There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works
The question is how long Apple will let it.
• A new Android app called Beeper Mini allows users to send iMessages as blue bubbles from non-Apple devices.
• Beeper Mini bypasses traditional iMessage hacks by directly sending iMessages from Android devices.
• The app has been praised for its smooth functionality, sending messages seamlessly between Android and iPhone users.
Hate to say it but who gives a fuck?
Just use signal.
The hardest thing about switching communication apps is that you have to convince everyone you talk with to switch as well. I'm stuck in WhatsApp because that's what my friends and family all use.
Right? I feel it's really snobby and disingenuous to just snap back and say "just ditch that and use so and so messaging app", as if messaging platforms didn't require your direct peers to also use them. As long as messaging platforms operate as walled gardens, we have little say on what apps we use. We're at the mercy of the general populace and that's all there is to it, at least until the DMA changes things. I really tried to make people jump ship from WhatsApp to telegram during what seemed like a mass exodus from even businesses (yeah bad choice but I didn't know back then), ended up back on WhatsApp some 3 months later with my tail between my legs, nobody stayed on telegram even though a ton of people downloaded it and jumped in. Now imagine trying to get them all to use a privacy-focused app that gives them a hard time using it in multiple devices. Convenience is the reason why Meta, Apple, Google, MSFT, etc. are on top. You can't expect the general populace to sacrifice it for privacy, not after continuously giving up freedom and privacy for the sake of convenience for decades in the digital space.
I just said fuck it one day, deleted WhatsApp and explained to family and friends why I did it. Slowly but surely, almost everyone switched.
But I do realize this will not work for everybody. Your contacts have the same right to use their phone as they see fit as you do, after all. And this kind of freedom is something super important, too.
Gotta find the compromise that works for both parties. If there is one to find, that is.
I have to convince every one of my friends to switch because they all use SMS/iMessage. Outside of the US, you would have to convince every one of your friends to switch from WhatsApp.
There's been some social discrimination occurring around people who don't have blue messages being excluded, or being seen as poor. Not a great use base but the fact I am even aware of blue Vs green messages means some people do.
I'd love to, but none of my friends use it unfortunately
After 3 years of use of signal, I have converted my Mom which cares about privacy too from shows she seen. Which allowed us to convert my Brother, with it being the main discussion app. I also converted my SO because of a problem we had on messenger that was scary, finally I was able to move my Best friend, which is also a member of the DND group I started which moved to Signal because others (Brother, Best Friend) where already on Signal
I'll just continue to use my old strategy of not voluntarily communicating with people who care about what color my text bubble is.
At this stage in the game, isn't that basically the only difference?
I've never understood how this became an issue of shaming and exclusion.
Literally just star bellied sneetches.
It's not the only difference. It indicates the difference in experience parties receive. Higher quality pictures & video, E2E encryption are some of the differences. I'm not shamed for being on android but I can't have the same quality conversations without convincing lots of people to use something like signal (which I do use with those I have convinced).
LOL. Thanks for the sneetches comparison!
Fucking insane a 16 year old kid figured it out.
It's always wild to me thinking how good kids are with tech these days to be able to crack something like this (assuming it's true).
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it always seems to me that kids are living in a world where they need to as present in their digital realities as much, if not more than, their actual ones. At work it seems like they are trying to be in two places at once sometimes.
I wonder how much of that is down to their real world sucking and their digital world being pretty cool.
It's what naturally happens when smart people have free time. And teenagers have a lot of that.
And teenagers have a lot of that
._.
Most kids are clueless with tech to be honest. Yes they know how to use it, but they have no idea how it works behind the scenes. This has pretty scary consequences on how they are easily manipulated or scammed.
Some of them are very smart, sure, but on average I'd say they are less tech savvy than Gen X and millennials who grew up at a time you couldn't use computers without some kind of knowledge of how it works (and smartphones didn't exist).
Right, I have to teach shortcuts to our young intern the exact same way as i had to do with my grandma. All the ui's are so smooth now that even a context menu is too much.
im good thanks
I don't get why Americans are so obsessed with iMessage. There's like a million chat apps out there.
It's the status symbolism of the green bubble vs blue bubble. Here in America we try to show off how rich we are by driving fancy cars, live in giant ridiculous houses, and buying all the latest most expensive tech the day it's released.
You can see me in a fancy car or in front of my mansion, but how do you know i spent way too much money on the phone i text you from? If all texts arrived on your phone in the same color you wouldn't be able to immediately identify which kind of phone i sent the text from.
Now here's the magic: if i send your iphone (bc let's be real, if you don't have an iphone you aren't someone worth talking to) a text, you know it came from an iPhone because the text bubble is blue. If you ever received a text and it was this hideous radioactive snot/puke green... Just delete. Just don't even bother. I can't believe I'm even typing these letters, it feels so gross... But that green bubble means you received a text from someone with an.....Android. 🤮
So there ya go! 😀
Most Americans aren't obsessed at all. They just want to use whatever is easiest, and iMessage is preinstalled and mostly works fine with pretty much everyone. The bias toward default is strong.
Bingo. People just use what’s on the phone at the start.
It's because texting has been very cheap there for a long time. It's now very cheap where I am too, but in high school everyone was using stuff like MSN Messenger where possible. At that time teens in the US were texting. It became cheap where I am by the time WhatsApp came out, so we have a mix of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and texting
Me neither and I'm an American
Crazy to think this is just because of a different colored bubble
It's not the color of the bubble. It's the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn't iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
Because Apple decided all media over SMS should be sent in a shitty downgraded form.
This is all on Apple wanting to make iMessage look better than SMS, and Apple look better than everyone else (and to be fair, iMessage is the right approach to the SMS issue, just not as a walled-garden version).
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.
