Beeper Mini is back! Now you can text Apple users via iMessage again
Beeper Mini Is Back
We've created an updated version of Beeper Mini that fixes an issue that caused messages not to be sent or received. We even added in a few new feature improvements: chats now open at the last unread message, and we polished the video player a bit!
How long do you think it'll be back for this time? I'd consider trying it again after I finish a very important life event soon. Right now I can't afford to have messages going to a black box though.
Why not use regular text or email? Is it just about green vs blue bubbles? I've never understood why anyone thinks this is important.
I guess you aren't living in the US either.
The iPhone is extremely popular over there, especially amongst teens the market share is over 80%. Also, because of cheap SMS and MMS people actually continued to use SMS while e.g. most of the EU quickly switched to internet messengers.
At the same internet messengers started to appear, Apple released iMessage which is a internet messenger with an SMS/MMS fallback for chatting with non-iMessage devices. This experience is worse for many reasons, notably the terrible 500KB media size limit makes videos unwatchable.
Additionally, MMS group chats are a thing in the US. This means a single non-iMessage device in a group makes the experience worse for everyone.
This lead to most people using their pre-installed messaging app, which is a worse experience on Android (SMS) than on Apple (actually modern messenger). It's not an issue in other countries because people are accustomed to instantly installing WhatsApp on their new device.
Edit: As a teen, I didn't even know MMS could do groups because ten years ago it would've been prohibitively expensive anyway.
IDC about the colors, but being able to respond to individual messages within a conversation, being able to edit, and seeing which images a friend responded to is a nice to have. Android does all this stuff too, but until this Beeper app, neither phone OS played nice with the other. So that's why it's nice to have over regular SMS. As for regular email for an ongoing group conversation between friends? What is this, 1999? :P Email is not a good format for instant messaging like text messages are.
Only one thing is abundantly clear: you don't want your communications in the clutches of Big Tech.
This US problem with iMessage always sounds so bizarre to me
I don't see why it's bizarre. Apple worked hard on getting their devices into people's hands and created an ecosystem to keep people buying their devices again in the future.
Besides, it's no different from any other countries dependancy on other messaging applications, like WhatsApp!
WhatsApp is universally available, not locked down by the dominating platform's own proprietor.
The fact that people chose an app mostly locked to a platform or something that encourages you to just use that specific platform by placing restrictions on the other platform. They could've used something like Whatsapp but no. They chose imessage. No other country has this problem.
Yeah but like at least WhatsApp works, apple chooses to suck for half the population
The ultimate power move for Apple would be to require an iCloud+ subscription to use this service.
Yay?
is it using the iMessage servers again, or is it still talking to iMessage directly?
They claim this one talks to Apple's servers directly without proxy and therefore does E2EE.
See https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works
They do claim to use a custom-built proxy for push notifications (Apple's obviously won't work on Android) but that's a helluvalot less critical than a message content proxy.
Given their previous behaviour, I'll only believe that when an independent security researcher confirms that the app's code actually implements the iMessage protocol with E2EE as they claim.
There was a very recent project that reversed enginered iMessage which I assume they are using as reference.
In terms of helluvalot less critical - is it really though? Remember that the app on your phone is also witten by them, closed source and does whatever they want with your clear-text messages. If the trustworthyness of a messaging vendor is part of the critical-ness question, e2e encryption does not add anything: Either you trust them and could also do so when they process your message on their server, or your don't and they could indeed spy on you on the proprietary client app.
End 2 end encryption is only a real benefit when the ends actually belong to the user, i.e. theres transparency about the ends being clean, which can only be shown for open source ends. If the ends are potentially compromised, there's so security / privacy guarantee.
It's still taking to iMessage directly, but now you need an Apple account, your iMessage account won't be associated with a phone number.
They also have a different app called Beeper Cloud that uses a relay Mac somewhere in a data center.
Not a relay Mac, see the post you linked.
Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.
I'm in the US but am not a teen, so the idea of sending videos by text messages never occurred to me. Thanks for the explanation. I have been satisfied with SMS but I guess video continues to be the fungus that eventually destroys every data transport medium, heh.