- Hey guys, this is Austin.
From time to time, you might want to message someone
and have them actually respond.
Hi Wes. - Hi.
- You've had this issue before I hear.
- Oh, I have this issue all the time.
So, like many people out there, I am on Android.
- Yes.
- But to the rest of the population,
I'm not seen as, Wes or as a nice guy,
or just someone with a phone of their choice.
- You're a green bubble boy.
- I am a green bubble boy.
(dramatic music)
I'll set the scene for you a little bit.
So imagine there you are,
you're on whatever dating app you want.
Maybe it's Tinder or Bumble or Jdate, FarmersOnly,
Mutual for our Mormon friends.
And then everything's going really well--
- I like to think you've tried every single one of those.
- I have actually. (laughs)
Then you get to the point where
you got to exchange phone numbers.
Now usually, this is usually a great point
in the conversation, but this is where
I start to become worried because
they're about to find out my dark truth--
- Green bubble boy. - I'm a green bubble boy.
It's a very real thing.
It's ridiculous.
But I knew that I needed to find a solution, so--
- I mean, there is the solution
you can go to apple.com/iphone.
- Yeah, but I wanted to find a solution
for the cool people like me.
We are in a very strange time, obviously,
where SMS, despite being the standard for text messaging,
really is fading.
- I mean, you have most of the world
that's on WeChat or LINE.
- Facebook Messenger. - Yep and iMessage.
- And people want more features,
they want a cooler messaging experience.
It completely makes sense.
- But there's still, especially here in the U.S.,
there's not one thing to rule them all, right?
Typically speaking, a phone number
not only allows you to call, but also to text.
If you have iMessage, it's a completely seamless process.
So what do you need to get iMessage up on Android?
Obviously there's a Mac mini involved somehow.
- There is. So there have been
a few attempts at this throughout the years.
A lot of the solutions have been focused on
how do we jerry-rig iMessage onto an Android phone
which doesn't really work well.
Apple tends to knock those down pretty quick.
But what someone realized
kind of recently is hey, if we just get a Mac computer as
the central device to essentially ping the messages through,
we might be able to make an app on the phone side
that interfaces with that.
I don't own any Apple or Mac products.
I'm here with my Chromebook and my Android
and my Android wear device, yeah.
So I wasn't about to go drop a ton of money on a Mac.
So in order for this to work, you need a Mac
that can run Yosemite, so 10.10 or higher.
- That's not bad at all.
- In fact, this 2010 with a Core 2 Duo
is running High Sierra.
- Oh, okay.
- Which is amazing. - That's not bad.
- To be perfectly honest.
- All it really needs to do is, not only run
iMessage, it also needs to run, what's the program called?
- It's called Air Message, so, yeah.
- Air Message.
- And it's only two pieces of software.
You have an app on your phone, which is a messaging client
that honestly looks pretty identical
to Android's messages app already.
And then it's a tiny little piece of server-side
software, that sits on the Mac, and if you want
you can honestly buy a Mac Mini on eBay
for under 50 bucks that will do this.
- And the other advantage here is not only
if you were to do something like this,
you have a Mac Mini which is perfectly capable to be
run as like a Plex server, or anything like that
or alternatively, if you have a Mac,
or someone else has like an old Mac,
or even if you have a brand new one,
all you do is just load up
this piece of software, and your Android phone
is ready to go with iMessage.
iMessage on Android:
Blue bubble messaging for your favorite phone!
- And it's amazing, they don't even disguise it.
They know this is a problem.
It is straight front and center, blue bubble messaging
- Oh, it's from the internet, do you wanna really
open something from the internet?
- I've heard of the internet.
- It's not good. - That was quick!
Alright, so it's already up, cool, love it, great.
- So it just runs as a small program on the top of your bar?
- Just a little program on the top of the bar.
It'll show you how many clients are connected,
which is a nice little security thing,
And just gives you preferences
on a few different ways to connect.
And this actually is a really big deal for this project,
because with every other attempt
it's always been very insecure,
you've had to go through someone else's server.
- Yeah, I don't want to deal with that.
- Yeah, that's mad sketchy.
