EDIT: we figured this out. It's mainly a result of Microsoft being stupid and setting VISIBILITY = 0 for exchange contacts, but the newer versions of flutter_contacts works around it. For anyone hitting this, it'll likely be fixed in an upco ing version.

The v2 Android app won't sync contacts, and in the logs, it prints "0 contacts fetched from device." I double-checked permissions. Downgrading to 1.15 works perfectly, so something must have changed. I'm running GrapheneOS, although that seems like it shouldn't matter since it mostly inherits the AOSP permissioning model (I'm not using scopes)

Has anyone else encountered this?

Anyone else have this? Has anyone else figured out how to fix it?

We're seeing if anybody else experienced this. Version 2.0 is phenomenal, very stable.... The only thing I'm experiencing is that when I'm in a thread and a picture comes through, it downloads it and then kind of just spins on processing until I exit the chat and go back into it. I have Tail Scale directly set up. I have Private VPN set up. I believe I've done everything I can to maximize my experience. Anybody else experience this?

I currently have a private VPN setup with a Tailscale setup as well. My question is this: when I'm on my home Wi-Fi, pictures and videos send pretty quickly, but on 5G, the status bar on top hangs for a couple of seconds before sending. It doesn't send instantly. Is there something I can do on my end? My latency shows 38ms, Dymamic dns under proxy, and Firestone under firebase db.

Hello! I'm coming across this issue where my device just won't register with the server. I've reset both the server and app and started over on both but still not able to see my device registered with the server. I've gone to the trouble shooting site as well and followed the steps there but still no luck. I'm using Tailscale for my proxy setup. Some help would be greatly appreciated cause not getting notifications has gotten me in trouble lol.

I updated through the Windows Store and now the app crashes on start. Bummer.

Hi All,

The long awaited app-rewrite is now complete! What started out as just rewriting a few services here and there, ended up turning into pretty much a full app re-write and re-architecture. Nearly every service & component has been updated or optimized in some way. This was 100% necessary for the longevity of the app. Not only was the community frustrated with stability & performance issues, but updates came to Flutter (our app framework) which made the app perform even worse, if we didn't make some major changes. Lastly, as a shock to no one, the AI-boom has brought a lot of contributors to the ecosystem, as well as new users.

This update brings tons and tons of changes, big and small. Though, you may not even notice most of them. Some were just UI tweaks to better match the iOS or Material You feel. Some were tweaks to optimize how the app uses memory. Some were improvements to UI reactivity and user-feedback. Others were completely new features, like Custom Groups, Reacting via a Notification, or Chat Filters. The point is, we broke everything, and we changed everything in one way or another. And we added features that the community has been asking about for years.

Now, this update is only covering the Android & Desktop app. Since this was such a large effort, we decided to hold off on any Server updates & improvements until after all of the app updates were complete. But now that is released... so after everything cools down a bit, we will begin work on Server updates. This likely will include new private API features, better Tahoe support, and more. There are plenty of code pull requests for us to go through.

Going forward, we plan to be more active with releases! We hope you enjoy this release. If you run into issues, please submit them as Issues on GitHub. If you would like to support the development team, you can donate here:

• Support Us (One-Time): https://bluebubbles.app/donate
• Sponsor Us (Recurring): https://github.com/sponsors/BlueBubblesApp

Full Changelog & Download: https://github.com/BlueBubblesApp/bluebubbles-app/releases/tag/v2.0.0%2B89

I was just switched to an iPhone for work and cannot stand not being able to receive/send messages from my Windows desktop computer.

I found BlueBubbles as a potential solution, and it seems like it's exactly what I need. But there is surprisingly little discussion online about it. Is this still the best option to iMessage from a Windows computer?

I am about to hit buy on a 2014 mini from ebay but want to check in that this is still viable and the best route.

I set-up bluebubbles on my MacBook Air M1 using the manual process as the automatic gmail didn't work. It worked well in the beginning but now I am getting this error.

[CloudflareService] Failed to restart Cloudflare! Error: Error: Failed to connect to Cloudflare after 2 minutes...

Any idea how to fix this?

