Chert – iMessage infrastructure for trusted communication at scale
Chert provides the infrastructure for teams to send, receive, and automate conversations over iMessage using APIs.
Details
- External ID
- 100959
- Source
- YC
- Company
- Chert
- Product
- Chert – iMessage infrastructure for trusted communication at scale
- Website domain
- trychert.com
- Launched
- May 7, 2026
- Cohort
- Spring 2026
- Upvotes
- 44
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8246268656716418
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Oct. 1, 2026, 1 a.m.
- Updated at
- Oct. 1, 2026, 1 a.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche social and community platforms
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- imessage api infrastructure
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Apple offers no public API for iMessage; delivering iMessage at enterprise scale requires reverse-engineering Apple's proprietary closed protocols or managing physical Apple hardware farms while constantly circumventing anti-abuse countermeasures.
What it would actually take: Building an iMessage gateway at scale requires reverse-engineering the Apple Push Notification service (APNs) and iMessage encryption protocols (or running large clusters of virtualized/bare-metal macOS devices using tools like MacStadium), along with automated Apple ID generation and rotation systems. The project demands deep reverse-engineering skills, cryptographic expertise (FairPlay/identity pairing), and continuous cat-and-mouse defense against Apple's automated hardware and account banning heuristics.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 54 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #6 of 55 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 190 days after the earliest competitor.
- Chert · ph · 2026-05-19 · 192 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- AmeChat - AI Messenger · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- TYIT · ph · 2026-09-13 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- XChat · ph · 2026-04-25 · 175 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Chert · ph · 2026-08-16 · 210 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- psstpsst · github · 2026-09-12 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- folk · ph · 2026-06-01 · 309 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- TrustedAt · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.36
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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