So Apple and carriers are to blame for this.
Only happens in Muricaland.
Not just in 'Merica, also in Canada eh.
People are fucking stupid.
Total time spent between all of the discussion, hand-wringing, programming, and reporting, this has got to be be pretty high on the list of colossal time-wasters.
Is this available on iOS?
Lol
I started using it mainly to not have pictures and videos sent get all degraded, it does work.
Anyhow all my friends were like OMG, YOU GOT AN IPHONE because my messages started coming through blue and I was like, why does that fucking matter?
This is like when I started drinking my coffee black and suddenly I knew the secret handshake at every coffee place I'd order at. Baristas would be like, "the way it should be" and wink and shit. Um. I guess I'm cool now or something
As nice as it would be to have all my messaging in one app rather than across a half dozen, I just can't picture paying a monthly fee to do it.
Might be good for business owners, having a single inbox.
Exactly, either setting themselves as an alternative to Twilio, or to be acquired by them. Companies will pay more than $2/month/user for customer engagement on all platforms.
I'm not sure what the business model is here (I have no interest in iMessage) but unlike the previous ones this solution doesn't require a Mac mini farm. Messages are sent directly from the Android device.
So it doesn't require a monthly fee to be profitable.
Can some American please explain this European why this is such a big deal?
Mostly because the iPhone's dominance has led to iMessage being a very popular service over here. But Android users on the receiving end of messages from that service get images and videos in much lower quality, among many other quality losses.
I mean it's kinda a chicken and egg problem but I'd argue that you've got it the wrong way around. I think the iPhone is so dominant only because of iMessage. It's a status symbol to have blue bubbles, and there are people seriously not dating Android users for example.
The iPhone got popular for different reasons but the only reason why it's so dominant in the states is that people started viewing blue bubbles as something desirable. And that is by design! Apple has deliberately made texting between iPhones and Android phones shit by not updating to newer official texting standards. They stuck with an SMS/MMS protocol from the 90s and early 00s, just so that people keep buying iPhones.
It's not, it's a superficial opinion on color and functionality that apple and Google want you to think is a big deal but in reality it's two companies using two different protocols and they want you to pick up their product over the over. Even Americans don't know why it's a big deal, they see green in iMessage and freak out.
Sounds like you're an iPhone user, or at least someone who doesn't have kids with Android phones and doesn't participate in group activities where the people primarily use iPhones.
I won't bother explaining it all, but the real issues are group chats that contain both iPhones and Androids, and image/video quality, reactions, etc. The issues are bad enough that kids especially get left out of group chats over it, and bullying incidents are widely reported (and I've seen it first hand)
Stop trying to make this a thing
Sunbird worked - I was in the beta - but it turned out to have no encryption whatsoever. I am skeptical.
Sunbird just relayed messages back and forth using a Mac mini in a warehouse. They probably had something that read the messages app on there and sent to their app on the phone through their servers, and seemingly forgot to encrypt anything during this process.
This is actually sending messages as iMessage. It’s been reverse engineered which is an incredible feat, iMessage has been out like …10+ years? And no one figured it out yet until this 16yr old rocks up.
Doesn't iMessage require some sort of Apple-issued device id? A key, unique to a device, hard-coded in the SoC? (which is easy to block if over-used).
Which is why hackintoshes used to require crazy workarounds to get this working, even with Apple's own software, if I remember correctly (never tried myself, could be wrong).
How did they get around this? (did they?)
So if the app will be open source like they say, can't we just build it ourselves and not pay $2/mo?
Kind of, but it's more complicated. I'm not sure if the app itself will be open source, but currently, the method they use is. Either way, the hardest part is already done, but you still need a client (maybe; they might open-source it) and a notification server. I'm planning to attempt to build a Matrix bridge if I have enough time and it's not beyond my skills, but if you don't want the messages to be decrypted by the server, making the notification server and maybe client would be really difficult.
Don't see why not. Whats the timline on this?
Its already available for download and use, but I can't find the source anywhere other than a Python proof of concept project that beeper purchased the rights to to make this app.
Open source doesn’t mean it can be very conveniently free. Besides backend, building can be difficult, as you see in paid libre apps like Ardour
no, thx
The fact that people are using iMessage for group chats is which a weird concept to me.
That’s what discord, WhatsApp and Facebook messenger are for.
If anyone adds my primary text message service number to a group chat they are being blocked. Gross.
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It's primarily not an active choice. For most iPhone users, it's just what's installed, so it's what they use. The idea that there might be other options doesn't really occur to them; iMessage came out before any of the other options really became popular, it worked well enough, and it was preinstalled, so that's what people learned to use.
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I don't know what sort of people you are getting into group chats with, but for me it's not exactly people I can just decide to block on a whim. Family groups, employer groups, friends I was already friends with and would lose contact with if I blocked. I'm not going to torpedo my job and all of those relationships by making a big deal over what messaging service we use, even if their use of iMessage makes my experience worse.
I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.
As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.
Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.
Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.
What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.
I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.
We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.
This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA
Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.
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Anecdotally, in my experience everyone in the UK just uses WhatsApp for group chats
Is the app already down? I can't even read reviews of it on Google Play store
Other way, actually; it's only just come out. Doesn't look like there are any reviews yet.
Seems available to me but I'm not paying $2/month to use it. I'd buy it but I'm not creating a perpetual subscription.
Impressive if true.
Working great for me.
And from what I've looked through so far of the pypush code it seems pretty legit.
IMessage being only for iPhones is officially over.
This isn't something Apple can just block or patch without also affecting every iPhone that doesn't download the patch update beforehand. Any device that isn't patched in advance will also lose access to iMessage.
It's actually quite impressive how it is done and it's truly innovative. It's very much a significant step forward compared to the implementations we have seen before.