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There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Sort of.
All messages/etc are sent using iMessage encryption directly between your phone and Apple's iMessage servers.
But there is no Android push notifications from Apple's servers.
So in order to be notified about new messages in a timely manner without killing your battery/data plan a cloud server is required to trigger your phone that a message has arrived so your phone can then request the message from Apple's servers.
This is actually a really common implementation, many apps use Firebase or similar to handle push notifications that are only used to trigger a "pull" of a larger chunk of data.
The push notifications being used here don't contain any private data, they just tell your device when to collect that private data securely.
Ah, I see what you mean. That's pretty neat architecture.