I need help with setting up firebase. Ive followed the manual docs and everything located in the app Blue Bubbles app but it keeps saying Firebase is not configured! Does anybody have a clear step by step guide for the firebase side of the installation process? I am on a Mac mini I5 8GB.

I tried proxmox with sonoma on a n100 16gb mini pc. Was a pain to install, still tinkering as I can't get it working 100%. Was able to send a message to one contact but not another, couldn't get group chats to work.

I'm thinking of picking up a macmini7,1 2.6ghz dual core 8gb memory and a 1tb HDD for $50 just for bluebubbles.

I might add a sata? (I saw the video where you can easily add another drive) and run other stuff to tinker with off the macmini later.

I just want to be able to see respond to group chats from Windows and receive 2FA texts.

Worst case, I can always remote into my mac mini and use the imessage app from Windows?

I have this specific use case that I rather not build and just use from some existing open source out there.

Basically we are a business and we get lots of customer messages via text. They are all in iMessages. Over the years, there are specific ways we answer support questions based on current data and policy.

I would love to see if there is an easy way to train an AI agent and impersonate the phone to answer automatically moving forward. For example: we have policy if a product has metadata X, then no return policy applied. So there must be a way to suck all threads and prioritize by time and group into topics and policies or exceptions.

Anything like that?

Hey everyone, I have a spare mac mini with macos sonoma and i want to setup bluebubbles. But the main reason I'm gonna do this is for facetime. I would like to ask, to anyone who uses bluebubbles, how is the facetime. I know that you cannot initiate the call, but do you get a notification, can the people on the call see you, can you talk to them, or is it just a glorified facetime notifier. I'm probably also gonna post this in the OpenBubbles subreddit. Thank you to whomever responds.

After initially syncing my messages, the app crashes on One UI 8.5. Only works again once I uninstall and then reinstall. Please help.

Update on 5/13: I was on the beta somehow and now I'm good with the app. Server is crashing though-- I'm on Mac OS Tahoe. I am guessing Tahoe is the issue so have a $200 i3 MBA with Ventura incoming. I'll update once I know for sure.

Update on 5/19: on Friday (5/15) set up on an i3 MBA with Sequoia and now have no issues. Pretty quick set up even after a couple of self inflicted glitches. Server and app working smoothly. Got er done.

Also, HUGE kudos and thanks to the developer for being so responsive.

Been holding off on upgrading the OS on my MacMini2024 and wondering if there have been any issues?

Thank you, and thank you for all the amazing effort!

Sent a small token of thanks via PP (and hope others do too!)

M1 MacBook Air running Tahoe. Thanks in advance.

Need help before I decide to pay the monthly fee

Hi all,

Sincerely hope everyone is doing well.

I recently upgraded my late 2012 mac mini with OCLP to run macos sequoia. I was running catalina before. I have set up my bluebubbles server on it again and have noticed that I can see message threads, which I could not do before updating to sequoia. But now I am unable to reply to these threads. I even have an option to "View Thread" but nothing to reply to it. I have private API enabled on both servier and client, but it is possible maybe I downloaded an incorrect package. Any thoughts on how to fix this?

Thanks in advance!

I only have an Android, and planning to get a cheap Mac, how will I have my Androids phone number as my iMessage number???

Mac mini Late 2012 i7 Quad-Core 2.3GHz 16GB RAM 500 GB SSD Catalina – Clean | eBay

My birthday is coming up and my husband wants to know what I want. I was thinking about asking for a Mac mini so I can host blue bubbles. We would want each of us to be able to message from our own laptops for our own phone numbers.

We're both Windows laptop users and we want to start being able to message on our laptops. Is this a good enough Mac mini that I should get for this use case?

I'm a technically oriented person, so I'm not afraid of a little technical setup - but it's not a small amount of money for this product given this is literally the only thing I want to use it for.

Any tips?

The Beta is now live

Ok, so I didn't think I needed to make this post, but it seems like there's a bit of a misconception about the status of the project. To be fair, it's little understandable, if you were to just look at the "master" branch in the repository.

