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I built a tool to create AI agents that live in iMessage

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Hey everyone, I made this thing: https://tryflux.ai/. Here's a demo video: https://screen.studio/share/1y2EnC26Context: I've tried probably 15 different AI apps over the past year. ChatGPT, note-taking apps, productivity apps, all of it. But most of them are just clutter on my iphone.They live in some app I have to deliberately open. And I just... don't. But you know what I open 50 times a day without thinking? iMessage. So out of mild frustration with the "AI app graveyard" on my phone, I built Flux.What it does: - You describe a personality and what you want the agent to do - In about 2 minutes, you have a live AI agent in iMessage - Blue bars. Native. No app download for whoever texts it.The thesis that got us here: AI is already smart enough. The bottleneck is interaction. Dashboards get forgotten. Texts get answered.This was also my first time hitting #1 on Product Hunt, which was surreal.It's still rough and probably broke something. If you try it, feedback is super welcome, weird edge cases, "this doesn't work," or "why would anyone use this" comments all help.That's all. Happy to answer questions.

HN · launched Jan 4, 2026 · 54 upvotes (top 19%) · 0 views

Niche: ai app builders · 190 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -56% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Agent / copilot
  • Prosumer
  • AI-native
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial The LLM agent logic and multi-channel messaging integrations are straightforward, but maintaining an iMessage gateway requires running Apple hardware farms or reverse-engineering proprietary Apple Push Notification protocols.

What it would actually take: A production version requires macOS server virtualization or a fleet of physical Mac Minis running custom bridge software (such as BlueBubbles or AppleScript daemons) to interact with Apple's private iMessage service. The backend connects these iMessage listeners to a webhook pipeline and LLM orchestrator alongside official WhatsApp and Telegram bot APIs.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Perplexica, Perplexity, Twilio SMS, WhatsApp

Concerns raised: Apple ToS violations, risk of account shutdown, Reliability issues with Apple account provisioning, Flagged for suspicious messaging patterns, Difficult to find GitHub repository from homepage

Feature requests: Open protocol alternative to closed iMessage, Use standard SMS or email instead of iMessage, Clearer homepage navigation and documentation

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 972 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #191 of 973 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 67 days after the earliest competitor.

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