So what’s the CyanogenMod team up to this time? It seems everyday, the CyanogenMod team is working on something new. Now the team appears to be working on an iMessage-like feature or app for users of CyanogenMod. Which there are many of us out there.
Many of you probably know Koush, Koushik Dutta, who is one of CM’s lead developers and the developer of Helium and ROM manager has been working on his own version of iMessage that would work between CyanogenMod members. It would actually work just like iMessage, the initial message would be sent encrypted through the user’s data network and would fall back to the regular SMS protocol in the event of failure.
There are about 7 million CyanogenMod users. But this appears to not be able to work on the entire Android ecosystem. Which is pretty unfortunate since there are are hundreds of millions of us. But this is a huge first step into getting this kind of functionality into Android. And it’s something we all really want.
Here’s what Koush said on Google+:
One of the interesting developments of the past couple weeks is that iMessage, is not snoopable by a third party, not even Apple (or so they would have you believe. Regardless of whether that is true; I love the design philosophy of iMessage: it works transparently, and encrypts the user’s message between iOS users and fails over to SMS as needed. Frictionless.
I’d thrown a poll out there, to see what sort of cohesiveness CyanogenMod users have. Surprisingly high. Many CyanogenMod text a lot with other CyanogenMod users.
(Which makes sense, as our growth to 7M users is entirely organic and word of mouth).Anyways, TL;DR. I’ve built out a secure/push based messaging plugin for CyanogenMod. Messages between two CyanogenMod users will be encrypted end to end and sent over GCM. It’s built into the framework; so it works transparently, even with third party apps. (This is actually one of the cooler points IMO, and I do a lot of testing with GoSMS, etc).
To me, one of the most interesting parts of the integration is the backend service will detect that you’re attempting to send a message to another CyanogenMod users and act accordingly. That is just awesome. It’s also said to work regardless of whether you’re using the stock messaging app or a third-party app like Sliding Messenger pro.
What do you think about this new feature coming soon to CM?