Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android [UPDATED]

AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world to Android@lemmy.world – 217 points – Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android | TechCrunch
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UPDATE: Beeper, through their Twitter account, is saying that they're working on it and "hope to have good news to share soon":

Work continues to fix the issue causing the Beeper Mini outage. We know how hard this has been for those who loved using Beeper Mini, and we're extremely sorry for the inconvenience. We are feeling good, though, and hope to have good news to share soon.

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To the surprise of no one.

Afaik apple can't block this without also blocking iMessage on older devices that no longer receive updates.

Pretty sure I saw on Reddit beeper is already working on a fix.

without also blocking iMessage on older devices that no longer receive updates.

My guess at Apple's response when they do block them: "Buy a new phone"

This is the company of "you are holding it wrong" after all.

Has there been any news of people with older Mac's unable to use iMessage anymore because of this?

Apple flexing their anti-competitive muscles again.

From locking down the OS to proprietary charging and a staunch opposition to right to repair, their track record has been nothing but anti-consumer for the last decade and a half.

And the worst part is that they've gotten away with it for so long and so often that they managed to inspire Android device manufacturers (ahem...Samsung) to follow in their footsteps. Someone really ought to step in and break up the company, Microsoft anti-trust style.

Apple flexing their anti-competitive muscles again.

The EU will protect us, right.... Right?

No, because iMessage isn't a gatekeeper in the EU. It's comparable to Signal in size, depending on the country.

Hopefully with Apple adopting RCS they fix the spec to include e2e encryption. At the moment only Google's proprietary client does RCS with their own encryption.

iMessage is one of the largest enablers of ostracization and teen bullying. It's a stupid cult - people see green text in their chats and they freak out. Apple knows this extremely well, and profits from it. Apple couldn't give two shits about the degraded security either. They know this pressures their users to be locked in to their platform, and pressures people outside to buy into it or suffer being on the outside of their cult. This quick move to cut off Beeper makes Apple's disregard for teens, security, and their own users painfully obvious. So long as they can coerce people into buying into their locked and incompatible system, Apple will continue to fuck everyone.

iMessage is one of the largest enablers of ostracization and teen bullying

This feels like a strange trivialization of teenage bullying thought up by someone who hasn't been a teenager in a long timr.

On the other hand, if this is true, kudos to society for clamping down on teen bullying. There wasn’t much (if any) bullying in my high school, but not long ago bullying and ostracizing was more… physically painful.

Like yeah it sucks that there’s still any, but this green text nonsense is a hell of a lot better than having one’s head flushed inside a toilet and the like. Good to see society making forward progress.

The green text is not the bullying, the green text is one of the new reasons the kids are getting their heads flushed in the toilet. The bullying has stayed the same, there are just new additional reasons to get bullied.

Oh. That’s disappointing, I guess there was some degree of wishful thinking in hoping bullying was actually easing up. My schools had next to no bullying + years of anti-hazing campaigns and I’d never actually heard of anyone dealing with the classic bullying stereotypes, so I thought we really were making progress.

I wonder if part of it was the setup of the schools, where we had only a few minutes between classes to transfer rooms. Not much time to flush heads in that span? But I also thought it was a common setup still used today so no idea.

It's probably a combination if reasons why it seems like there's less bullying.

Bullying is less physical now with online bullying existing. Also, it's difficult for outsiders to understand if someone is bullied if they don't bring it up.

E.g. some girl in my class was bullied in 8th grade, but it wasn't obvious to me as I wasn't close to them. For an outsider not paying particular attention making fun of someone a few times might just be friendly banter.

[...] transfer rooms. Not much time to flush heads in that span?

At least in my school there were 20min breaks after 90min of classes, so more than enough time to give someone a shower if they wanted. Edit: Altough I want to believe they had to be more careful so they chose less obvious forms of bullying.

A) Apple stop being scummy

B) USA gets a grip on this bubble colour nonsense and stops using iMessage

Which comes first?

It's not about the bubble color, it's about not being able to use modern messaging features cross-platform.

The two things go hand in hand, though.

Degraded messaging gets branded with green bubbles. Green bubbles - i.e. non-Apple phones - get associated with degraded messaging. Non-Apple phones get pidgeon-holed as crappy phones for messaging. People get bullied into buying iPhones.

it gets even better because the android to android messaging is better than the IMessage stuff, but apple purposefully degrades the performance of cross-platform messaging

When iPhones get RCS won't this stop being an issue?

