I admire their dedication, but at the same time strongly disagree with asking people to pay money for a service, that's fundamentally based on a hole in a reverse engineered protocol. They won't win this
They're doing more than riding on apples services for free. They had to build and run a notification relay server to make this work.
Same thing that's been in the news about Apple sharing info with police. The content of the messages are ETE encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
My objection wouldn’t be that they didn’t put in enough effort, because it was clearly a lot, but that the service is a doomed idea.
Same thing that's been in the news about some sharing info with police. The comment of the messages are ete encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
Beeper Mini's GCM server only handles a "new message waiting" trigger, it doesn't contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.
I'm happy to pay to support them.
If you'd rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.
The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can't just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.
The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.
I'm just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users' data.
Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.
You should look at american legal precedent surrounding reverse engineering. Legally speaking, it's quite hopeful.
If the open source community could provide such a thing for free I think they would have done it already?
But presumably they lack the ability, the motivation or both.
They did. Its called airmessage. Has been around for almost 3 years now
do you need your own server
Yes.
n̈
You need a Mac of some kind, Minis are often used.
I used airmessage for a while when I was on iOS because I missed able able to message from the web while I was at work.
As much as I want it to he open source what could the risks be of apple finding a way to patch any exploits by looking at the open source code
I believe it’s a system that uses an actual Mac as a server for relay. Not really a way for them to stop that, and I doubt they care that much since it requires someone to have a Mac.
That's how Beeper works. Beeper Mini doesn't do that and instead imitates the Mac software, which is why Apple broke it.
I thought they meant airmessage.
I wouldn't mind paying $2 a month for Beeper. I've been using it for months to consolidate all of my messaging apps. It's worth $2 a month for me. Beeper Mini is just iMessage, so I don't know if it's worth it for me. They said they'll eventually move all of the other chat services over to Beeper Mini, at which point it will just be Beeper.
There's zero sense in charging anyone anything until apple decides to not find ways to block it. If there's going to be a cat and mouse game going on, the product isn't going to be stable enough to be worth using, so only die-hards are going to be willing to pay anything to begin with.
Them getting shut down so fast is not making them look reliable at all
The only way Beeper can make this work is to make it literally indistinguishable from a real Apple device, one that’s recent enough that Apple can’t simply drop it out of support. Seems unlikely but I’ve got popcorn so I hope they keep at it.
Best of luck in their protocol war with apple
Keep fighting boys
Just cut the losses already my beeper friends
Just quit?
What kind of nonsense is that.
Their idea was based on reverse engineering Apple. How could they have thought it would have kept working. Bad business idea IMO
For people out of the loop what is this about? Is a new whatsapp clone being released? I read something about apple blocking something but don't understand what's going on.
I find that, generally, reading is conducive to absorbing information I want to have.
I agree with the other commenter in general but I'll give you the bullet points.
Old news:
iMessage is a proprietary chat protocol that only works on Apple devices. Apple has indicated multiple times they have zero intention of porting this to other platforms
Apple users texting each other default to iMessage
iMessage has a lot of useful features over SMS texting that are highly desirable and convenient
On iPhones, when iMessages are being successfully sent in a text, the chat bubbles are blue. If they are SMS, they are green
The US additionally has a weird culture of some iPhone users shaming Android users because of the inability to communicate via iMessage, often referred to by the green/blue bubble appearance
There have been a few attempts to circumvent this, mostly by having a Mac somewhere with software installed to it that forwards iMessages to your Android device, though this is extremely cumbersome as it requires having an entire computer on 24/7 to make sure you receive these messages
New news:
Beeper Mini was released earlier this week, which actually runs a reverse-engineered iMessage client that tricks Apple servers into treating it like an Apple device
It was fully functional for about one day with almost all iMessage features working
Apple made some variety of change on their end that broke Beeper Mini functionality
And that's about it. For those of us that would like to have easy communication with our iPhone-using friends and family, yet don't want to change phone ecosystems to do so, this is a problem that would be awesome to see solved.
There are folks that, either because of ignorance or pigheadedness, like to chime in on these threads that they don't care about having blue bubbles. That is the least important aspect of this to most people following this, for the reasons I mentioned above.
Thanks. That helps a lot. I never knew that iMessages was integrated with sms, just thought it existed as a internet protocol like many other proprietary ones.
Basically it's all the same usual problem of using a closed proprietary chat protocol that a single stake holder has the power to change however and whenever they want.
Like whatsap, facebook and others which any alternative has to keep catching up to the changes that the companies do and which is very hard to maintain the reverse engineered protocols.
