It seems the inevitable has happened. Beeper Mini, the reverse-engineered app that brought iMessage to Android via the Blue Bubble hack, has apparently run into an official snag from Apple. Within the past few hours, multiple users have posted online that their Beeper Mini texts won’t pass.
Well, it looks like Apple is somehow blocking access to their servers. When asked if Apple was to blame for the outage, company founder Eric Migikowski said it was likely. “Yes, all the data points to that,” Migikowski told TechCrunch.
Well, it didn’t last long.
Beeper Mini is also affected. You’ll receive a little toast notification that you want to write a letter but can’t reach you.
However, the OG Beeper app will continue to work fine. However, messages are sent via email rather than a phone number. pic.twitter.com/JG2qYisLAv
— Raven (@Razar_the_Raven) December 8, 2023
Interestingly, so far it seems to be a geo-locked debacle. A colleague of mine in the US noticed that his Beeper Mini was returning message delivery failures. Here in India, you can now send iMessage texts from your Android phone to your iPhone via Beeper Mini.
Most features also seem to be working fine, including delivery status, input indicators, and GIF reactions. However, when I try to send a message to a colleague in the US, the message is not received and there are no delivery or read indicators.
If Apple is behind this, it looks like the company only patched the US market, which has the largest base of iMessage-only users. Digital Trends reached out to Migicovsky for more clarity on the situation. We will update this story as soon as we hear from him.
We’re investigating reports of Beeper Mini not transmitting and receiving 🔎
— Beeper (@onbeeper) December 8, 2023
It’s worth noting that Beeper Mini, despite its seemingly clean operating credentials, is still an unofficial iMessage solution. Apple has previously blocked the introduction of iMessage to Android because it considers it an important perk of the iPhone.
This gap is why all texts between Android and Apple smartphones are downgraded to the older SMS protocol. As a result, you won’t get the fancy texting features that iPhone users enjoy, or those available on messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Did we mention the green text bubble situation for messages sent from Android smartphones? Yes, there’s that too. Sunbird used a Mac relay to trick Apple systems and attempt to hack into iMessage on Android. However, security flaws and unstable fundamentals soon led to its closure. The Nothing Chats app borrowed the same technology, but was quickly discontinued for the same reasons.
Beeper Mini does not use any such Mac relay hack. Apple ID is not required. Instead, it was the result of an iMessage reverse engineering project called Pypush. But the whole premise of Beeper Mini was always too good to be true. All of this was done without compromising the safety net of end-to-end encryption of the conversation.
It offered nearly all the benefits of the native iPhone-to-iPhone iMessage experience. Beeper Mini also had plans to introduce FaceTime voice and video calls in the future. However, those plans are likely to take time.
Meanwhile, Apple has officially adopted the RCS protocol, which is supported by Google. In a nutshell, the messages exchanged between Android smartphones and iPhones do not degrade to SMS or MMS protocols. The RCS protocol will offer the same kind of nifty trick at some point next year.
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