Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.
yeah, I give it until Thursday.
Aged like wine!
It’s been out for a long time with limited access and nothing yet. Maybe Apple will change their mind toward it when it’s being used by a large group of people finally. Hopefully not.
Edit: I was wrong. See below.
It’s been out for a long time with limited access and nothing yet.
you’re thinking of regular Beeper, wthich used Macs hosted by the company to relay iMessage messages.
That sounds exactly like what what Nothing Chats was shamed for a couple weeks ago, how has Beeper been fairing so well?
Beeper’s entire premise is based on decrypting your messages on their servers, re-encrypting them and sending them to you, and pinky promising that they’re not reading them.
So it really is the exact same thing as Nothing Chats then? I don’t think I trust them any more than Sunbird…
The difference, as I understand it, is Beeper hasn’t claimed to not be doing that. Sunbird/Nothing touted E2EE and that was a lie.
That makes sense I suppose. A company that doesn’t outright lie about how their service works would have more goodwill behind it, wouldn’t it.
It’d be nice if apple wasn’t so petty.
Okay I’m out of the loop, why is iMessage on Android such a big deal? I know that images get compressed but it sounds like Google and Apple are finally working together to draw up a spec there. Besides that it’s… A color difference?
There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.
Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.
why is iMessage on Android such a big deal?
Being able to use rich chat features.
Like what? I know there is a difference in how group chats are handled, but thats a compatibility issue, not a rich chat feature. The only thing I can think of is Apples stupid push for more emojis and even worse Memojis. Otherwise, pics, gifs, emojis work between Apple and Android. Seems like its the green v blue and group chat edits that are the differences.
But maybe I dont know.
Being able to send videos that don’t look godawful would be nice
They look just fine over RCS. Which everyone else supports and apple could even integrate support for into iMessage.
Even straight up MMS on most carriers has no limit or a generous enough one that a short clip comes through just fine.
That’s just apple refusing to use rcs, so it changes to sms, which uses the phone connection, not the data connection.
