Earlier this year, a developer slipped into Eric Migicovsky’s DMs and made a spectacular claim. His idea was that he reverse-engineered Apple’s iMessage so that any device, including Android and Windows, could send messages as blue bubbles. Migikowski did not believe what he was reading.
“I said, ‘Damn, no one’s ever done that. No one on earth has ever done that,'” said Migicovsky, CEO of messaging startup Beeper. He tried to do it himself and sent messages to everyone he had ever gotten close to. “Nobody put all the pieces together.”
But now he had a developer in his DMs, a 16-year-old high school student, connecting him with a prototype. And it worked.
That prototype became the basis for a new Android app called Beeper Mini that Migicovsky’s startup is releasing today. When you open the app, it looks at all your text message conversations, determines which ones are from iMessage users, and switches them to blue bubble conversations on the Apple platform. From then on, via Beeper Mini, he will always use iMessage when sending messages to iPhone users, and they will be wise as well.
No messages were lost or group chats were corrupted.
I’ve been using this app for the past few weeks and have been amazed at how smoothly it works. Messages sent from my boyfriend’s Pixel 8’s Beeper Mini appear as blue bubbles on friends and family’s iPhones. The group chat I was in would automatically switch to iMessage as soon as someone said a meme. Reactions, threads, photos, and videos (without the annoying text message compression) all arrived. The best thing I can say about the Beeper Mini is that almost no one noticed I was using it. The message was never lost, just the blue bubbles starting to appear.
Beeper Mini joins a growing list of apps trying to hack the iMessage experience on Android, but Migicovsky is adamant that Beeper Mini is different from other services. directly Sending iMessages.
Other services, including Beeper’s previous iMessage implementation, relay messages through your Mac hosted in the cloud. This poses real security concerns, as recently exemplified by Sunbird and its Nothing brand spinoff, Nothing Chats. Nothing’s app was released and removed just four days after a serious security issue was discovered. Sunbird discontinued the app soon after.
Beeper Mini avoids some of these issues because it works in a fundamentally different way. Its developer has figured out a way to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to his Apple servers, and send messages back to your phone natively within the app. This was a tricky process that required disassembling Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team needed to figure out where to send the messages, what they needed to look like, and how to get them out of the cloud. Migikowski said the most difficult part was deciphering what is essentially an Apple padlock throughout the system, meaning he could see if the connected device was his genuine Apple product. It is said that
“We jailbroken the iPhone and dove deep into the OS to see how everything works,” Migicovsky wrote to me in iMessage. “We then wrote new code from scratch to reproduce everything in the Android app.”
Beep does not display messages, contacts or passwords
According to Migicovsky, the result is a third-party implementation of iMessage that is actually secure. Beeper doesn’t recognize your messages, contacts, or Apple ID passwords. (You don’t even need to log in.) It just connects to Apple’s servers, just like an iPhone, he says.
Migicovsky knows that security is a big issue for potential users. To address concerns, Migicovsky said Beeper’s iMessage code will be open source for others to review. His CTO at Beeper, Brad Murray, has also spent time trying to subvert systems as if he were an attacker and has published his findings.
The bigger question may be how long Beeper Mini will survive. Migikowski believes he’s on the right side of the law (he points to copyright infringement for reverse engineering, and says there’s no Apple code in Beeper Mini that he says exists). And he believes it would be extremely difficult for Apple to block Beeper without destroying iMessage on a large number of genuine Apple devices. I’m not sure about either point. Apple has fiercely protected iMessage as his iPhone lock-in mechanism, and it’s hard to imagine the company will permanently ignore the emerging third-party iMessage solutions.
At least Beeper has been operating a less secure type of iMessage relay for nearly three years, and Migicovsky says he hasn’t heard anything from Apple yet. Apple did not respond The Vergewants comments about third-party iMessage apps.
Beeper originally launched in 2021 with the promise of building a single home for all your messaging. He raised $16 million to help the company reach its goals and grew to about 20 employees. The 16-year-old developer who reverse engineered iMessage now works as a contractor at Beeper. Migikowski declined to share further details about the students, citing privacy concerns. His GitHub page for this student states that he lives in Pennsylvania.
Beeper Mini comes at an odd time for both Beeper and iMessage. Apple recently announced that it is adopting the RCS messaging standard, bringing many of the key benefits of iMessage (high-quality photos, read receipts, and eventually encryption) to cross-platform texting. Once these features arrive, Beeper will primarily just provide the coveted blue bubble.
Most people didn’t notice that the bubbles turned blue
In my experience, most of the people I messaged were simply unaware. The group thread moved on. Photos started flowing. Only the message color was different. Of course, that’s what the blue-green bubble disparity is all about, and it’s mostly man-made. Often it’s not the ability to chat, but just identifying strange people. It wasn’t really an issue for me, but I’m sure it’s not an issue for many others. For those who feel punished by green bubbles, the Beeper Mini may be worth it.
The service initially costs $2 per month and only provides access to iMessage. According to Migicovsky, Beeper Mini will eventually drop the “Mini” branding and integrate all of the other chat services offered in Beeper’s main app (WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, etc.) into a single, convenient app. The plan is to hack it so that it will work within a similar interface. My biggest complaint at the moment is that the Beeper Mini doesn’t support his SMS and RCS. So, this all-in-one app for texting him is splitting his texting experience into two. Migicovsky said bundling of SMS and RCS is also planned. However, the price for these additional services can be a little higher.
Even with RCS coming to iMessage, Migicovsky believes Beeper will still have an important role to play. “The long-term vision is one app where you can chat with anyone in the world,” he says. This is a great goal. Beeper just cuts out the work to tie everything together.