Beeper Says It's Done Trying To Bring iMessage To Android (techcrunch.com) 61
Beeper is giving up on its mission to bring iMessage to Android after implementing a series of fixes that Apple has knocked down one by one over the past month. From a report: Although the company has issued a complex workaround, it says it has no plans to roll out another one if this one is knocked down by Apple. "Each time that Beeper Mini goes 'down' or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper's credibility takes a hit," the company wrote in a blog post. "It's unsustainable. As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we can't win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth. With our latest software release, we believe we've created something that Apple can tolerate existing. We do not have any current plans to respond if this solution is knocked offline"
Uh ok... (Score:1, Insightful)
Who even wanted this, even if it did work reliably?
Re:Uh ok... (Score:4)
I sure as heck didnt. I don't feel left out of the apple metaverse because my bubbles are the wrong color.
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Oh, they cared. It's just that those that cared actually admitted they wanted the blue talk bubbles and look like idiots when they do.
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Well, if you believe several of the articles written on the topic; Apple is running some sort or PR or advertising campaign to bully and stigmatize people whose bubbles are green versus blue. Personally, I've never seen any of this messaging, aside from Tim Cook's "Just buy your Mom an iPhone" quip. And, really, did anyone actually think Apple's CEO was going to tell people to scrap all their Apple kit and buy their mother an android instead? But the (admittedly, false) narrative is pretty common these d
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Who even wanted this, even if it did work reliably?
Plenty of people wanted cross-platform messaging capability beyond what SMS offers. What few people wanted, though, was for it to be in the form of an unreliable hack which never had a chance in hell of being given Apple's blessing. I'm surprised it took Beeper this long to realize that.
Re:Uh ok... (Score:4, Funny)
I was just saying this exact same thing to my friends on telegram. I as like "man it sucks that we don't have a platform independent way of messaging each other" Then I realized it was telegram and I didn't hit send.
After that I went to signal and asked some friends out to lunch. Finally later my mom sent me a Facebook message about the holidays and some recruiter hit me up on LinkedIn chat.
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The play here would be a legislative intervention on the basis of anti-trust law.
Not that I'd place a lot of faith in lawmakers properly understanding the situation, but iMessage is run on Apple's servers which obviously costs Apple a non-trivial amount of money to run and maintain. It's not anti-competitive to run infrastructure which is intended to be utilized only by your paying customers.
A case certainly could've been made that Apple is engaging in anti-competitive behavior by having iOS not support RCS, but Apple is planning to add RCS support. So, if other companies want to run
Re: Uh ok... (Score:3)
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Me! Me! I use Windows (and even Linux occasionally) at work, and Beeper's great for letting me continue text conversations with family and friends. It gets me a similar (although not quite as nice) experience as I do when I'm on a Mac like I do when I'm at home. The alternative is to either a) keep pulling my phone out of my pocket, or b) I just don't bother until I leave for the day, unless my phone's blowing up. I'm not looking at it for "bring iMessage to android", it's more "let me text from my computer
Because (Score:1, Troll)
It was a waste of time to begin with. Android has absolutely zero need to have integration with iMessage. I'm the only Android user in a family of iPhone users. Beeper doesn't help me communicate with them any differently or better even if it was working as originally intended. I mean, like the only reason to make this app to begin with is as a challenge to yourself. Releasing it was never going to go well.
Re:Because (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the creator's reasons for making it are bullshit to begin with. The E2EE encryption only worked with other Beeper/Matrix users. iMessages themselves, by default, aren't E2EE encrypted unless Advanced Data Protection is turned on AND iCloud Backup is turned off. If you have iCloud Backups on, then the encryption keys are on Apple's servers, thus Apple can decrypt your messages if they want or are forced.
So, first of all, it was never going to viable long-term because Apple is Apple and Apple doesn't share. Secondly, it was nowhere near as secure as they led people to believe, as described above. And lastly, if you want E2EE that is cross-platform and available on both iPhone and Android, we already have solutions for that - Signal and WhatsApp. The only thing Beeper had going for it that was different that those two apps, was the attempt at iMessage bubble color, otherwise this app never had a point or reason to exist.
So, while I also love being pedantic and pithy, you lose.
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It was a waste of time to begin with. Android has absolutely zero need to have integration with iMessage. I'm the only Android user in a family of iPhone users.
Either you're the luckiest person on the face of the Earth to have completely avoided "did you get/read my text?" drama, and never had to deal with group iMessages, or you've managed to completely convince your entire family to all use the same 3rd party messaging platform.
I use iPhone and my partner uses Android. For awhile, we did try running an AirMessage server, but it has reliability issues. Ultimately, we just settled on using Facebook Messenger because we both were already on it. I know on /. peop
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Either you're the luckiest person on the face of the Earth to have completely avoided "did you get/read my text?" drama, and never had to deal with group iMessages, or you've managed to completely convince your entire family to all use the same 3rd party messaging platform.
