Interestingly, in the groupchat I'm in (N=67, mostly software engineers in the Bay Area), I've noticed a high correlation between people taking Pro-Beeper and Pro-Palestine stances, and those taking Pro-Apple and Pro-Israel stances
Beeper Mini is back
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#812Earlier quoted context omitted.
What grounds would Apple have for suing?
"No reverse engineering" is a pretty standard TOS item.
Can you sue someone for violating TOS? It's not illegal, and Apple doesn't have any damages.
Terms of Service are just... the terms you need to follow in exchange for service. If you violate the terms, you get cut off from service... which they already did
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#813Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that one is popular too. My point was that almost no one uses iMessage group chats.
Agreed that I don't get the entire "iMessages is essential". I also have never seen it been used, I'm a zoomer and most of my friends use iPhones, but with snapchat or anything else for group messages. Maybe it's a generational thing!
The funniest part is all the olds (of which I am one) talk for your generation on this topic. Of course anyone who actually interacts with zoomers knows that this “green bubble blue bubble” thing is a media beat up: discord, Snapchat, instagram are what matter to western zoomers for group chats
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
From their website [0]: > We currently offer a 7 day free trial, afterwards there is a $1.99 per month subscription. Beeper Mini is available to download today with no waitlist. That doesn't sound free to me. Am I missing something? [0] https://www.beeper.com/
The article we are commenting on says they have made it free for now. I just don't think they've updated their main site yet.
Ah, thanks, I missed that (I skimmed until "What happened")!
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#815Earlier quoted context omitted.
From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…
> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. I'd be sure this was why, if Google hadn't once tried to get me to use a combo SMS/MMS + some-other-Google-messaging-service app on my phone (by replacing the normal SMS app on OS upgrade—this was on a Nexus phone) tha…
> iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app
(Almost) nobody here is challenging that it is, under the condition that you communicate exclusively with iPhone users.
MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#816Earlier quoted context omitted.
It hardly matters, almost everyone on earth uses WhatsApp for group chats.
I'm not American and I've never seen anyone use WhatsApp. I only use it to text my family back in Morocco. Facebook Messenger is even more universal than WhatsApp in my experience
In quite a few countries, the vast majority of Internet users (in Kenya, 97%!) use whatsapp at least once a month: https://www.verint.com/blog/what-countries-are-the-biggest-w...
In India alone, whatsapp MAU already reaches nearly 50% of imessage MAU worldwide, and rapidly rising.
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's imagine it is an engineering problem; how do they solve it? Give a disclaimer that "your communications are not encrypted" and turn the bubbles maybe light green?
> how do they solve it? Release iMessage on Android. If there is a concern that it wouldn't be secure with Google controlling it, then they could put it out on F-Droid, which would simultaneously prove that they're serious and also undermine Google's own efforts at controlling the culture war.
Does f-droid allow non-open source apps?
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#818> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…
I live in the UK and have not seen an MMS conversation in about 15 years. This is crazy.
even SMS is seen as outdated here i feel
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#819Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 0% confident in a surprise acquisition by Apple. Beeper doesn't seem to offer anything that Apple couldn't do themselves.
With that logic you would expect Apple to never make acquisitions. They've got the money in the bank to do just about anything.
I should have said it explicitly, but there was an implicit "couldn't do themselves in a reasonable amount of time".
If the rumors are true, Apple already has iMessage running on Android, they just haven't released it yet. They used to support AIM and other messaging services, so they're no stranger to cross-platform messaging apps. The could probably pull together a Beeper competitor pretty quickly.
Re: Beeper Mini is back
#820Feedback 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
You can self-host this matrix bridge which is developed by beeper.
So you can host this on your mac, and then you can join that bridge using matrix.
I've used this once for whatsapp, and it worked quite well, also stuff like polls and reactions worked. Though I don't know how good the imessage bridge is feature wise.