Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

Edit: Actually it did happen when I opened a Firefox tab with a heavy js and left it open with deactivated suspend, which you shouldn't do on any phone (and even then it's more than a couple of hours).

### Beeper Mini - fix coming soon

Our fix for Beeper Mini is still in the works. It’s very close, and just a matter of a bit more time and effort.

In the meantime, we have deregistered your phone numbers from iMessage so your friends can still text you. Sorry, you’re temporarily a green bubble again. Annoyingly, the iPhone Messages app ‘remembers’ that you were a blue bubble for 6-24 hours before falling back to SMS, so it’s possible that some messages will not be delivered during this period.

Also, we are extending your 7 day trial by one additional week.

I just want to say thank you for bearing with us through this wild day (week!). I feel awful about important messages you may have missed today because our iMessage connection stopped working. My sincere apologies for this.

Tomorrow is a new day. Onwards!

### Beeper Cloud - iMessage works again!

I am very proud to say that iMessage is now working again on Beeper Cloud. After a Herculean effort from my amazing colleagues, our iMessage bridge is back in action. Unfortunately, messages received during the outage are not recoverable.

If you have a Mac or iPhone, you may see an alert that a new device has been added to your account. This due to the bridge update. The update is rolling out over the next hour.

And...it's not working for everyone yet. We're going to call it a night and get back to it tomorrow.

My wife won't use Signal because it includes a crypto wallet and crypto transactions are taxable.

Matrix/Element would be my preferred option, but it causes so many security or encryption related issues that it has scared off everyone I tried using it with. Nobody knows what to do with the incessant popups demanding to "verify" something or other. Nobody (including myself) knows why older messages often can't be decrypted.

Telegram is less secure than WhatsApp.

Threema is not free, which makes it difficult for me to ask people to install it. It's not open source either.

iMessage is Apple only.

So what's left besides WhatsApp?

I'm torn on this. Is it following the hacker spirit to get more people plugged into Apple's closed ecosystem? Maybe? Maybe not? Reverse engineering a proprietary protocol is certainly hacker-y. But building a business around that -- essentially charging people to put more load onto someone else's infrastructure, who have to bear the costs (even a rich behemoth like Apple) -- I'm not sure that qualifies. If we were talking about some open source project that was releasing this app to F-Droid, maybe it'd be more clear?

> The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!"

I don't think that's Apple apologism, that's just "duh, obviously Apple is going to try to shut them down, and probably succeed". It's lame. It's just as lame as when AOL kept breaking Gaim/Pidgin's ability to talk AIM's OSCAR protocol. But acknowledging that Apple is going to pull something like that isn't apologism, it's just stating reality.

(As for the AOL/AIM example, I think reverse-engineering OSCAR was actually hacker-spirit-y, as AIM was a free service open to anyone, just they didn't feel like supporting Linux users, as was the SOP of many companies at the time. Linux users were a fairly small percentage of users, so it wasn't a big thing. But there are tons of Android users; more than iOS users, globally, even. That's not really the same, to me.)

In the context of the overwhelmingly saturated messaging space, I think it'd be a lot more hacker-y to bring something like Signal up to the usability standards of iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc., and evangelize the hell out of it to get people out of closed platforms. Even Signal isn't perfect there, since they refuse to enable federation in the protocol, and only release updates to their server-side software a long time after it's been running in production. But it's certainly better than getting more people hooked in Apple's walled garden.