The new "iMessage on Android" app, Beeper Mini, was released on December 5 and offers iMessage blue bubbles and end-to-end encryption to Android users. On Friday, users found they could no longer send and receive messages.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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/