I have been able to join my partner's family group chats at long last, to much fanfare. It's nice, because there's a lot of great people I just haven't been keeping up with since I couldn't join the chat and was not about to buy an entire phone for one chat protocol.
Only problem I've had so far is that I can't see who's specifically reacting to messages when I try to tap into it. IDK if that's in line with the traditional iMessage experience though.
And from what I've looked through so far of the pypush code it seems pretty legit.
IMessage being only for iPhones is officially over.
This isn't something Apple can just block or patch without also affecting every iPhone that doesn't download the patch update beforehand. Any device that isn't patched in advance will also lose access to iMessage.
It's actually quite impressive how it is done and it's truly innovative.
It's very much a significant step forward compared to the implementations we have seen before.