Chat SDK now supports iMessage via a new vendor-official Photon adapter. Bots can send and receive iMessages, participate in group chats, share media, and respond with native tapbacks, all through the same handlers, posts, and subscriptions used by every other Chat SDK adapter.
Each Photon conversation maps to a Chat SDK thread. Tapbacks arrive as reactions. Webhooks are HMAC-verified, and bots can reply to a DM directly from a webhook delivery with no persistent connection required. The adapter runs against Spectrum Cloud, a self-hosted server, or directly on a Mac.
The full Photon documentation and the vercel-chat-adapter-imessage repository on GitHub have the implementation details worth reading, specifically how webhook delivery handles reply routing without a live connection, which changes the architecture assumptions for iMessage bots considerably.
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