There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
theverge.com
• A new Android app called Beeper Mini allows users to send iMessages as blue bubbles from non-Apple devices.
• Beeper Mini bypasses traditional iMessage hacks by directly sending iMessages from Android devices.
• The app has been praised for its smooth functionality, sending messages seamlessly between Android and iPhone users.
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So if the app will be open source like they say, can't we just build it ourselves and not pay $2/mo?
Kind of, but it's more complicated. I'm not sure if the app itself will be open source, but currently, the method they use is. Either way, the hardest part is already done, but you still need a client (maybe; they might open-source it) and a notification server. I'm planning to attempt to build a Matrix bridge if I have enough time and it's not beyond my skills, but if you don't want the messages to be decrypted by the server, making the notification server and maybe client would be really difficult.
I'm pretty sure the point of this is that the official iMessage servers are the notification server.
Sort of.
All messages/etc are sent using iMessage encryption directly between your phone and Apple's iMessage servers.
But there is no Android push notifications from Apple's servers.
So in order to be notified about new messages in a timely manner without killing your battery/data plan a cloud server is required to trigger your phone that a message has arrived so your phone can then request the message from Apple's servers.
This is actually a really common implementation, many apps use Firebase or similar to handle push notifications that are only used to trigger a "pull" of a larger chunk of data.
The push notifications being used here don't contain any private data, they just tell your device when to collect that private data securely.
Ah, I see what you mean. That's pretty neat architecture.
Don't see why not. Whats the timline on this?
Its already available for download and use, but I can't find the source anywhere other than a Python proof of concept project that beeper purchased the rights to to make this app.
Open source doesn’t mean it can be very conveniently free. Besides backend, building can be difficult, as you see in paid libre apps like Ardour