Beeper Mini is back

&gt; 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.<p>These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and includes a single non-Apple device, it converts the chat into a group MMS at which point anyone in the group who was added by Apple ID email address starts receiving the messages via email with text messages arriving as text attachments to those emails.<p>The from&#x2F;to addresses look like 2345678901@domain with domains such as mypixmessages.com, mms.att.net, mypixmessages.com, icmms1.sun5.lightsurf.net, etc.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter if you have a phone # associated with your Apple ID in addition to an email address. If the person who starts the chat accidentally uses your email address (which Messages makes both very easy to do accidentally and very difficult to notice because Messages hides the actual address behind the contact name) and there&#x27;s a single non-Apple device in the group, you get to be on the receiving end of a barrage of emails from which you cannot unsubscribe.<p>When Messages converts a group to MMS, it really needs to make it obvious which recipients are email addresses and which are phone #s... it should either not hide the information behind the contact name and&#x2F;or for cases where a contact has both a phone # and email addresses, it should favor the phone #.

Some useful history, the AOL&#x2F;MSN chat wars: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nplusonemag.com&#x2F;issue-19&#x2F;essays&#x2F;chat-wars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nplusonemag.com&#x2F;issue-19&#x2F;essays&#x2F;chat-wars&#x2F;</a><p>AOL finally &quot;won&quot; that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.

I think one of the underlying issues is that many are now going to be hesitant to even bother with Beeper Mini anymore. I don’t think there is going to be a high tolerance for this game of cat and mouse from the end user perspective<p>I also don’t think goading apple is going to do much here either. Regardless of the current feelings around apple’s walled garden, they are not going to suddenly keel over and give up on locking out these commercialized attempted to bypass their security

&gt; <i>Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button.</i><p>This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to intergrates natively into the system where they are presented as equal peers to iMessage and default phone app.<p>When I view contacts in the first party Contacts app, it presents message &amp; call as the top options for my contacts. The first time per-contact it&#x27;ll prompt you which you want to use, with third party options getting equal billing compared to first-party, but after that it&#x27;ll remember.

I’m curious what their best-case outcome is here. It’s fully transparent at this point that Apple has no appetite for a third party iMessage client on any platform and will take whatever technical steps needed to prevent this from happening.<p>I’d wager heavily that even if Beeper plays cat-and-mouse to the point where they’ve exhausted Apple’s budget for blocking them and somehow managed to avoid Apple’s legal team putting a stop to things via other channels (very unlikely), Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.<p>It’s easy to read this as a pure publicity stunt on Beeper’s behalf, but that’s not what I’m getting from the tone and content of these announcements. And I also don’t think the market for a paid all-in-one chat app is large enough to justify the expenditure that this iMessage for Android project represents, if the endgame is ultimately a PR stunt.<p>They seem too smart to realistically think that Apple is going to just shrug and let them continue unbothered after a few rounds of back-and-forth, so what are they playing at?

Your view on iMessage depends on your social network. If your social network uses other messaging apps, this whole exercise seems pointless. Many of you outside of the US fall into this category. Many of you technically-savvy commenters also fall into this category. But if you are a teenager in the US, 85%+ of your social network uses an iPhone, and you will not convince everyone you know to switch apps for you. The green bubble causes real problems, and Apple does this intentionally to coerce teens and others into buying their phones. It’s anti-competitive and immoral for a company of that size.

&gt; We’ve made Beeper free to use.<p>&gt; Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday.<p>Really have to wonder what their play here is. What did they think would happen?<p>Isn&#x27;t it always going to be a cat and mouse game with Apple? Who would want to use a messaging service that works some days but not others, much less pay for it?

Not living in US so it&#x27;s fun to see people poking at big corporations like the mouse-and-cat chase of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers. Unfortunately, in the end, it is usually the big companies that have both the moral and technical high grounds, just like YouTube and Reddit did.<p>Also funny to see HN trashes on Google for their Web Environment Integrity while Apple pulling off the biggest attestation scheme in history (they even shipped attestation in Safari for a year before anyone noticed).

the optics are already less than ideal for apple. beeper mini dismisses the any technical challenge apple may claim a hurdle to android having iMessage.<p>i don’t doubt this will also get shutdown in the near term, but i’m 70% confident in a surprising acquisition &amp; continued support from apple in the longer term.<p>it will be hard for apple to continue to claim they are pro-user when they appear to be this hostile toward android users.

