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Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

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Re: Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

#12
Really happy to see that original customers are getting this included as well. I was worried that this was a ploy to say "we know we said you all would be grandfathered in, but that was for _Beeper Cloud_, our old legacy one. This new one is a monthly charge". Thanks for being great, @erohead

Re: Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

#14
post #7

The unfortunately fatalist question to ask is... how long until Apple shuts it down?

Seems like the local implementation may be durable, but the system for backend polling (BPN) they built appears to ping Apple servers server side. I imagine that creates a block of homogeneous traffic for Apple to spot.

Re: Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

#15

It's really impressive that a high school student [1] has managed to reverse engineer iMessage. What I'm wondering is: 1. How stable is it; would it be trivial for Apple to patch this? 2. If it's as simple as reverse engineering the protocols, how has it taken this long? [1] https://github.com/JJTech0130

Its more a commentary on how amateur it is in my respectful view. iMessage is a fundamentally unserious "product" in search of enough collateral flaws to harm those foolish enough to depend on it for anything.

Re: Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

#16
post #7

The unfortunately fatalist question to ask is... how long until Apple shuts it down?

Besides being allegedly hard to shut down without breaking iPhones, there's also this statement given to Ars Technica:

> Migicovsky had a few different answers. The broadest one, regarding the tech behind the app, is that reverse-engineering for interoperability is legal—a fair use exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's restrictions against circumventing encryption or other protections. The app also goes out of its way to avoid trademarks like iMessage, referring instead to "blue bubbles" and the like, and the rest might be considered nominative fair use.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/beeper-mini-on-andro...

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