None of the above. They add me into group messages, complain if I don't respond, and aren't interested in using other apps. I simply sternly told them that I'll reply if and when I want to. I'm a busy adult living in a different state three time zones away. They all live within 30min of each other and hang out regularly. That solved it from the family.
If you aren't family and add me to a group message of any kind from any device, I will immediately remove myself from the group, if possible, and ignore or de
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So, start with you and your partner and start convincing your closest friends. Get them to do the same. Because Facebook Messenger is an absolutely terrible option no matter how well it seems to work.
Most people don't want to join a MLM scheme of evangelizing their preferred messaging platform. Especially when, as you just said, FB Messenger works just fine and a lot of folks are already on it by virtue of having a Facebook account. I agree in principle that it shouldn't be the default, but convenience is king.
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Well, enjoy knowing Facebook is 100% data harvesting all those messages for who knows what purposes. You're better off just sticking with basic SMS/MMS at that point.
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Maybe I'm not understanding something but I'm near positive my entire family uses iphone and numerous times my mother has sent out a group message (it went to about 4 of us) and me using Android saw all the group responses just fine. I'm guessing their little bubble color changed but it sure as heck didn't stop me from having to hear ALL the responses to the originally sent message.
I know my mom, her husband and my aunt use iphones. Not sure about the other relatives (but I'd honestly be more surprised if t
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It's mostly that the iMessage users can see if their messages have been sent/received/read by the other iMessage users. They don't get any feedback from Android users other than the message was sent. No feedback if it was received or read. So, if don't respond in whatever timeframe seems reasonable to them, they may assume you never got the message or are ignoring them on purpose.
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Ahh okay. That clears that up. My family and friends don't treat text as "urgent/emergency repond NOW" kind of thing. If we happen to be available to respond we will but no one is taking a slight if a response isn't forth coming right away. Knowing it was received or read is a nice to have but honestly not deal breaking. I could see how if you were really use to that functionality, it could slightly annoy you for it to not be there but beyond that, eh, not really.
Thank you for clearing that up.
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All I want is for iPhone users to stop annoying me with their mass texts.
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And we don't care if someone "liked" a photo. A completely useless system within iMessage.
It was unusable (Score:5, Funny)
Who was really going to use this? From TFA:
"To get the app working now, you need to have an old jailbroken iPhone (6/6s/SE1/7/8/X) and a Mac or Linux computer. You then need to install a Beeper tool to generate an iMessage registration code, then update to the latest Beeper Mini app and enter your code. You need to leave the iPhone plugged into power and connected to Wi-Fi at all times"
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These sound like spam gateways to me.
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If you already have a Mac computer you can just run AirMessage, which is free. Granted, my experience with it was that the reliability is really only as good as your home broadband (yeah, that should be obvious) and if you don't have particularly reliable broadband at home it can get annoying. There's also a few caveats with the Android app itself, and some bugs with missing notifications.
The real fix for this will be when Apple finally pushes out the iOS update which includes RCS support. Waiting sucks,
Slashdot Users Done Tolerating Beeper Stories (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is Beeper getting so much coverage here? It seems a useless busy-work project for somebody that, in days past, would have come and went completely unnoticed. And probably rightfully so. Is there a reason we need to be updated every time the project lead farts? Did someone have unicorn dreams and were only able to produce half-alive shetland ponies?
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Why is Beeper getting so much coverage here?
Well for one a common hobby shared by a lot of people on /. is Apple hater. So anything even remotely related to Apple is almost guaranteed to generate engagement.
Re: Slashdot Users Done Tolerating Beeper Stories (Score:2)
Since you're commenting, you must be an apple hater then?
Most people don't give a shit and just want texting to not artificially be made worse when they text their friends/family and someone made an app to make that happen until Apple insisted on making the experience suck again to try to strongarm people into buying their phones.
Re: Slashdot Users Done Tolerating Beeper Stories (Score:4)
Re: Slashdot Users Done Tolerating Beeper Stories (Score:4, Insightful)
> Most people don't give a shit and just want texting to
> not artificially be made worse
Quite a few people on slashdot actually DO give a shit, as the automatic reflex to bash anything Apple does quite clearly illustrates, even right there in your very own comment which misrepresents Apple's actions to falsely paint them in a bad light.
Nothing Apple did with iMessage made regular texting worse in any way, artificially or otherwise. iMessage provides EXTRA features on top of traditional messaging. Don't use iMessage? Don't have an iPhone? No problem. SMS still works exactly like it always has before with no degradation whatsoever. You just don't get the extra features on top of it. And, really, why should you? Or, to put it another way, why do you expect Apple, or any other business for that matter, to give you and other non-customers something for free without any benefit (And by benefiting their competitors, actually harming themselves.) in return?
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WTF are you even talking about? The subject here is text messaging, not file transfers. If you're trying to use the iMessage *or* SMS for the latter, you're using the wrong tool in the first place. And no, Apple has not degraded SMS; not one whit.