Feedback 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?<p>Don&#x27;t know if that would solve the Phone Number registration part, but thought I&#x27;d throw this out there

&gt; If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.<p>Presumably this would only be if Apple agreed to allow the beeper mini users by default? I appreciate Beeper&#x27;s stance on all of this, and hope they can continue operating.

So what&#x27;s the big idea? Keep playing whack-a-mole with Apple until Apple changes their TOS and sues their pants off, or until they run out of open holes? Or is there a bigger end goal?

&gt; Android and iPhone customers desperately want to be able to chat together with high quality images&#x2F;video, encryption, emojis, typing status, read receipts, and all modern chat features.<p>There are numerous chat apps with those features, so I can’t see why people were “desperate” about it at all. Better yet, those existing chat apps aren’t likely to stop working tomorrow.

This is some ways like Youtube and adblock. Apple is completely within their right to try to kick Beeper to the curb but I also enjoy watching a scrappy company like Beeper try to circumvent Apple&#x27;s attempts to shut them out.<p>Because of how likely it is to be killed though I don&#x27;t think I shall be adopting it personally.

As far as I understand, in order to talk to Apple iMessage services&#x2F;backend (and all auth pieces) you need a &quot;legit&quot; Apple ID and legit Apple hardware model #s &#x2F; serial #s<p>If you don&#x27;t have that, how are they able to get auth tokens &#x2F; send messages around without basically &quot;exploiting a hidden hack that might get patched&quot;?

The whole green bubble thing with Android SMS on iPhone is a problem, but the solution is to get everyone to use a different chat app. Apple will never give this up.<p>Google could be leading that charge and providing a world beating chat app that works across all phones and all desktop devices. They have every reason to provide the best chat app in the world and yank iPhone users over to it. Instead they have given up on chat. The Google Hangouts&#x2F;Meet chat situation is a disaster on iPhone and on desktop. They don&#x27;t even try. It&#x27;s proof that they are lost.

props to these guys for intentionally getting into a cat and mouse game with apple over this.<p>surely there&#x27;s security implications to all this, if you&#x27;ve got a chat app where there&#x27;s some internal belief that it can only run on certain platforms, also controlled by your company, there may be some assumptions made about how things work... can&#x27;t help but imagine beeper itself opens up more vectors for stuff like the recently-in-the-news push notification mass surveillance<p>i have been wondering if theres other outcomes i&#x27;m missing between the two obvious results: 1) a more tightly controlled, locked-down iMessage ecosystem 2) some kind of explicitly supported third-party api

Relying on the assumption of an “authorized client” is fundamentally not a reliable security or anti-spam mechanism, as this Beeper saga demonstrates. A curious 16 year old casually figured out how to make a client be “authorized”, and a motivated party just demonstrated basic interference from Apple can’t stop it from continuing to practice guerrilla interoperability. Apple might be able to sue Beeper out of existence, but lets not pretend this approach is any meaningful defense against spam.

Happy user of normal Beeper, have no skin in this particular game though.<p>Still, I&#x27;m glad they brought it back, and hope will continue this route.<p>Anything that helps break the high walls of that garden.

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.

Why are Apple users so upset about this? It&#x27;s almost as if they don&#x27;t want interoperability with Android users. And please spare me the spam excuse.

&gt; From what we can tell, Beeper Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than 100,000 people.<p>These numbers seem very low. I would have expected numbers in the millions.

The funniest outcome with this whole “Apple vs. Beeper” saga would be if Apple said, “Fine use the iMessage protocol. We won’t break interoperability and you can even have full feature parity…<p>BUT… Any messages sent this way will still show up as the dreaded “Green Bubble”.<p>(I hope Eric and the Beeper team can pull through!)

I really want to use this but it just seems unrealistic. I don&#x27;t want to start new iMessage group chats with friends, explain to them how it&#x27;s possible, only for it to break 3 days later. I knew this would happen the first time which is why I didn&#x27;t subscribe. And now I don&#x27;t want to create an Apple ID only to have it banned and messages lost.<p>I love that you&#x27;re pursuing this and taking on Apple, but at the same time your marketing has felt misleading and you&#x27;ve put a lot of users at risk by listing on the Play Store with a subscription model.

&gt; Beeper Mini made communication between Android and iPhone users more secure. That is a fact.<p>It seemed like it would make spam and scamming over iMessage worse. At least it requires an Apple Id now.

