Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users::The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. A startup called Beeper, which had been working on a multi-platform messaging
i had no idea that having green chat bubbles upset people so much.
The issue isn’t so much the message color. It’s the ability to send videos that aren’t potato quality and other media.
Which should go away anyway once Apple bakes in RCS support
Which they will surely do with no caveats whatsoever.
They’re doing the GSMA standard and nothing else. I think they refuse to play ball with any standard Google controls either directly or indirectly.
I hate apple as much as the next guy, but I respect them for that
It’s just smart business. Why give up any level of control of anything to a direct competitor when you don’t have to?
Especially Google, and especially the crappy implementation of RCS.
I see posts every day of people having issues. Messages not sent, not received, etc.
They’re not doing encryption, because Google is using their own.
RCS is too little, too late. It sucks. I refuse to ever use it.
oh, can’t android users receive high-quality videos and photos? after 16 years of smartphones, you’d think they’d have that figured out…
Yeah the whole reason Apple won’t allow it is because they expect you to conclude exactly this.
👆 your average apple user, oblivious to the world around them
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iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
you can when it’s android to android. as soon as an iphone is in play, the iphone immediately decreases the quality, even though the MMS standard allows for attachments up to 100MB in size
That is not the issue. At all. Lol
You’re joking, right?
i’m laughing, if that’s what you mean.
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
I think they’re hated because they’re synonymous with broken group chats and low res photos. Hopefully EU forcing rss adoption fixes these instead of having to download an app to ‘fit in’.
why should the EU have anything to do with who “fits in”? maybe i misunderstood what you’re saying here…
People are dumb af
In the US, every millenial is a communist until a green bubble shows up in the group chat… then the poverty jokes commence
gen z*
Dumb kids are always dumb. And cruel.
It’s all the other features in iMessage that android users “ruin” in group chats. Things like read receipts, typing indicators, reactions, animated/spoiler text messages, sending media in full quality, etc… A single android user is enough to downgrade an entire group chat, so apple users tend to be a little bit resentful.
It’d be a little bit like if one person on a Discord server disabled all the fun parts of Discord, and it killed the functionality for everyone on that server. Now nobody in the server can add fun little reactions to messages, or start threads, or send embedded gifs. All because that one person decided they didn’t like it.
This shit seems like a perfect target for an antitrust suit, no?
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What OS are you on?
CalyxOS, which uses microG.
Is it just you can’t pay for the subscription or the notification process (MicroG GCM) doesn’t work?
Looks like both. Beeper mini (and a lot of other apps) ask the play store if the user paid for the app, which is a heavily pretexts part of goggles services… so using non-Google services means I can’t sign into beeper mini at all. They can’t prove I paid for it, especially since I don’t have a Google account at all.
Oh, so no Google account. Yea, looks like Beeper Mini relies on GCM, so without an account there’s no way to notify you that messages are to be retrieved.
I was really wondering if the issue was MicroG.
Hopefully the devs will be willing to work on using a notification process outside of GCM, even if that means polling by Beeper, once they get to a level of stability.
Though I think they’ll likely work on integrating other messengers first.
Well I do have GCM, it’s how all my other apps are able to work, even pokemon etc.
I think it’s purely that beeper is relying on Google authenicating that I paid for the app. Could there be a cracked apk? Probably, but I’m not willing to risk using that.
Assuming that it’s actually reverse engineered, this is great news. If not, there’s a massive lawsuit brewing.
Seems like Beeper will see the cleartext of the replies, though, since they send the notifications via BPNs, right?
[edit: thanks for the replies. I see now the footnote on their BPNs diagram: “Push notification does not contain message contents” so it seems like the answer is “no they will not”]
No, with this new app messages are encrypted between you and Apple’s iMessage servers using iMessage encryption more or less the same way an iPhone does.
The push service simply notifies your device it has a message waiting, no message content passes through Beeper servers.
No, they know that a message has been received, but the phone is what decrypts the message. Beeper can’t see it.
I don’t know for sure, but often mobile notification protocols are more like “wake up and check your incoming messages” than “user foo says bar”. If this is true then the best they could do is collect timestamps of when you probably received messages.
Why is this even a need to be solved? are people that stupidly superficial about the color of y fucking message bubble? (im not american but where im from literally nobody wiorth their salt gives a hoot)
are people that stupidly superficial
Yes.
understandable i suppose, a good deterrent tho if they speak about it openly
The color of the bubble is only important because it helps iPhone users know who not to add to group chats, since the presence of a non-imessage user in an iMessage group chat downgrades the entire chat to grainy photos, no reactions/ read receipts, voice memos, typing indicators, etc. I don’t blame them at all, many of them don’t use any third party messaging apps because iMessage is built in and gives them everything that other chat apps have, with the benefit that they don’t have to convince anybody to install it because all their iPhone owning friends have it preinstalled.
Lol the world we live in
It still needs Apple’s servers, which tells me they will try and find a way to shut it down. Now that Apple is going to implement RCS, I care a lot less about this.
What exactly do you mean with it requiring Apple’s servers? All of the services Beeper integrates with require it to communicate with the servers those services belong to.
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I don’t, I want modern messaging features like typing indicators, read receipts, and videos that have more than 10 pixels total
In exchange for security loss, is it really worth it?
Edit: the downvotes are very expected. You people need to lean about why this is important
https://www.androidauthority.com/beeper-app-opinion-3345142/
First, the elephant in the room needs to be addressed: security. In Beeper’s start-up guide, the first thing you see is a huge alert box: “Beeper may be less secure than using encrypted chat apps by themselves.” Fundamentally, there’s no way to fix this. To use any of the chat apps, you need to link Beeper to that service using your credentials, which is inherently more insecure than logging into the app directly. Beeper is quick to defend itself by pointing out its robust privacy policy, its ethical business practices with a user-centered focus, and its use of end-to-end encryption (E2EE). However, that doesn’t protect your credentials from hackers that could gain access to Beeper and send your grandma a message through WhatsApp pretending to be you and asking to wire $1,000 to an account in China.
More in depth: https://www.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/13hhx9e/transient_key_retention_a_suggestion_to_solve/?rdt=61709
What security loss, mate?
These: https://www.androidauthority.com/beeper-app-opinion-3345142/
First, the elephant in the room needs to be addressed: security. In Beeper’s start-up guide, the first thing you see is a huge alert box: “Beeper may be less secure than using encrypted chat apps by themselves.” Fundamentally, there’s no way to fix this. To use any of the chat apps, you need to link Beeper to that service using your credentials, which is inherently more insecure than logging into the app directly. Beeper is quick to defend itself by pointing out its robust privacy policy, its ethical business practices with a user-centered focus, and its use of end-to-end encryption (E2EE). However, that doesn’t protect your credentials from hackers that could gain access to Beeper and send your grandma a message through WhatsApp pretending to be you and asking to wire $1,000 to an account in China.
More in depth: https://www.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/13hhx9e/transient_key_retention_a_suggestion_to_solve/?rdt=61709
That’s about beeper, not beeper mini. Mini was just launched, that’s older information that only applies to the MITM version (beeper which is now beeper cloud).
Beeper mini talks directly to the services you use, no MITM, which is why they plan on adding more services to mini until it can replace the older Beeper (cloud).
My understanding is that this absolutely applies to their previous iterations, but not this – there’s no authenticating with your Apple ID, for example. It’s sending and receiving iMessage data directly between the Apple servers and your device, now.
