I don't think they use that anymore though? From what I've heard it all happens locally now with a proprietary solution.

Interesting, i'd be curious to learn more. It's been awhile since I looked into Beeper/Texts type apps.

at least from talking to Eric at a meetup, I think some are still on remote implementations. I know texts definitely needs to do the iMessage implementation locally, but they're moving everything client-side, which to me as a thunderbird user, makes the most sense. I just wish we could have something like libpurple again that would allow me to finally get back to the everything-in-one-app paradigm

ok is there an "open source beeper" that has emerged that i can play with? cant use amber because closed source

The bridges made for Beeper are all open source (https://github.com/mautrix/), so you can set up your own Matrix server with bridges and use any open source Matrix client (https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/).

Besides Beeper, the only consumer bridge hosting service I'm aware of is Element One, but it's only barely maintained, so I'd definitely recommend self-hosting over that.