Isn&#x27;t this a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or other US laws? Doesn&#x27;t the fact they are trying to make money off of this negate any ethical hacker arguments?

Yeah, I am not expecting this to be a protracted game of cat and mouse. Apple will just sue them in the end; that&#x27;ll put a REAL quick stop to this.<p>I wish things had more interoperability, but Apple is under no obligation to implement it or be okay with it. And honestly, I believe them when they say that this is a security&#x2F;privacy risk; even if it does serve their anticompetitive tendencies.

&gt; If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.<p>Why would they not just shut it down if Apple asks, wouldn&#x27;t that just do the same thing (beeper users can&#x27;t send messages)

Beeper on main(ish)stream media.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;apple-shutters-new-app-bleeper-in-latest-block-to-imessage-for-android.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;apple-shutters-new-app...</a>

This clearly isn&#x27;t going to be solved through technical means. It makes me wonder - if Apple were to stop obstructing interoperability, how much the resulting market for competition to iMessage and other parts of the walled garden be worth? A couple billion dollars? With today&#x27;s valuations, probably closer to trillions.<p>Why then VCs aren&#x27;t willing to spend a fraction of that - say a couple billion - to invest into a crack team of lawyers and sue the shit out of Apple over this issue? When at least one side of the suit is a corporation, my understanding is that American justice system is basically the game of who can outspend whom. Surely enough VCs could outspend Apple on this while still securing some probable profit in the end?<p>Why is this not happening?

&gt; &quot;We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.&quot;<p>They never addressed that part of Apple&#x27;s statement. I don&#x27;t see how they can survive without doing so.

Without phone number registration working isn&#x27;t this far less useful?

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.

I’m really curious how this is possible.<p>Why wouldn’t every iMessage sent be tied to an Apple ID?<p>If Beeper can do this, wouldn’t that mean anyone else with the same technique could basically spam iMessage users across the world?

Over or under on 24 hours until they are &quot;not back&quot; again?

It&#x27;s interesting to see how polarizing this topic is. I&#x27;m curious if people are just reacting according to the &quot;party line&quot; so to speak, ie based on whether they are iPhone or Android users.<p>We can do a poll to confirm this without revealing your phone preference.<p>Just respond with &quot;Affirmative&quot; if you are an iPhone user and dont like this OR you&#x27;re an Android users and like this. Likewise, respond with &quot;Negative&quot; if you&#x27;re in the opposite camp.

Try as you may, you will not escape the village<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;op7IgFbT8l0?t=194" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;op7IgFbT8l0?t=194</a>

Final result: Apple releases official iMessage client for android, but messages sent from it show up with a little green android icon in the corner. :)

iMessage is possibly the most effective vendor lock-in I&#x27;ve ever personally experienced. I resent it, but I don&#x27;t have time to fight it. Maybe 1 of the 20 people I regularly text with use Android. The amount of video&#x2F;photo sharing my wife and other family members have done throughout the years is via iMessage is downright incredible.

Doesn’t this push traffic that didn’t pay Apple through Apple’s infrastructure? These guys should know better than to waste dev hours on a business problem. Apple isn’t going to allow this. No amount of shady spoofing or reverse engineering will change that. If you want to send an iMessage just get an iPhone. Pretty basic requirements.

There is no doubt that Google will refund every single customer that asks (they are way more flexible about refunds than Apple - I&#x27;ve known people who were able to get substantial amount of IAPs from games refunded just because they didn&#x27;t like the results they got). I suspect those refunds will be net negative for Beeper.

One thing I’m not seeing discussed in the battle of client apps, is that Apple is still paying to run the backend servers. Considering the ubiquity of iMessage, this ain’t cheap.<p>When Beeper charges customers subscriptions for the client app, do they kick back any money to Apple who provides server side support for iMessage?

&gt; The underlying connection method is open source, for anyone to review.<p>SSPL sure isn&#x27;t open source and I&#x27;m certainly not reviewing this. At best it&#x27;s source available. I&#x27;m all for separating the meaning of the term from OSI&#x27;s opinions but this usage misses the mark.<p>I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.

Man, what an absolute waste of engineering talent.<p>I don&#x27;t understand those in this thread celebrating the &quot;hacker spirit.&quot; The real &quot;hacker spirit&quot; would be something like, I don&#x27;t know, building a better alternative to iMessage. This is just a game of whack-a-mole, destined to lose.

