What is the Linq iMessage API?

What Linq actually sells

• iMessage, RCS, SMS and voice through a single API and one contract.
• Group chats, tapbacks, read receipts, typing indicators and rich media.
• FaceTime scheduling and Find My location sharing — unusual, and genuinely differentiating.
• A stated SOC 2 Type II posture and an advertised 99.95% uptime SLA.
• A free sandbox with a temporary test number, before any sales conversation.

The full write-up, and how to evaluate it.

What it does

• Send and receive iMessage programmatically, with RCS and SMS fallback and automatic routing.
• Group chat creation and management — materially harder than one-to-one, and missing or partial at several competitors.
• Tapback reactions, read receipts and typing indicators.
• Rich media, plus delivery of interactive iMessage apps.
• FaceTime calling and scheduling, and Find My location sharing.
• Real-time webhooks across all of it.

The claims worth verifying

Vendor claims, not our measurements. Ask for the artefact: the SOC 2 Type II report under NDA, and the SLA text with its remedy clause. A report that exists will be produced within a day. How to run that evaluation.

Why it is also called Linq Blue

Linq began as a digital business card company and moved into communications infrastructure. "Blue" distinguishes the iMessage channel from the RCS, SMS and voice channels sold alongside it — but you will not find a separately priced product by that name. It is one API.

What that means practically

• One integration, four channels. If you genuinely need iMessage *and* RCS *and* SMS *and* voice from one vendor, that consolidation is the actual pitch.
• One contract and one compliance review, which is the point for a procurement team.
• No à la carte iMessage pricing is published — the platform is quoted as a whole.
• Fallback routing is theirs to handle, since they own every channel in the path.

Who it fits

The week-long test

1. 1Open the sandbox first. Linq offers one free, with a temporary test number. Do this before any sales call.
2. 2Send 20 messages a day for two days to real recipients who expect them. Log every send and every delivery event with timestamps.
3. 3Measure delivered rate, not API uptime. Under 95% at that volume is a warning, not a fluke.
4. 4Break it deliberately — a landline, an Android number, a malformed number. Check the errors are distinguishable and documented.
5. 5Test inbound. Reply from three phones and confirm every webhook arrives, verifies and is idempotent.
6. 6Email support with a real question at a normal hour and time the reply. You are buying that response time as much as the API.

The questions that matter

Calling it from Node.js

const response = await fetch("https://api.linqapp.com/v1/messages", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.LINQ_API_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    to: "+19998887777",
    text: "Your 2pm window is confirmed.",
    webhook_url: "https://acme.co/webhooks/imessage",
  }),
  // Without this, a hung provider hangs your request handler with it.
  signal: AbortSignal.timeout(10_000),
});

if (!response.ok) {
  const retryable = response.status === 429 || response.status >= 500;
  throw new ImessageError(await response.text(), response.status, retryable);
}

Calling it from Python

import os
import httpx

_client = httpx.Client(
    base_url="https://api.linqapp.com",
    timeout=httpx.Timeout(10.0, connect=5.0),
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['LINQ_API_KEY']}"},
)


def send_message(to: str, body: str, callback: str | None = None) -> dict:
    response = _client.post(
        "/v1/messages",
        json={"to": to, "text": body, "webhook_url": callback},
    )
    # 429 and 5xx are worth retrying; a 422 for a recipient not on iMessage
    # will fail identically forever, so route those to your SMS fallback.
    response.raise_for_status()
    return response.json()

Names it gets confused with

Blooio, Miss Blue, Texting Blue and Project Blue are separate companies — "blue" is unsurprisingly common in this category. The directory disambiguates every name we could find.