While Blackberry continues to fail at putting out their BBM service for Android and iOS, another messaging service is now available for Android users. iMessage has long been one of the secret weapons of the iPhone, giving a very robust instant messaging service built in alongside SMS delivery as well. If you have a lot of friends with iPhones that use iMessage, this app might be worth looking into, in a shady, back-alley way. In other words, be careful or completely avoid. Avoiding might be the best action here.
The app itself is pretty barebones overall. Once installed, you login to your AppleID and then you get the choice to either try and import contacts from your phone or add them yourself. Lots of users are having trouble with each step of the process, but after installing and signing into my account I was off and bugging Ron my friends with iPhones pretty quickly. There are no ads built into this app and it is completely free to download. The developer says that the point is so that “everyone can chat via iMessage on Android for free.” Certainly a noble cause, but you have to wonder if Apple will let this Android application continue to have access to their proprietary messaging system for that much longer or how much data it is stealing from you.
If are desperate enough to use this, please note (again) that it does require you to give your AppleID and password into an app that we aren’t completely sure how the back-end works. Definitely use at your own risk if you like to keep your security priorities straight.
Update: If it wasn’t clear enough, we aren’t/weren’t recommending that anyone actually use this app. It’s about as shady as it gets. Play link removed for those who can’t read. Title even updated. Moving on!
Update 2: If you really need to know why it’s so shady, read this.
This post was last modified on September 24, 2013 2:57 pm