This is subtle and much bigger issue than it looks. Marketing people have a real issue with the inability for a single messaging solution, and paying the Apple tax. And unless you did not realize, marketing kind of run&#x2F;control a lot, far more than it appears.

Totally tangental but now that iPhone users are using RCS the chances of successfully sending them a message feels like its dropped by half to me-- that is about half the time my messages aren&#x27;t getting through, to multiple individuals.

I wonder how far I would have to dig before I found the way Google is funding Beeper Mini. They are a sacrificial lamb, getting lead to slaughter so Google can ask EU regulators to stop Apple’s anti-competitive actions.

If nothing else it’s a fun game of cat and mouse in the most David vs Goliath way possible, to mix metaphors.<p>Is it likely that Apple just has an engineer working on reverse engineering Beeper to find and patch the latest method?

Living in the country where absolutely no one uses iMessage, the whole kerfuffle about the colour of the message bubble leaves me completely flabbergasted.<p>I mean, probably the curvature of the Earth is involved, but from here this looks like a very small hill to die on.

&quot;Moat&quot; is SV buzzword that means monopoly as a goal. These people want to own the thing and not let anyone benefit from it other than themselves.<p>The fact that Beeper Mini is possible in the first place categorically proves Apple is making a decision here to restrict interoperability. If we have regulators for anything it should be for things like this. At Apple&#x27;s scale it is completely unacceptable behaviour.<p>The whole iMessage things lost me as a 23 year customer of Apple. I just don&#x27;t care about them anymore because they clearly don&#x27;t care about their customers. Plus they&#x27;ve release the same goddamn phone for the last decade. Tim Cook has been coasting on Job&#x27;s legacy and times almost up for them being on top.

At some point, Apple is just going to send them a cease and desist.

fwiw, updating the existing app didn&#x27;t work. I had to uninstall&#x2F;reinstall. After authenticating with Apple vis Beeper Mini, my iPhone says a &quot;Mac now has access to iMessage.&quot; (via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;beeper-mini-is-back-in-operation-after-apples-attempt-to-shut-it-down&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;12&#x2F;11&#x2F;beeper-mini-is-back-in-ope...</a>)

Got myself a apple ID for fun but cannot sign in, as SMS second factor fails in Beeper Mini. Wonder if they found another way again to detect the &#x27;fraud&#x27;.

I get why many people might want this, but open standards are the way to go, and this seems to be playing into the hands of proprietary in some ways.

I like that this is happening, because Apple will want to prevent it from being possible, and they&#x27;ll dig their own regulatory grave doing it.

&gt; We—of course—expected a response. What we didn’t expect was 1984-esque doublespeak. The statement is complete FUD. Beeper Mini made communication between Android and iPhone users more secure. That is a fact.<p>Is it? Their argument about a potential increase in spam (by removing the existing annoyance barrier of signing up to iMessage with a phone number before getting full access) is valid. And from their perspective, a third party app could be doing anything with the messages once unecrypted, despite Beeper&#x27;s claims to the contrary.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, it&#x27;s obvious Apple went looking for the first &#x27;valid&#x27; reason to kill Beeper Mini. I also own a ~~Beepberry~~ Beepy, so I am a fan. But this isn&#x27;t FUD at all, this is a potential risk to their userbases&#x27; privacy (as well as their bottom line).

Was really hoping to read about what Apple changed to break things, even if they won&#x27;t explain how they worked around it

Beeper has caught a ton of media attention in recent weeks but I truly do not understand it. The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones. If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp. How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party interop app?

I don’t really understand the long-term purpose of Beeper. Apple has already announced RCS, which will fix most complaints about text messaging interoperability.<p>There is still the question of encryption, which Beeper is strongly pushing, however Apple has announced it wants to develop an RCS encryption standard, so it sounds like it will be solved at some point in the next few years.<p>At that point, all Beeper becomes is a service to turn a green bubble blue.

At what point does Apple start a lawsuit? I hope they don&#x27;t, but I can&#x27;t see them ignoring this.

I&#x27;m glad that at least you need an Apple ID for this to work. Apple probably closed the spam hole.

Tried to use the app. 2FA error, and can&#x27;t connect to iMessage, so I can&#x27;t use the app :|.

I just wish Apple to get into another anti-trust case, ideally by the EU, over this.

Just got a notification that it&#x27;s working again and I could log in

Is it possible to install macos in a virtual machine and use iMessages?