You just want to connect straight to your device, and go.
- [Austin] Oh, so you're going to actually have to do some
DNS settings to make sure that port forwarding is set up?
- We are, but the great news is that it's dead simple,
and it works incredibly well.
- So, I'm guessing you need to just use an email, right?
Unless you had a phone number attached to your Apple ID?
- Yeah, so the phone number part is a little sketchy,
but when you message someone, it will popup normally
as their email, and not a phone number
- Right.
- Which, you know, you can just make some excuse.
Which is actually exactly what I did.
I just said, oh haha.
I don't know why that happened.
- I really actually think a fair few people probably
use iMessage with emails anyway, right?
- I don't know, I'm new to this.
- And, you can also check how often it scans
for new messages, which is kinda neat.
So about how often would you typically set it to?
- I normally keep it at one second,
just to make sure that nothing jams up.
And, welcome to Air Message, yay!
So now what we have to do is set up our port forwarding.
So this-- - So this is going to be very
much dependent on what your router is and everything,
but you basically just need to log into the router,
and clear whichever port the Air Message wants
to be set up to go out to your phone.
Because the other advantage here,
is that you obviously don't need to
have your phone on Wi-Fi, right?
So I think the phone we're going to be
using here is this S10e, which is specifically
not on wifi, just to show that no matter
where you are, connected to LTE or whatever,
iMessage is going to work exactly the way that
you would expect it, if you were using an iPhone.
- So by using a DDNS service, which there are tons
of free amazing ones that are very easy to use,
you can basically make a fake website,
that just points at your IP as it changes
and then you put that website into the app
that'll live on your phone.
So instead of having to change your IP all the time,
which was a problem with one of the older projects,
that I tried, and changing your IP address every 30 minutes.
- It's not okay - It's not okay.
So yeah and with this, all you have to do is just
pick what you want your host URL to be--
- I'd say blue bubble boy is the only option.
- Blue bubble boy is the only way to go,
and then they have all sorts of--
- Different domains that you can take advantage of.
So it's legitimately like a five-minute
setup process on your Mac.
- Yeah, it is incredibly quick, incredibly easy,
and honestly just their guide
that they have on their website.
- Which we'll of course, we'll link in the description.
- Yeah, it's dead simple to use.
- Cool.
So the next step is we need to download it on the phone.
- Yeah, and here's what's really cool,
the Air Message app doesn't have to be side loaded
it's in the Play Store.
This has never been done before,
you've always had to side load it.
- 'Cause you're not really technically
breaking any rules, right?
I mean, iMessage is landing on the Mac exactly
the way it's intended to be, and there's just
an application which just so happens to take that
message and forward it on to something else.
- Exactly.
- Apple messaging on your Android phone,
Mac computer required.
Man, I'm actually like really surprised
to see that in Play Store.
- I think just the amount that it feels like
a non-sketchy thing, - Yeah.
- It just goes so far.
- Hey! - There you go.
- So when you type the password in correctly, it works!
Alright, so I'm going to message you,
at blue bubble boy and see if it works.
- Yeah, go for it.
- So, it pops up as MMS.
Oh, there we go, we're blue, alright!
Hi bubble.
- There it is. - Hey!
- Boom.
- Hi bubble boy
Dude! - And it even has--
- It's seamless! - Yeah, it's that seamless,
and even right there, notifications,
you have mark as read or reply
just like you would have--
- Again, we are not on wifi here
so the Mac mini and my phone is on wifi,
but the S10 is specifically on LTE
just to show that once you have
this part set up, everything is completely seamless.
- Yeah, you could be out anywhere.
It's amazing, this has legitimately changed my life.
People have, they talk to me.
- This is pretty rad.
This is properly cool.
So, if you guys want to get iMessage on your own Androids
and ascend to the blue bubble boy...
Realm?
- I just like calling it being
treated like a normal human being.
You too can find love, if you install this app
and people will respect you, your parents
will talk to you, your friends will talk to you,
even if you have an LG V40 or a Galaxy.
- These sound like personal problems man,
these are definitely personal problems.
- No, it's all because of the blue bubbles,
it's not personal.
Alright, it's kinda personal.