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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#881

Post by pixelmonkey »

dwaite wrote: post #646
rplnt wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your summary is right but is missing one key detail. In the period since iMessage was developed, every single direct messaging and group messaging app that got to scale has been x-platform across Android and iOS, and many of them have even been x-platform to web/browser clients and/or desktop apps across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Namely: Telegram, Signal, LINE, WhatsApp, Discord, among others.

That is, all except one.

The one exception is, of course, Apple's iMessage.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#882

Post by Ajedi32 »

al_borland wrote: post #787
Ajedi32 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that's not the right framing of the issue. Taking active steps to prevent your services from being used on competing platforms is more than merely "not supporting" them.

Apple has always made services primarily for the users of their hardware. They are a hardware company that makes their own software and services. The hardware purchase funds the software development. Who decides which platforms get support, if it's not the company making and supporting the service? When BBM was popular, I know a lot of people without Blackberries would have liked to use it, but Blackberry didn't offe…

> Who decides which platforms get support

The developer of the software supporting those platforms. In this case, Beeper.

I suppose if Apple wants to say certain users are not allowed to access iMessage unless they've bought an iPhone that's fair. (Maybe you could argue its anticompetitive to bundle services together like that, but I won't assert that point here.) But if that's all this was about then I ought to be able to buy an iPhone, import the access token from that into Beeper on my Android, stuff the iPhone in a drawer, and go about my business. The problem is that Apple wants to dictate not only who has access to iMessage servers, but also how they're allowed to access it. And that is unacceptable in my opinion.

"Security" is a poor excuse. If server side software has to rely on trusting the client then it was never secure in the first place. And if client side software wants to "secure" itself against the person who owns it... that's a form of "security" I could do without.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#883

Post by lawgimenez »

Time should be well spent by creating meaningful apps that can solve world hunger, poverty, water shortages and all that shit. All this circus for a blue bubble is just so hard to comprehend.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#884

Post by lallysingh »

hornban wrote: post #640
js2 wrote: post #471

> 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…

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…

Shh don't mention Voice. Google obviously forgot that they still had it turned on. If they remember it'll get killed.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#885

Post by pixelmonkey »

nani8ot wrote: post #850
leoxiong wrote: post #831

Why are people obsessed with “breaking into” Apple’s walled garden? There are already secure cross platform messaging services like Signal or WhatsApp that has feature parity with iMessage. This is a solved problem that doesn’t need another solution.

tl;dr Most people in the US use iPhones. They also like to use the default messaging app, which most of the time is iMessage. Some people like to use Android phones (privacy, cost, freedom), but still want to message their peers who use the Apple-only iMessage.

This is the best and most concise summary on the thread.

The equivalent would be if Microsoft, when they had the largest market share of email clients in the US in the late 1990s with Outlook Express (OE), decided to make it so OE-sent group rich text emails with attachments could only be received by other OE users, whereas non-OE users only received plain text emails with image thumbnails and downscaled video attachments. People would have lots of good reasons to use a different email client, like forthcoming Thunderbird, Gmail, or Apple Mail clients. But they'd find they couldn't communicate well with Microsoft OE users.

If Microsoft had made this change early enough and also made it so non-OE responses were color coded with a green background to indicate they are "lesser emails," we'd be in a world of Microsoft Outlook Express users would wonder why everyone doesn't just switch to Windows (the majority OS, at that moment) to make everyone's lives easier. And friends/family would exclude non-Windows users from an email thread as not to "degrade" the thread.

Communication via text with friends and family should be an open standard. Barring the availability of such a standard (e.g. RCS), at a minimum, the chat clients to communicate with friends and family should be x-platform (like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and LINE all manage to be).

Ergo iMessage should, at least, have an Android app, even if such an app requires an Apple ID.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#886

Post by jagged-chisel »

lawgimenez wrote: post #883

Time should be well spent by creating meaningful apps that can solve world hunger, poverty, water shortages and all that shit. All this circus for a blue bubble is just so hard to comprehend.

If we’re going to solve all hunger, poverty, water shortages and all that shit before we ever do anything more, then we’ll never do anything more.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#887

Post by [deleted] »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #874
js2 wrote: post #471

> 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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#888

Post by riscy »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #874
js2 wrote: post #471

> 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…

[flagged]

Even if this bizarre claim were true, that wouldn’t make them “incels”, as they voluntarily chose to use Android.

Desperate men blaming everyone and everything for their own dating shortcomings is nothing new.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#889

Post by haswell »

roamerz wrote: post #854
haswell wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are pro user - for Apple ecosystem users that is. And I’m good with that. I don’t really agree. The interoperability impact means that I’m affected as an iPhone user too. I’m only not impacted when I communicate with other iPhone users. And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Apple just knows that their lock-in is strong, and the impact is disproportionately felt by non…

>> And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Interesting. How does this impact an Android user who sends text to you? To them everyone is green (or whatever color Android uses) correct?

Any kind of multimedia is compressed behind recognition. Basic texts are fine. Send me an image, and it’ll look like it came from another era.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#890

Post by venusenvy47 »

danaris wrote: post #699
milkytron wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're using false or duplicate Apple devices for this. I think that it may be likely they are using AWS resources for it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/ When AWS first came out with these, this was my first thought. People could spin up an EC2 instance and use it for iMessage, and Beeper came to be shortly after this feature went live in AWS.

Not fake devices , fake credentials. Beeper Mini is explicitly using a different method to access the iMessage system than Beeper and some other previous services; it's not spinning up virtual Macs and bouncing off them. Because of that, it also doesn't require you to hand your Apple ID login & password over to Beeper in cleartext just to make it work. At least, from what I've read over the past few days.

I don't think the credentials are faked. The author's blog post seems to give the details. He is publishing a public key to Apple's servers and figured out how to read the public key of other users. It seems like he is using the normal Apple encryption path from there. Although I don't fully understand the details.

https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/

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