Crazy that Apple gets to ship a proprietary messaging app as the default

What’s the over&#x2F;under on how long before Apple blocks it again?

Sprinkle some seasoning on these guys, cus they&#x27;re cooked.<p>There is no path forward for integrating with Apple unless Apple opens up imessage. Fat chance. These guys took years and years and years to switch to a non-idiotic charging port! :(<p>I wonder how viable their business is without imessage integration. They are still aiming for all-in-one chat app - but that&#x27;s not new and has been done at least a dozen times before.<p>How is this VC scalable?

Interestingly, in the groupchat I&#x27;m in (N=67, mostly software engineers in the Bay Area), I&#x27;ve noticed a high correlation between people taking Pro-Beeper and Pro-Palestine stances, and those taking Pro-Apple and Pro-Israel stances

There ARE alternatives, as posters have noted. In an iMessage to an Android user, I shared some information. Android user said that I could share the info with third user if I were on WhatsApp, but I choose not to use apps owned by companies built upon surveillance capitalism, and soon, using customer data to train AI. (Which may include Apple). Hmmmmmmm.<p>Guess what? Signal locks out non-Signal users, WhatsApp locks out non-WhatsApp users (AFAICT, I don’t use others, and Signal is refusing to work on my systems for reasons I don’t know, and I can actually live well without it)<p>The bubble with bright white text on a bright green background hurts only ME, the Apple user with old eyes, and I have offered old Apple gear to friends so we can FaceTime, a nifty way to reuse rather than recycle gear.

As an Apple customer, I applaud their tenacity. Every time Beeper&#x27;s protocol hacks are fixed, Messages gets more secure.

how is it legal to use private apis of another company in your product? does it not count as cyber attack or potential dos?

Oh yeah because this went so well last time.<p>It took them what, a lazy few days to kill it off last time, bets on about the same, along with a “don’t make me do this again” warning?

No, it&#x27;s not. I don&#x27;t get the 2FA code. It never worked before for me. Never worked with Beeper proper either.

Anyone got a referral code?

I&#x27;m surprised people are defending these guys. This is paid-for illegal breaking into systems.

I got my first iMessage spam from an email address ever. I wonder if this whole thing is related..

Honestly, I just want the ability to add and remove Android users from group chats without having to start an entirely new thread. If RCS fixes this, then I&#x27;ll be thrilled.

Wild the Apple pundits who were weirdly angry about this app acting completely disgusted someone would do this. So strange to see that attitude from the Apple community when some of us are old enough to remember when Apple wasn&#x27;t in a position of power and we absolutely relied on these sort of projects to exist and work in a Windows dominant world.

Apple&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Amazon do a lot of extremely petty things that should disgust us and give us a glimpse at how this pettiness and adversarial conduct might escalate in a GAI world:<p>- Amazon does not carry Google branded products. ([edit] they do now once again, whew!)<p>- Search in GMail is nearly completely broken when you have too many messages, yet Google (ostensibly a search company) can&#x27;t deliver good email search at scale so they don&#x27;t bother.<p>- Apple allows lots of customization of push notifications and notification behavior (lock screen, badge icons, etc., etc.) yet does not simply let the user turn off push notifications that are advertisements or promotions.<p>- Google does not let parents choose third party whitelist &quot;experts&quot; for kids content recommendations. The status quo is that most kids either have parents who spend hours curating or they get to watch all the generative content garbage that Youtube hosts.<p>- Google Maps contains significant glitches and confusing navigation suggestions even though there must be terabytes of data showing that they routinely result in wrong turns and rerouting.<p>These are all examples of market failures that are fostered&#x2F;continued by various anticompetitive aspects of the markets these firms operate in.<p>Not sure why anyone would expect Apple to allow Beeper Mini when clearly iMessage is meant to secure a competitive advantage at the expense of apple customers convenience and freedom.

edit: nm, their help page explains it.

how long will it last this time?

should&#x27;ve stayed dead

How is it better than, e.g. Whatsapp ?

They sure are trying hard to get sued.

Lmao Apple.<p>Time for the EU to step in. They don&#x27;t get everything done but they certainly force a lot more out of companies than other organisations.

