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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#411

Post by cmiles74 »

snakeyjake wrote: post #374
tapoxi wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't 70% of American teenagers on iPhone because of the iMessage network effects? The whole "green bubble" shaming issue.

>The whole "green bubble" shaming issue. Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy. 70% of American teenagers may have access to iMessage due to it being on their phones but there is a 0.0% chance that, in aggregate, iMessage is in their top five most-used messaging apps.

I can't speak to the anti-trust issue but it is a real thing. My daughter couldn't join the group chat used by her (all iPhone) cheerleading team. We ended up missing last minute changes to practice locations more than once.

And, of course, there was some teasing from the other team members about how my daughter's parents were too cheap to buy them a proper phone.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#412

Post by gafage »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #409
snakeyjake wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms. Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The purpose of anti-trust is to increase competition and prevent unlawful monopolies. Apple…

> How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? How is this less of an issue than Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day? The shit Google and Apple seem to be getting away with these days would make regulators of yore spin in their graves.

It is less of an issue because of market share. MS crushed Netscape with IE. imessage is not used in the EU

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#413

Post by lotsofpulp »

microtonal wrote: post #293
starkparker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best-case outcome is that Apple decides engaging in an arms race with a motivated competitor isn't worth the time or effort and they enable some (probably limited) interop. I can imagine a "blue-green" type of message that's encrypted but not from an Apple device; Apple keeps their status symbology and users on both ends get E2E encrypted messages to and from Apple device users without Apple users switching to a thir…

Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary. 100% I have been an iPhone user since 2009, but for me the most likely reason to go to the competition is not if it gets iMessage (I don't live in the US). The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what…

> The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what has changed or improved

Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#414

Post by k310 »

There ARE alternatives, as posters have noted. In an iMessage to an Android user, I shared some information. Android user said that I could share the info with third user if I were on WhatsApp, but I choose not to use apps owned by companies built upon surveillance capitalism, and soon, using customer data to train AI. (Which may include Apple). Hmmmmmmm.

Guess what? Signal locks out non-Signal users, WhatsApp locks out non-WhatsApp users (AFAICT, I don’t use others, and Signal is refusing to work on my systems for reasons I don’t know, and I can actually live well without it)

The bubble with bright white text on a bright green background hurts only ME, the Apple user with old eyes, and I have offered old Apple gear to friends so we can FaceTime, a nifty way to reuse rather than recycle gear.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#415

Post by modeless »

garysahota93 wrote: post #35

Feedback for the Beeper team if they are reading: there is a non-zero amount of us that own Apple devices (like MacBooks or iPads) and not iPhones. For those it applies to, what if you leveraged the legitimate devices we do own as the spoofed devices used by Beeper Mini to register? Don't know if that would solve the Phone Number registration part, but thought I'd throw this out there

I believe that this already works. If you register your phone number to your Apple ID on an iPhone, then Beeper Mini (and/or Cloud) should be able to receive and send messages using your phone number in iMessage just as, say, your Mac can.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#416

Post by misnome »

RKearney wrote: post #260
maratc wrote: post #227

Living in the country where absolutely no one uses iMessage, the whole kerfuffle about the colour of the message bubble leaves me completely flabbergasted. I mean, probably the curvature of the Earth is involved, but from here this looks like a very small hill to die on.

iMessage is not about the color of the bubble. While the color is what's most noticeable to the end user, a non-iMessage chat means: 1. Unable to rename group chats 2. Photo sharing quality is lowered 3. Video sharing quality is abysmal 4. Messages traverse carrier networks in plain-text 5. Loss of undo send and delete 6. Loss of inline replies 7. Loss of typing indicators and read-receipts (if enabled) Just to name…

I’d add that photo and video sharing might not be free as even today it depends on your carrier plan.

… So it’s an extremely useful signal to tell you to use a different messaging app with this person. Glad we sorted that out!

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#417

Post by lxgr »

malwrar wrote: post #315

Relying on the assumption of an “authorized client” is fundamentally not a reliable security or anti-spam mechanism, as this Beeper saga demonstrates. A curious 16 year old casually figured out how to make a client be “authorized”, and a motivated party just demonstrated basic interference from Apple can’t stop it from continuing to practice guerrilla interoperability. Apple might be able to sue Beeper out of existen…

The only thing this really demonstrates is that non-update-able software DRM doesn't work and Apple didn't introduce a robust hardware attestation mechanism early enough.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#418

Post by magnio »

Not living in US so it's fun to see people poking at big corporations like the mouse-and-cat chase of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers. Unfortunately, in the end, it is usually the big companies that have both the moral and technical high grounds, just like YouTube and Reddit did.

Also funny to see HN trashes on Google for their Web Environment Integrity while Apple pulling off the biggest attestation scheme in history (they even shipped attestation in Safari for a year before anyone noticed).

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#419

Post by lxgr »

modeless wrote: post #362
misnome wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know that beeper wasn’t cut off by e.g. an automated spam algorithm? I saw lots of technical discussion in previous threads that stated that they were using the same faked hardware ID for all messages… that would seem an obvious red flag.

Beeper Cloud was running for years before, and Apple released a statement at the time they blocked Beeper Mini. This was not automated.

Beeper Cloud was running on actual Apple hardware until October 2023, which is when they switched to the software emulation approach that Beeper Mini is also employing.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#420

Post by hoistbypetard »

blitz_skull wrote: post #243
ankit219 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they ignored a rarely talked about but important aspect. iMessage is free for Apple users because it comes bundled with all Apple products. The cost to run iMessage and deliver millions of messages daily must be a significant number. With beeper, they are enabling the functionality for android. That is every android user signed up with beeper will end up costing Apple some money to send messages to iphone (or…

It’s actually really surprising to me (from a technical perspective) that this wasn’t already the case. Based on what I’ve read they’re basically spoofing the fact that they’re an iDevice which seems like it should be much more difficult than Beeper has made it look.

You'd think. But a great big pile of intel-based macs without TPMs are still supported iDevices. And the tail for supporting those macs (that have been on iMessage for some time) might be quite a bit longer than the tail for, say, OS updates to those macs.

So there's quite a window where spoofing that kind of iDevice will be easy.

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