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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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161–170 of 1001 posts

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#161

Post by solardev »

prmoustache wrote: post #129
solardev wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Google Android user using a Google Pixel and Google's RCS on Google Fi, the messaging system is a total clusterfuck. There's no way to reliably send or receive messages, and sometimes my images will be degraded silently, group messages to other Fi users often don't work before several retries, reactions are totally hit and miss... IMessage is a much much much better experience. It's not at all bad for their cust…

GNU Jami or similar messaging systems are the solution, not some proprietary vendor locking solution.

That sounds like an uphill battle, lol. Signal came and went, WhatsApp and WeChat and Line dominate in much of the world, even email these days is mostly proprietary webmail. I think the average person will always prefer ease of use over openness or security.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#162

Post by misnome »

doublerabbit wrote: post #54
not_your_vase wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't implement it exactly due to their competitive tactics... (It was exposed in a recent courtroom hearing that Apple has seriously considered making it available on Android, but they decided that having it Apple-only is a serious benefit for them)

Of course. This now puts Apple in a prickly situation. One which paints a negative light on Apple which of, if a crowd following gathered "why isn't there iMessage for Android?". As I see, it would result of one of the following: - They sue and cause a backlash of Apple users. - They do nothing, shows Apple solely interest is in itself. - They create, happy times.

> "why isn't there iMessage for Android?"

Is there a single person in the world who didn’t already know the answer to this question?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#163

Post by sergiotapia »

Sprinkle some seasoning on these guys, cus they're cooked.

There is no path forward for integrating with Apple unless Apple opens up imessage. Fat chance. These guys took years and years and years to switch to a non-idiotic charging port! :(

I wonder how viable their business is without imessage integration. They are still aiming for all-in-one chat app - but that's not new and has been done at least a dozen times before.

How is this VC scalable?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#164

Post by junofan »

Nextgrid wrote: post #125
misnome wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t anti-freedom and pro-proprietary to have a view on what you think the law says and what you think Apple’s right to respond is. The original kid who reversed: Great hacking, I think we can all applaud. This is a for-profit (VC funded?) company charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for (and using apple binary blobs?). If they used the protocol they reverse engineered on their own…

> charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for Apple is free to charge for them. In fact, I think it would be the best outcome and a mitigation to the upcoming spam onslaught now that the protocol has been documented. > But that wouldn’t be profitable for them. Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create (since Apple is mo…

Apple does charge for access to their servers. Or are you saying they’re free to pick another business model?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#165

Post by theklr »

afavour wrote: post #108
martinky24 wrote: post #13

These Beeper folk sound a bit entitled. As was repeatedly mentioned in the other thread [1], building production applications on top of an undocumented and unsupported (in terms of backwards compatability, etc) API is a nightmare that should be avoided. Apple has every right to change their API, if they do Beeper will go down, and Beeper will blame Apple. I understand Apple's incentives to not want to be in this situ…

The way I see it Beeper are deliberately poking the bear. They knew Apple would block their implementation (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had this replacement ready to go). You don’t have to trust them, if you don’t want to use the service then don’t. They’re highlighting the closed nature of Apple’s messaging system more effectively than anyone has in a long time. I support them in doing that.

Only question is what’s the endgame? It’s not like they’re going to gain meaningful followers from this. This happens every 3-5 years with something Apple does and all that happens is Apple hardens even more, the little guy gets some press for a month and then disappears into the ethers

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#166

Post by kernal »

Why are Apple users so upset about this? It's almost as if they don't want interoperability with Android users. And please spare me the spam excuse.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#167

Post by dabinat »

I don’t really understand the long-term purpose of Beeper. Apple has already announced RCS, which will fix most complaints about text messaging interoperability.

There is still the question of encryption, which Beeper is strongly pushing, however Apple has announced it wants to develop an RCS encryption standard, so it sounds like it will be solved at some point in the next few years.

At that point, all Beeper becomes is a service to turn a green bubble blue.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#168

Post by placatedmayhem »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #97
micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's valid feedback from Beeper, but to insinuate that this gives them to right to force Apple to run their reverse-engineered access is where things go a bit too far for me. Apple's customers are not Beeper's customers. They have completely different incentives. I guess the approach is to try and force Apple's hand or push some legislation for interoperability, but Apple is working on RCS so it's not like th…

Apple's RCS implementation is meaningless unless they cut out the blue/green bubble shit.

"Meaningless" isn't accurate at this point. Media doesn't get nearly as severely downgraded (if at all), so the user experience of using an RCS chat is better than SMS/MMS.

There are still disparities, though, that should be presented. There's no standardized end-to-end encryption yet for RCS (although it could be argued Google's protocol is a de facto standard), and Apple has indicated it will be implementing RCS as the standard dictates, i.e. with no E2E encryption. Using blue bubble to indicate E2E encrypted and green to indicate otherwise is a reasonable UX choice.

After Apple implements E2E encryption over RCS via whatever standard (which can be reasonably inferred as their intention from their announcements), if the delineation for green-vs-blue is still iMessage/not-iMessage (rather than E2E vs not-E2E), then I think "meaningless" applies. But we're not there yet.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#169

Post by Pulcinella »

jxf wrote: post #138
vineyardmike wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A walled down proprietary messaging platform is so common as to be unremarkable. Google has probably 5 in the works right now. Meta has a few, and there’s dozens of others to choose from. It was really cool news when they reverse engineered the API. It was less cool when they sold paid access to this unofficial API. Beeper is barely pro-consumer because again, they’re charging for something open sourced by a 16yo kid…

> The green bubble blue bubble story is really tired. Yea it’s real, but it’s not a technical problem it’s a social problem. It's both. For example, Apple degrades the experience for "green bubbles" even though it doesn't need to. That's not, strictly speaking, a social problem.

Apple doesn't degrade the experience, that's a carrier limitation when sending SMS and MMS messages to anyone even other iPhone users.

E.g. MMS messages generally have to fit within 300-600KB so they are horribly, horribly compressed. https://m.gsmarena.com/glossary.php3?term=mms

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#170

Post by rpmisms »

dabinat wrote: post #167

I don’t really understand the long-term purpose of Beeper. Apple has already announced RCS, which will fix most complaints about text messaging interoperability. There is still the question of encryption, which Beeper is strongly pushing, however Apple has announced it wants to develop an RCS encryption standard, so it sounds like it will be solved at some point in the next few years. At that point, all Beeper become…

Group messages. RCS doesn't have a good solution for this.
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