Maybe this came up in the earlier threads (announcement, outage) so I apologize if it&#x27;s been discussed ...<p>This project is fantastic. The hacker spirit is in full force, and I love a good David and Goliath story. However, all the comments about demanding interoperability and protocols keep confusing me -- I don&#x27;t consider APNS a protocol (like TCP anyways), it&#x27;s also not incidental, extra header space to stuff data into in an existing message being transported (ala early SMS), and it&#x27;s not an open relay for everybody to use. It&#x27;s Apple&#x27;s private message delivery system!<p>Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they&#x27;re not using Apple products?<p>I&#x27;m not licking boots over here, just genuinely curious. I wouldn&#x27;t want to set up a mail server and then foot the bill and assume liability for whatever the hell goes through it from random people on the internet.<p>And trust me, I&#x27;m all for civil disobedience and sticking it to the man with clever technical solutions, but given the (probable) massive costs of operating APNS, Apple&#x27;s got every right in the world to close any gaps in their system and keep kicking Beeper out.. and Beeper can keep trying to get back in.. but I just can&#x27;t wrap my head around making the assumption that APNS access is somehow a fundamental right that we&#x27;re all being denied.

I’m a former Android fanatic turned iPhone user. I still own Android devices, but my primary device is an iPhone. I haven’t had something excite me as much as this Beeper Mini situation in years—I love that they’re doing this.<p>One of the things that got me to switch to the iPhone a few years ago was the fact that it seemed Apple was actually doing a lot of the right things when it came to privacy and security. Obviously, I was still pretty skeptical of them, but compared to Google, Apple’s track record seemed a bit more trustworthy.<p>The way Apple tries to lock you in though while stifling competition is extremely disappointing. They’re on the wrong side of history.

Apples response:<p>&gt; These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.<p>Didn’t it recently come to light that apple have been “exposing” that metadata to government agencies for years? Maybe they should stop exposing metadata rather than blaming others for replicating their implementation!<p>How does a 3rd party implementing their API mean there will be “unwanted messages, spam and phishing attacks”? Are they accusing the 3rd party of doing that, or do they believe 3rd party software is inherently inferior to their own (which constantly needs security updates).

I have a feeling they&#x27;re not going to stop being a thorn in Apple&#x27;s side for quite a while...

Stuff like this feels petty by all parties.<p>Use an app that’s already universal if users are so desperate.<p>Playing whack a mole back and forth over a chat app as if it’s some high minded fight for speech when countless options exist is melodrama for the sake of melodrama and engagement farming<p>Beeper real goal is like everyone else in tech; get rich. It found the perfect marketing meme, the old David and Goliath story, to piggyback its business goals on.

It might be a controversial topic, but this post had some oddly rapid upvotes for HN.<p>I&#x27;m trying to understand what the target of this hacky iMessage spin-off of Beeper is. The whole idea of subscription-based monetization. Rather no way of Apple not patching quickly, dealing with this as soon as it raises attention.<p>But maybe that was the intent of a hack they found? A clever marketing strategy, to gain some rapid traction with the controversy, highlighting their project?

Apple is writing their own death sentence here. Beeper Mini&#x27;s case will definitely be used against them when their anti-monopoly case inevitably comes about:<p>1. Forcing a monopoly when they force-migrated their users to iMessage<p>2. Maintaining said monopoly by keeping third parties out<p>Best thing they could do is put third party clients into a MFI like program and loads of red tape.

These Beeper folk sound a bit entitled. As was repeatedly mentioned in the other thread [1], building production applications on top of an undocumented and unsupported (in terms of backwards compatability, etc) API is a nightmare that should be avoided. Apple has every right to change their API, if they do Beeper will go down, and Beeper will blame Apple. I understand Apple&#x27;s incentives to not want to be in this situation.<p>I don&#x27;t buy their &quot;Beeper unequivocally makes things secure story&quot; either. For one, I do not want to have my Apple ID login routed through a third party. I trust an established, trillion dollar company far more with that sensitive info than I do a fast-moving, eager-to-break-things startup. And the list goes on.<p>It&#x27;s an impressive engineering effort, but I really don&#x27;t believe they&#x27;re entitled to parasite off the undocumented iMessage API.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38574888">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38574888</a>

I’m hoping Apple find a perm shut down solution. A proper iMessage client for android can’t come from a hack.<p>I do applaud them for getting a home run in PR for themselves

&gt; If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.<p>As an iPhone user I would love for them to do this so I can not communicate with these users. The green&#x2F;blue bubble gives me an indication of the encryption being used, and presenting a blue bubble while the messages are being MITMed (how Beeper works) is something I want to be aware of.