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Stella Foster

iMessage on Any Phone

Details

External ID
47523447
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Stella Foster
Website domain
stellafoster.com
Launched
March 25, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
5
Upvotes percentile
0.1070110701107011
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hey HN — I built Stella Foster (stellafoster.com). Stella lets you access your iMessages, WhatsApps, and Telegrams from any phone — flip phone, feature phone, anything. A Mac desktop app connects to your messaging channels natively. Once that's running, Stella has a phone number — you text or call her from any device and she gives you your messages. No apps or internet needed on the second phone. If it can call or text, it works. Free to try. Happy to get into the technical details in the comments.

Enrichment

Theme
cross-device control and OS utilities
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Communication
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
imessage support for non-apple phones
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial The SMS/voice assistant wrapper is easy with Twilio and OpenAI Realtime, but bridging natively into desktop iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram without official APIs requires fragile reverse-engineered desktop daemons.

What it would actually take: The architecture pairs a cloud phone gateway (Twilio + LLM function calling) with a local macOS daemon. The core technical hurdle is interfacing with macOS Messages (accessing `chat.db` with Full Disk Access and sending via AppleScript/Accessibility APIs or private BlueBubbles/Barcelona protocols) alongside local WhatsApp/Telegram web/desktop automations while keeping them securely synced to a cloud relay.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Daemon needs to be running on laptop while away, Unclear how routing/tunneling actually works

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 167 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #165 of 168 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 147 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product