It never crossed my mind that I don't usually see alternative clients for imessage, but makes sense, didn't think it would be so hard to do.
So these guys came up with a implementation that works and apple just wants to crush them to destroy any alternatives. Business as usual.
It's hard to understand these news when all the lingo used implies you already know the thing being talked about. An article talking about "Blue bubbles" makes no sense whatsoever to anyone not used to apple ecosystem.
I admire their dedication, but at the same time strongly disagree with asking people to pay money for a service, that's fundamentally based on a hole in a reverse engineered protocol. They won't win this
They're doing more than riding on apples services for free. They had to build and run a notification relay server to make this work.
Same thing that's been in the news about Apple sharing info with police. The content of the messages are ETE encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
My objection wouldn’t be that they didn’t put in enough effort, because it was clearly a lot, but that the service is a doomed idea.
Beeper Mini's GCM server only handles a "new message waiting" trigger, it doesn't contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.
I'm happy to pay to support them.
If you'd rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.
The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can't just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.
The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.
I'm just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users' data.
Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.
You should look at american legal precedent surrounding reverse engineering. Legally speaking, it's quite hopeful.
If the open source community could provide such a thing for free I think they would have done it already?
But presumably they lack the ability, the motivation or both.
They did. That's why Beeper Mini exists.
https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush
https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/
https://www.wired.com/story/beeper-android-iphone-texting-blue-bubbles/
They did. Its called airmessage. Has been around for almost 3 years now
do you need your own server
Yes.
n̈
You need a Mac of some kind, Minis are often used.
I used airmessage for a while when I was on iOS because I missed able able to message from the web while I was at work.
As much as I want it to he open source what could the risks be of apple finding a way to patch any exploits by looking at the open source code
I believe it’s a system that uses an actual Mac as a server for relay. Not really a way for them to stop that, and I doubt they care that much since it requires someone to have a Mac.
That's how Beeper works. Beeper Mini doesn't do that and instead imitates the Mac software, which is why Apple broke it.
I thought they meant airmessage.
I wouldn't mind paying $2 a month for Beeper. I've been using it for months to consolidate all of my messaging apps. It's worth $2 a month for me. Beeper Mini is just iMessage, so I don't know if it's worth it for me. They said they'll eventually move all of the other chat services over to Beeper Mini, at which point it will just be Beeper.
There's zero sense in charging anyone anything until apple decides to not find ways to block it. If there's going to be a cat and mouse game going on, the product isn't going to be stable enough to be worth using, so only die-hards are going to be willing to pay anything to begin with.
Them getting shut down so fast is not making them look reliable at all
The only way Beeper can make this work is to make it literally indistinguishable from a real Apple device, one that’s recent enough that Apple can’t simply drop it out of support. Seems unlikely but I’ve got popcorn so I hope they keep at it.
Best of luck in their protocol war with apple
Keep fighting boys
Just cut the losses already my beeper friends
Just quit?
What kind of nonsense is that.
Their idea was based on reverse engineering Apple. How could they have thought it would have kept working. Bad business idea IMO
For people out of the loop what is this about? Is a new whatsapp clone being released? I read something about apple blocking something but don't understand what's going on.
I find that, generally, reading is conducive to absorbing information I want to have.
I agree with the other commenter in general but I'll give you the bullet points.
Old news:
New news:
And that's about it. For those of us that would like to have easy communication with our iPhone-using friends and family, yet don't want to change phone ecosystems to do so, this is a problem that would be awesome to see solved.
There are folks that, either because of ignorance or pigheadedness, like to chime in on these threads that they don't care about having blue bubbles. That is the least important aspect of this to most people following this, for the reasons I mentioned above.
Thanks. That helps a lot. I never knew that iMessages was integrated with sms, just thought it existed as a internet protocol like many other proprietary ones.
Basically it's all the same usual problem of using a closed proprietary chat protocol that a single stake holder has the power to change however and whenever they want.
Like whatsap, facebook and others which any alternative has to keep catching up to the changes that the companies do and which is very hard to maintain the reverse engineered protocols.
It never crossed my mind that I don't usually see alternative clients for imessage, but makes sense, didn't think it would be so hard to do.
So these guys came up with a implementation that works and apple just wants to crush them to destroy any alternatives. Business as usual.
It's hard to understand these news when all the lingo used implies you already know the thing being talked about. An article talking about "Blue bubbles" makes no sense whatsoever to anyone not used to apple ecosystem.