Re: Slashdot Users Done Tolerating Beeper Stories (Score:2)
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"a common hobby shared by a lot of people" =/= "all"
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Why is Beeper getting so much coverage here?
Because Beeper was bootstrapped by Y Combinator and /. has a hard-on for all things Y Combinator.
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Why is Beeper getting so much coverage here?
Because Beeper was bootstrapped by Y Combinator and /. has a hard-on for all things Y Combinator.
Now this is something I hadn't caught. Interesting. Thank you for pointing it out.
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Yes, we need more stories about AI instead.
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Yes, we need more stories about AI instead.
The funniest part of the AI stream on ./ now is how many of the "stories" are literally just tech CEOs promising great use of AI in some imaginary product they haven't even taken the time to spec out yet. I have a feeling I could leak something about using AI to do literally anything and it'd probably make the front page here before I could point out that it was a parody.
The Beeper story has value (Score:1)
I don't know the reason why, but I can think of a possible reasons why.
First, by following this particular story, from start to end, I think we see it went much faster than in times past. That's interesting and shows that Apple's evil is not asleep. They've obviously been quite active. Peoples' enemies are faster and more agile than they once were.
Second...
Everyone eventually has their moment, sort of like RMS and the legendary printer driver, where their heart gets broken and they finally see how they neve
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Because someone is holding a lot of Beeper stock. They just unloaded it all, so it doesn't matter to them anymore to keep it pumped up.
Blue Bubbles (Score:2)
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No. Most people do not care at all. And the younger generations are relying on the default messengers less and less. What do the younger generations watch a lot more of than older generations? Twitch. What do most, if not all, Twitch streamers have? A Discord server for chatting. Discord is available for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, Mac, PS5, Xbox, and even the Switch. The only thing Discord doesn't do is E2EE, but they are experimenting with various encryption methods, so it could still be a thing in the
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Hmm, tribalism is a very human thing and sure, it may be learned but it gets passed down to every generation and likely isn't going to change any time soon. We always find ways to differentiate people. My teen years were by far my least enjoyable years of life because of all the stupid shit teens do. I was extremely happy to put high school and all that bullshit behind me.
It's really no surprise to me if teenagers were concerned about something absolutely trivial and picked on other kids for not being part
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Teens do stupid shit, yes. Forming cliques is normal, yes. Bullying others not in your clique is not normal. It's either a learned behavior or a mental health issue of sorts (or both, I suppose). I'm sorry your teen years weren't enjoyable; they should have been. Children aren't monsters, but their parents certainly can make them one.
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But you're forgetting that this service was in part written by a 16 year old, the exact kind of demographic who is most affected by this bullshit, and who is least empowered to fix the roo
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Nothing. Because it's not actually happening anywhere near as much as you might be assuming it does.
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Getting bullied because you aren't part of the in-crowd is most certainly a common theme, especially between around 10-13. I put up with it a decent amount and I saw other, even less fortunate kids, get it worse then me. I beat a few people up and they decided to move on to easier targets. Adults don't do shit about it and now of course, the Internet means the harassment moves online and happens even more often. The kind of abuse that gets dealt to you as a kid would be criminal if it was happening as an ad
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Yeah, and mantal health care has also improved since then. Better mental health care means less bullying. It's not the same as you remember nor as prevalent as you think.
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Oh, and I forgot, iMessages E2EE only works if you turn on Advanced Data Protection (which is off by default) and turn off iCloud Backup (which is on by default). If you have both on, your encryption keys get backed up too. Onto Apple's servers. Where it can be accessed by people other than you and the recipient(s). Apple doesn't even have the right priorities for their default settings, because those two defaults should each be reversed.
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Blue bubbles sell nothing.
Bubbles in Skype and Signal are blue, too. And in Telegram.
And most chat apps let you pick what ever colour you prefer anyway.
Did we not learn from AOL's AIM vs. Microsoft war? (Score:3)
Did we not learn anything from the AIM vs. Microsoft Messenger war [theverge.com]?
It's engineering effort that'd put to better use (Score:2)
creating great messaging solutions for FOSS mobile OSes such as any deGoogled AOSP distro or SailfishOS.
If Beeper was as dedicated to improving free solutions as they are trying to horn in on Apple's private party where they're not welcome, they would actually achieve more to break the Apple / Google stranglehold on the mobile industry than what they've achieved so far - which is, ultimately, diddly squat.
Of course, improving open-source software is not as quick or as flamboyant as getting insane PR for try
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I kind of doubt we will ever have a universal messaging application that's platform agnostic. You'll always have an Apple, Google or Microsoft that uses their market share to push their proprietary bullshit instead of supporting open standards. Obviously there are third party applications that are agnostic, but it's really hard to compete against an entrenched application that shows up on center stage and is shoved in your face by the company that developed your device.
We played this game with messaging ser