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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#641

Post by greentea23 »

dotBen wrote: post #610
hamandcheese wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an Apple user. I've owned more iPhones and MacBooks than I can remember. I am the one who foots the bill for iMessage and APNS. I want to be able to message my friends with Androids with the same ease as I do my friends with iPhones. I also would like to be able to access my messages when I run Asahi Linux on my MacBook.

Use Signal. Get your friends to do so. What you are describing is a multi-platform ecosystem so don't rely on one of the platform vendors to enable something for everyone else.

Or better, use matrix/element if you can (the backbone technology of Beeper). It's an open protocol not beholden to one central server (Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord) that could go out of business, get bought, or change their usage policy at any time.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#642

Post by rezonant »

kamilner wrote: post #626
applecrazy wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Apple were truly acting in their users best interest, they would want their users to have encrypted and fast communication with all devices, through an open protocol or otherwise. yeah that protocol exists. it’s called RCS and it is coming to ios soon. imo apple is allowed to gate imessage behind ios-only if RCS support is a thing

RCS has no end-to-end encryption in the standard, though. That's a non-standard google messages extension. I think a better example would be the cross-device messengers like signal/whatsapp/etc.

Google is slacking here and I hope Apple's involvement in RCS will help to move this forward. Samsung Messages also does not support Google's E2EE even though it supports RCS and pretty much all of the user-facing features Google Messages provides. Based on Google's whitepaper [1] about their E2EE support, I imagine it's because of the identity service they use for key exchange being centralized and internal (when really the identity service a contact uses should be an RCS capability in the extended contact system [RCS terminology here], and they should interoperate).

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#643

Post by phonon »

fahhem wrote: post #605
phonon wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_(software)

Samba is a protocol, Microsoft doesn't have any costs associated with more users of it. GP is asking about APNS, which involves Apple servers and therefore costs Apple to handle more requests, however minimal per individual request/message

Support costs for Microsoft definitely go up.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#644

Post by oneplane »

rezonant wrote: post #632
oneplane wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't WhatsApp and Signal already do exactly that?

> And yes, iOS allows 3rd party apps but not nearly with enough permissions to act as a full Messages+iMessage alternative. Not an Apple user, but I imagine even though there's some allowances for third party messaging, there's a lot of holes. For instance, what happens if I ask Siri to send a message to a specific contact from my Apple Watch. Will it send it over Signal if I've added a Signal address to their contac…

While I don't mix text and voice control that often myself, it appears to be fully supported: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1803878309981730/?locale=sv_SE&cms_... as for what actions an app supports, that appears to vary based on what the developer included.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#645

Post by tinus_hn »

jvolkman wrote: post #432
tinus_hn wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A case against a monopoly with a minority market share. Good luck with that!

As far as I know, Apple has the majority of the market in the US where iMessage matters most.

Even if you limit it to the US, they have 56% which is only a very small majority. Are you trying to argue that that 44% of users not on iOS can’t message others because of that terrible Apple monopoly? Frankly, that’s just ridiculous and your fantasy case is so hopelessly going nowhere nobody is going to even start it.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#646

Post by dwaite »

rplnt wrote: post #582
tinus_hn wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wonder how anyone survives in all of the world where nobody uses iMessage (which is everywhere except the US). How do people even manage to open WhatsApp? How do people survive this horror!

I have an iPhone (and macbook if that matters) and have no idea what all the rage is about. Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?

Messages sends SMS/MMS (on a Phone or configured Mac/iPad/Watch), but will transparently upgrade to the iMessage protocol when talking to another Apple user. This has substantially better features over SMS, including network access and the ability to send higher quality multimedia.

If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc).

In the US, unlimited texting became a thing much earlier than in the EU, partly because the carrier and network relationship is structured differently. So SMS is bad but free, and thus a bit more tolerable.

A higher percentage of iPhone users means that more often than not, you'll find your text is using the much better protocol. As a result, many in the US never had to pick a third party to be "winner" via network effects (like say LINE in certain asian countries).

This puts things into a weird state, where SMS and iMessage sort of act like a single pseudo-"product" in the US available to both iPhone and Android users, but where Android users get a way worse experience and where iPhone users get a worse experience when talking with Android users.

Which is where I get to personal opinion, and say this is mostly Google's fault. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo... . As owner of the other major platform and with the ability to release a compatible chat app for iPhone, they've had and squandered every opportunity to own the space.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#647

Post by lancesells »

unshavedyak wrote: post #540
graphe wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage is reliable, ‘free’ and encrypted. Beeper mini is unreliable, paid, and encrypted. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore to my Android friends.

Is it free? I have it bundled as part of my hardware purchases. Is there somewhere to get it without paying?

It is free even without purchase. I could give someone an old iPhone and they can use it without issue.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#648

Post by ehvatum »

GeekyBear wrote: post #572
kevinsync wrote: post #528

Maybe this came up in the earlier threads (announcement, outage) so I apologize if it's been discussed ... This project is fantastic. The hacker spirit is in full force, and I love a good David and Goliath story. However, all the comments about demanding interoperability and protocols keep confusing me -- I don't consider APNS a protocol (like TCP anyways), it's also not incidental, extra header space to stuff data i…

> Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products? I hereby demand that Google stop making changes to YouTube that prevent ad blockers from working. Or more to the point, I should have the right to sell hacked access to Microsoft's Office 365 servers to end users and Microsoft must not take any action that interferes in those user's access. That's reasonable, right?

I hereby demand that Apple stop supporting email interoperability with non iCloud users. The current situation, where the iCloud email users enjoy first class communication with gmail users, is tantamount to theft.

That’s reasonable, of course.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#649

Post by edrxty »

danaris wrote: post #624
vlozko wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wonderful speech full of noble platitudes. None of this actually answers the question of why Apple (or really anyone) should let anyone have free and open access to something they paid and keep paying a lot to create, deploy, maintain, and iterate on. It’s their stuff, not the public’s. Nobody should expect corporations to be charities.

Or, to expand a bit: If Apple should be expected to open up iMessage, then why shouldn't Facebook be expected to allow interoperability with Messenger, and Telegram and Signal forced to open those up, too? Or, if you wish to take it a slightly different way: Why shouldn't the New York Times be expected to give everyone a copy of their paper for free? Information and good journalism are a public good, after all. Why s…

I mean, we could structure our society so that everything wasn't arbitrarily gated but that would be gasp socialism.

Also, Telegram and Signal are already open and can be bridged from anything to anything so yeah, we should force Messenger and Imessage to accept, at a minimum, bridging as well.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#650

Post by grishka »

Nextgrid wrote: post #464
TeMPOraL wrote: post #424

This clearly isn't going to be solved through technical means. It makes me wonder - if Apple were to stop obstructing interoperability, how much the resulting market for competition to iMessage and other parts of the walled garden be worth? A couple billion dollars? With today's valuations, probably closer to trillions. Why then VCs aren't willing to spend a fraction of that - say a couple billion - to invest into a…

So much of the current tech companies derive at least part of their profits out of restricted interoperability. A legal precedent allowing adversarial interoperability would be the death of any "engagement"-based business model, aka most of tech nowadays. Alternatively clients would pop up left and right that will strip out all the "engagement" nonsense (as well as the spyware/malware), and those will no longer be st…

In some countries it's already legal to reverse engineer software for the purpose of interoperability.
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