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Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

beeper.com

191–200 of 902 posts

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

#191

[flagged]

If an Android user is added to a group message and changes everyone to green that will be sending over SMS, right? I've not used SMS in a while - does that still come with costs?

Just throwing a thought at your question, I have no opinion on people based on their message background colour haha

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp, Telegram and many other platforms do everything that iMessage does and more, without the deliberate segregation of users on different platforms. In effect, you are using a third party app (as opposed to stock SMS), but Apple has integrated it into their OS and refused to release versions for other platforms.

Your literally talking about WhatsApp and Telegram as if they aren't their own segregated microcosms you can't message from whatsapp to telegram for instance so obviously they are their own segregated users by platform, its just a software platform not a hardware platform.

They are hardware agnostic, iMessage is restricted to users of very specific hardware.

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

#194
post #102

https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works > SMS access is used to send an SMS text message from your number to Apple’s “Gateway” service. The gateway sends a response via SMS, and the contents from that SMS response are sent to Apple to register your phone number as a blue bubble. Your SMS chat history is also used to determine if any of your recent SMS chats were with people who have iPhones. If so, these chat…

Beeper Mini checks only the last 50 contacts and determines if any are on iMessage.

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

#195
post #110
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already a ton of those operating, I get iMessage spam at least once per day.

Never ever seen that myself. SMS however yes, lots if spam by companies using bulk SMS services. But those show up as green bubbles so easier to ignore.

The spam iMessages I've received had the "iMessage" text above, were sent from a seemingly normal phone number and had a "Report Junk" button at the bottom of the screen (which text messages don't have).

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage is the LastPass of messaging apps. This has been endlessly discussed and I want people to use their curiosity to help direct them to why I would comment in this way. In practice (not whitepaper or the ideal implementation), it is no more secure than sms (actually worse)

This is absolutely not true. iMessage is a full E2E implementation; it’s nothing like SMS.

I'm curious how Apple implements Keychain in the sense that they claim it is also e2ee but they also use e2ee for ADP and its absolutely not (or at least not zero knowledge), rather it is convergent encryption which is not zero-knowledge and also allows for knowledge of filenames and hashes cuz "de-dupe" is so important for people with TB of cloud storage at the expense of their privacy.

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

#197

At this point, why not just wait for Apple to release their RCS implementation? The nicest thing about iMessage (for me, at least) has always been that it was a significant improvement to SMS that just worked, with graceful fallback to SMS for anyone who didn't use it. No installing third party apps, wondering if someone new I wanted to contact would be on that messaging app, etc. A nice bonus, but not something that…

> with graceful fallback

Have you ever tried to stop having an Apple device? Hopefully better now, but a few years ago there was no way to unlink iMessage. So say good bye to all your Apple friends, as them texting you goes to the Apple cloud and not your new phone.

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

#199

This downloads from GitHub and ’executes’ specific code points in what looks like a proprietary Apple binary, ‘IMDAppleServices’. Where was that binary sourced? Could you provide more context for what is performed at the hard-coded call-in addresses in your code? Does this relate to how you’re presenting a unique device identifier to the network? Do all clients share one identifier, or is it generated per Apple ID? H…

I am not the developer but I also looked at that binary to help the project at some point.

It's taken straight from OS X 10.8 (more precisely from an Update Combo on their download portal). It's calling NACInit, NACKeyEstablishment and NACSign functions from it (which have no entry points but with reverse engineering the offsets have been figured out). They are themselves relying on OS X system functions to get device information. The Python code is using Unicorn to emulate it and patch the calls to those functions to stubs returning pre computed values from a Mac machine (stored in a data.plist file). All clients are using the same machine identifier. IIRC, nobody did get its account locked but if the Apple ID has not been used at all it might fail (it depends on the donor device that generated data.plist, if it's a hackintosh for example it will likely not work).

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

#200

[flagged]

You're overly angry about something you either don't understand or haven't experienced. The color of the bubble meaningfully signifies that the existence of that person in a chat is degrading the chat experience for everyone else. As an Android user, it is awful to be in an iMessage group chat, and the iPhone users don't appreciate my presence any more. Basically nothing works properly, and it sucks... and this is by…

I'm not angry. I'm absolutely baffled at how pathetic people can be.
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