Not all iMessage features can be mapped to RCS, so unless Apple brings iMessage to other platforms, non-Apple phones will always be associated with an inferior messaging experience.

I think you're being optimistic in thinking that either of those is going to happen.

So is it working again, or no? It seems to be on again, off again, on again at the end of the article. I think I'll just wait until they either figure it out for good, or get permanently banned. I can't have text messages going to a black hole right now.

No one who used I message after this could reach me it was so weird

It wouldn't surprise me if you're experiencing that old bug that happened when iOS users went to android. Their phone number would be in apples system as an iMessage number, and wouldn't recognize that it wasn't. So people would message you, and the message would get lost in the aether.

I don't understand what beeper is doing (cause I'm dumb and too lazy to look it up) but your number might be stuck. Your friends might need to manually turn off iMessage for you (it used to be long pressing the send button in the message till it turns green)

I reallt hope apple actually adopts RCS next year. The standard is so much better than iMessage.

My friends said they had a button pop up to instead send as SMS yesterday. Beeper sent notifications the service was down and shortly after my number was deregistered with imessage without me having to do anything.

This was exactly it I had to not only deregister from Apple's services but my friends also had to turn off iMessage send me a message and then they can turn it back on and nothing would be broken. Must be some kind of caching we've decided just to switch to Discord much safer that way

Well that's not anti-competative. We're at or above Carnegie and Standard Oil levels of monopoly shenanigans.

I don’t get what all the fuss is with iMessage. I got my first iPhone last year with work and it texts just like my old phone did.

What other features really am I getting that I didn’t have before? Delivered and read confirmation? Laser beam effects?

High quality picture and video? Have you never exchanged pictures or video with a non iPhone user from your iphone? Pictures aren't always horrible but video is basically unwatchable. Also end to end encryption, which is less obvious. Group chats are also borked by having a single non iPhone user in them. Android to android in most cases lately has high quality multimedia but that's not true of mixed interactions.

Technically apple users can fix the quality issue with a change in their settings to stop compression of images sent via MMS.

As to android phones not having high quality, your def right about that. The RCS rollout was terrible. But most of the flagship devices have RCS and a lot more carriers are allowing it (here in Canada at least. I assume we're behind the curve though)

Samsung has enabled RCS down to even their cheapest handsets, (I believe) but apple isn't adopting that till next year, and then we'll be able to skip the shenanigans

MMS? Now that's a term I haven't heard in 15 years. American texting is so weird.

Betweeen newer androids it's RCS now and between Apple devices it's imessage so it's only going between the two because Apple refuses to bridge the gap because people are so used to that setup. However now a lot of my friends, coworkers and neighbors have Telegram now so don't need to worry about the specific device.

I’ve always done all of that via Facebook messenger or discord not via text, before that it was via MSN messenger.

I suppose it makes sense to use iMessage for it, but so few people I know even have iPhones so that’s likely why we never used it.

99% of arguments I hear about iMessage are really just blue bubble vs green bubble, and that A LOT of people are extremely hung up about having to have a blue bubble.

Personally I have never gotten the bubble fixation.

If you're on Lemmy, you're already set up to "not understand". You probably have no trouble installing a new chat app and using it.

I chat with 20-30 people in my neighborhood, all middle aged adults, and they all have iPhones. If I were to ask, only one would accommodate my request to use a different app, and it'd still be disruptive to his routine. I'm not angry at any of these folks; I blame Apple. Though they have a good product, they are totally behaving like a monopolist.

It's not the features and never has been. It comes preinstalled, it just works, and it works perfectly with most people. No one calls it "iMessage". They call it "texting".

I also just don’t know that many people with iPhones. Sure I see them a lot at work now. But people with money for a nice phone tend to buy foldables and people without money seem to buy cheap androids.

I imagine it’s very different in the USA though. Australia has always been an odd market.

The ability to reply, edit, and delete are pretty cool. Yes, you can do that with RCS too, but unfortunately you can't do anything cross-platform.

When iMessage user sends messages, videos, pictures, gifs to another iMessage user, it sends over via data. Similar to Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, etc.

When an iMessage user sends to an Android user, it sends it via SMS/MMS which is very limited.

It's a text message protocol not fucking Standard Oil... Pull your head out of your ass.