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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

#41
post #32
post #19

Beeper was made by the pebble dev. Eric should have read the goal by Eli goldratt, it's a case study of TOC. I still love my slides of time. Pebble: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-time-a...

For anyone confused, "TOC" refers to "theory of constraints": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints I also enjoyed The Goal and found it helpful for my manufacturing business, although I'm having trouble understanding how it connects to this blog post.

It doesn't do with this post. It has to do with pebble. They overproduced and were too carried away with efficient over production and (probably) had warehouses full of pebbles. For years after you could get a new in box one for $40 or $99 at retail when it was supposed to be $200 or so.

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

#42

How does the generation of validation data for registration work? As far as I understand, this requires details from an actual Apple device (serial number, model, etc.)

jjtech covered this in pypush: hhttps://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush#dataplist-and-mac-seria...

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

#43
I already had a significant respect for Beeper (Cloud) as a technical product. The backend being Matrix with open source bridges was a great choice.

This write up adds so much more to that respect. It would have been easy to botch this, it would have been easy to do a worse implementation that would have caused problems for users whether they cared or not, but Beeper seemingly took the time to get right.

Congrats to Eric and the team on the launch!

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

#44
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's Pebble? It's mentioned on the Beeper home page too with no context as though everyone should know what it is, sadly I don't.

One of the original smartwatches, if not the original: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/getpebble/pebble-e-pape... (At least I think that's what the word salad of parent is referring to.)

I would name Seiko Data-2000 the original, some 28 years earlier. Even if you'd like something more modern-looking the list still has IBM Linux Watch and Samsung SPH-WP10 and others before.

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

#45
From their blogpost: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-cloud-and-product-roadmap

> Everything changed in August when a security researcher reverse engineered the iMessage protocol.

> At a high level, here’s our product plan for the near future (in very rough order, and very subject to change): > Add support for SMS, WhatsApp and Signal into Beeper Mini, using the same end-to-end encrypted client-side connection architecture. No cloud servers in the middle.

so they are changing their whole business model to rely on illegal proceedings, breaking the ToS of every service they want to provide an alternative for.

I'm pretty sure Apple isn't fond of random people using their servers and their proprietary protocol on a client they haven't created. Signal is the same, they C&D every fork that becomes popular, the only official clients are the CLI and the ones they release (Signal is open source though). WhatsApp is also similar.

It's interesting and disappointing to see that they are hoping to create a business model on top of that, and it will probably backfire and hurt Matrix users as well, because these chat companies will become stricter and completely forbid third-party clients.

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

#46

How does the generation of validation data for registration work? As far as I understand, this requires details from an actual Apple device (serial number, model, etc.)

I think it's calling a server generating validation data (probably with a pre-set hardware informations to be able to run it on a Linux machine which is cheaper, with emulation as pypush does it or by directly loading the macOS executable in the memory and run the right code snippets there).

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

#47
post #38

OK, took a while to figure out what it is, as I barely know anyone using iphone. Though it's not for me, BUT if they deliver this: > Over time, we will be adding all networks that Beeper supports into Beeper Mini, including SMS/RCS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Telegram, Instagram, Twitter, Slack, Discord, Google Chat and Linkedin. We'll also bring Beeper Mini to desktop and iOS. I'm interested, even if it's paid. I'…

Is this some sort of new mobile Adium?

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

#49

I'm on the fence about using this. I don't want to switch all my conversations over to iMessage and then have Apple figure out how to ban this. That kind of feels like a recipe for lost messages.

It doesn't help that they want to pursue the exact same approach for the other apps they want to provide service for.

They are looking to get banned and completely damage the Matrix/Mautrix bridge ecosystem.

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