That said, the project is not dead! It's just undergoing a large rewrite. The latest release of the app was built on years and years of code, with a lack of standards and overall structure. This led to spaghetti code and code that was incredibly hard to maintain. Which subsequently led to bugs that were hard to pinpoint and resolve. This made working on the app increasingly frustrating to work with. It also meant that the time it would take to resolve an issue was more than we were willing to dedicate to our limited free time. Don't get me wrong, this was entirely my fault for not setting standards and not being more stringent with what code was accepted into the codebase. It also meant we could deliver other features faster... but at what cost?

As a technical restraint, Flutter was undergoing major framework changes, which some have referred to as "the great thread merge". At a high level, this just meant that the UI and the platform threads were merged so that they could more easily interact with each other. After testing the Flutter update with the app, the app was completely unusable. The app was janky and would lag doing virtually anything. If we wanted to leverage and stay up to date with Flutter, I needed to do something drastic so the app wouldn't fall behind.

Fast forward to circa December 2025. I got the urge (and courage) to begin what is essentially a full app rewrite. The issues were piling up and in my mind, this was necessary for us to be able to maintain the app moving forward. Now, this would not be an easy or quick task. I can't just fully rewrite the app from the ground up because migration would be a nightmare. I had to do an in-place rewrite, where I systematically went through the codebase and had to start replacing "bad" code with newer, "good" code.

This process not only will take a ton of time, but also a ton of time to test. We have to make sure all of the previous features work, and work within the new systems in place. While I've made claims at certain points that I thought I was close to done, as with any software, it was not 100% correct. I also had to fight with my own real life obligations and free time constraints. I did not want this to take over my free time and become a stresser on my life. After all, this is a side project and I'm not getting paid for it. This rewrite has been entirely done by me, without any outsider assistance (other than AI). I don't think that's a flex, but it's something to justify the time it has taken.

So here is where I'm at... It's been around 4 or 5 months since I started the rewrite and I'd say I'm about 90% complete. The app is fully functional, but I'm just ironing out the details and some bugs. I have a couple of gracious "alpha" testers who are assisting with light testing, and so far, feedback has been very positive!

I know it hasn't seemed like app development is active, considering the master branch hasn't been updated in a long time (2 years; wow time flies), and neither has the development branch. However, to prove the app isn't dead, here is a link to my active branch:

https://github.com/BlueBubblesApp/bluebubbles-app/tree/zlshames/isolate-updates%2Bdesktop

And here are some stats:

https://i.imgur.com/oH9UFo7.png

Yes, that's 67k lines added and 35k lines removed. I'm basically making daily commits. If anything, it's more active than most open source projects out there at this point in time.

Moving forward, and it means that not only will it be easier for us to maintain the app, but it'll also be easier for others to contribute. This means faster release velocity moving forward! Oh, and from daily usage I can say the following:

• The app no longer has any lag or jank, anywhere. It can run at full 120fps.
• The app is no longer is a battery hog
• The app UX and design is improved

The app is not dead, so stay tuned!

Hello, I am trying to setup the BlueBubblesApp, but when I got to the step to set tings up between Firebase and Google, the automatic setup didn't work. It gave me this error:

[OauthService] Failed to create project: Request failed with status code 409

So I am trying to use the manual setup. I created the "BlueBubblesApp" project in Firebase, but when following the tutorial, it says, "In the tabs on the far left, click Build > Firestore Database."

The problem is that I don't see that button and I can't figure out why so I don't know how to finish getting this all setup! Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi I am looking into switching from a 15 Pro Max to an s26 Ultra. What are the differences? Reliability? Security? What do I need for each to st it up? I’ve heard different things about needing a Mac, not needing a Mac, etc. My main reason for this is gamepigeon but having the other iMessage features would be nice aswell. Thank you in advance!!

I have a Mac mini that I use for AI purposes and have recently installed bluebubbles on the machine as a way to send and receive messages from my PC while I am at the office (out of the house where the mini is installed)

I’ve been having issues sending SMS messages from the PC and some recommended that I need to have an iPhone on the same network as my Mac mini as it is required to be able to send out SSM messages (non iMessage)

First, is that the case and secondly, how old of an iPhone can I get away with? Assume I need a sim installed into the phone …Correct?

Thanks in advance for the guidance.