beeper’s built-in updater breaks the symlink. (Their tech support says this isn’t a problem if you use AppImageLauncher, and I agree, having switched to that solution for other reasons.) If you’d like to stick with bauh’s management of AppImages, I wrote a quick little bash script that simply checks the symlink and recreates it if a new AppImage is found where bauh installs them; it’s at https://gist.github.com/uriel1998/da34848e2cbd3d3d1169d9a2a77d4127
For those of you who are intrigued by that iMessage option but are not Apple users, you will find out something pretty quickly: Native iMessage support also means HEIC formatted images. To enable support for this format in Xviewer, Eye of Gnome, GPicView, PCMan File Manager, Nemo, and a bunch more, sudo apt install heif-gdk-pixbuf will enable support (for those on Debian or Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu and MXLinux).
If you’re determined to view HEIC images in something like feh (which I do), you can use something like this script: https://gist.github.com/uriel1998/402bebb02d071039032d77f286b2c40d. It uses both heif-convert and gifview to handle the formats that feh doesn’t natively.
For converting HEIC images to something else, I use this script: https://gist.github.com/uriel1998/71a94220feb2b9f159ff4126839163c0 which uses both heif-convert and imagemagick to quickly convert images. The usage is pretty simple: convert_images filename output_format , such as convert_images MyPicture.heif jpg or convert_images input_format output_format , such as convert_images heif jpg