I built an iMessage bot using Beeper

In case anyone doesn&#x27;t know - the founder of Beeper is Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble!<p>Beeper originated out of their troubles getting messaging on the Pebble working.<p>&gt; “We really wanted Pebble to be able to send iMessages, but we could never figure out a way to do it because there’s no API for iMessage,” he explains. But the idea for Beeper came to a head two years ago when he learned about a protocol called Matrix. “All of Beeper is built on top of Matrix, which is this open-source federated, encrypted messaging protocol,” he says.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;pebble-founder-launches-beeper-a-universal-chat-app-that-works-with-imessage-and-others&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;21&#x2F;pebble-founder-launches-be...</a>

I have been using Beeper for 6 months or so now. In the start it had some bugs, but now they are more and more rare (I don&#x27;t use iMessages).<p>Overall an amazing product, with what seems like a very active and product team behind which constants pushes out new updates. Highly recommended 10&#x2F;10!

Unfortunately, I had to quit using Beeper a few days ago. Ever since they migrated to their new hungryserv, iMessage reliability has gotten steadily worse and worse. It culminated in an entire day of sending iMessages where Beeper gave them all a delivered checkmark... But none of them actually reached their recipients. Was fun explaining to people who were angry I hadn&#x27;t messaged them back in over a day... I&#x27;m back on BlueBubbles now, hopefully it will be more reliable. Overall it&#x27;s a shame because I&#x27;m really rooting for Beeper to succeed. I&#x27;m sick of all the existing chat providers.

More of a Beeper question. I couldn&#x27;t find the information on Beepers website or FAQ page.<p>- For iMessage, does using Beeper allow you to use your own phone number to send&#x2F;receive messages or do you have to use your Apple ID email to send&#x2F;receive iMessages?

Is Beeper like the once super-messaging app Adium[1]?<p>Do Beeper not use Apple&#x27;s iCloud App-Password?<p>Can one not just download and use Beeper[2] without creating an account?<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adium.im" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adium.im</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beeper.com">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.beeper.com</a>

Beeper is just matrix + bridges, everything is open source except the client itself, which is a very big feature because element, the biggest element client is kinda crap.

I had a &quot;friend&quot; hookup hundreds of mac minis, added a decent api, setup icloud accounts, and let it rip. If you get good at sqllite you can make an entire chat app. A message goes out, a message comes in, you take an action, respond, etc etc. Apple shut that down (apple actually does have a unique hardware id they will use), but those were fun times - for my friend. But the cost beat twilios all day!

I don&#x27;t see why anyone would expect this closed-beta product to not get blacklisted by Apple as soon as it gains any mainstream traction.

In the slightly olden days, iMessage - or whatever it was called then - had a built in jabber client, and there was brief period (Sierra era?) that iMessage&#x2F;iCloud could sync up all your messages across google and apple and SMS.<p>I _think_ it would have enabled this functionality, if anyone knew and&#x2F;or investigated it.

I have my own Matrix &amp; Bridges setup (just like Beeper but with too much maintenance). It&#x27;s super easy to write bots that you can then hook into Signal, WhatsApp etc, because essentially you only need to talk to your Matrix server, and the bridges take care of the rest. Talking to Matrix is easy - there&#x27;s a straightforward HTTP API.<p>The other day I connected the matrix-chatgpt-bot (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matrixgpt&#x2F;matrix-chatgpt-bot">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;matrixgpt&#x2F;matrix-chatgpt-bot</a>) with WhatsApp - it was very funny to see how people reacted.

Does beeper have an API with a curl interface ?<p>As in, I can run a curl command with an API key and generate an imessage ?<p>How can I throw money at this today ?<p>EDIT: OK, I understand that the same restrictions are extant that always have been - namely, an Apple device needs to be involved in creating the actual imessage. So this is not the breakthrough service I thought it might be.

Beeper looks interesting, but I wish they made it clear it&#x27;s currently in waitlist-mode, BEFORE downloading the app through their custom downloader thing that you have to run<p>Installed the app through the installer just to remove it again because I can&#x27;t use it yet

I love the idea of beeper, but worried about the reliability of the bridges. This is super cool and give me a bunch of ideas though. Also hoping Sunbird has some other way to solve this problem.

I like the idea of Beeper but two issues bug me<p>- reliability (especially for iMessages)<p>- having to give them custody of passwords like iCloud

There is in fact a REST API for iMessage <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;register.apple.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;messages&#x2F;msp-rest-api&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;register.apple.com&#x2F;resources&#x2F;messages&#x2F;msp-rest-api&#x2F;</a>

&quot;There is also plenty of fun to be had: ETA Accountability Bot - when I send “I’ll be there in 10” it could follow with an accurate translation: “on average, this means I’ll be there in 13.26 minutes”.&quot;<p>Brilliant!

What&#x27;s the problem with using literally any other chat protocol that is not iMessage that have supported trivial chat bots for the past decade ?<p>Does Apple make chats that are not iMessage hard to use ?

Looking forward to a Beeper chatGPT bot

Reminds me of meebo

I signed up for beeper like 3 months ago and still haven&#x27;t gotten an official invite.