Beeper Mini is the iMessage for Android app we’ve been waiting for - Mishaal Rahman
androidauthority.com
Personally I don't care about this since apple is adopting rcs next year. But its a great thing for people who want iMessage.
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It looks like Beeper has purchased the software from the person who developed this, but his GitHub repo for it is still up.
He has also created a way to permanently side load apps on iPhone without jailbreaking. I imagine Apple will be working on both of these "problems".
iMessage reverse engineering hack that was purchased by Beeper: https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush
iPhone side loading: https://github.com/SideStore
Definitely going to look into this when I have the time. If it's not using your Apple ID for authentication (like the article says), what's to stop anyone from spoofing anyone else's phone number?
The pypush readme doesn't have a lot of details so I guess I'll just need to try it to see.
Edit: Looks like he's distributing "a framework from an old version of macOS, in order to call some obfuscated functions", which the script pulls from his GitHub. This is likely a copyright violation. If Beeper Mini is doing the same thing, I'd expect them to get sued into oblivion the second Apple takes notice.
It's not clear which version of macOS he pulled this from. There's always the risk that Apple will simply axe support for it. I don't recall them breaking support for older OSes with iMessage in the past but I haven't followed that closely so I'm not sure.
Update:
Just ran it on my desktop. It immediately prompts for a username and password, presumably for an Apple ID. I didn't continue because I don't want to use my real Apple ID. The article says Beeper Mini doesn't need an Apple ID at any point. After a little searching, it looks like iPhones actually don't need an Apple ID to use iMessage. I was not aware of that. So I guess Beeper is not using the exact same mechanism as pypush.
Beeper has been working in this space for awhile - there's no way they would publish an app with a copyright violation. I assume they have a workaround for that aspect.
a text message for verification from Apple confirms ownership
I think it's awesome that they paid the dev. More companies should do that for open source projects