I don't understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:
telegram is not encrypted by default, and does its best to make you forget to enable it for each individual contact. if you want to do a group chat, you're out of luck.
Telegram is only (partially) secure for pedantic power users, which most people aren't.
We took steps to protect or users by forcing them to communicate to Android phones using unencrypted channels. After all, those peasants are not iPhone users, they deserve to be spied.
Aside from the obvious reasons of competition, Beeper also used Apples infrastructure, that Beeper was then going to monetize. Not too surprising they shut it down.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading vendor locking tactics to distance our brand from other lesser ones.
We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.
We're not letting anyone breach this walled garden, but nice try.
These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.
By using these tactics we can keep our users away from solutions that have any interoperability whatsoever and keep promoting decade-old features as new, as our sheepahem user base don't know any better.
So many of these comments are pulling up the other encrypted alternatives that you can use between iPhone and other platforms. But few seem to actually be addressing the problem of actually getting other non-tech savvy people to use this stuff because they don't actually see a problem with what they have.
You may not realize it, but not everyone is thinking about whether or not their messages are encrypted. My own family looks at me like "🤨" when I try to convince them to use something encrypted, like I'm trying to hide a crime or something. And I've only gotten my parents to use other services (WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger with end to encryption turned on) by digging my heels to get them to stop using SMS. I still haven't convinced my almost 16-year-old sister (she doesn't really message me that much anyway. But she's in that phase where she thinks she's all independent, and her first places are the simple stuff she knows).
Might I add that digging your heels at every attempt for someone to use SMS isn't socially acceptable. I've only done it because they're family and I love them
Serious question since I don't use iMessage whatsoever, what's going on with the iMessage stuff? Seems like multiple companies recently have tried to make apps that connect to iMessage, but there's nothing I've heard about Apple opening that up. Did something happen for this to suddenly pop up more frequently?
Someone (possibly recently?) figured out the protocol and how to register a phone number without needing an apple device. Older versions of stuff like this required having a Mac virtual machine and routing messages through it using a user's AppleID, so this was much easier. I saw a video that was bragging about how this new method would be very difficult to block because doing so could affect regular users, and I just kinda laughed at the naivety.
In the US it's the messaging standard because they are too lazy to install a cross platform messenger like everybody else in the world. So Android has a 40% market share there, which is the minority but not a crushing minority like Windows–Linux but for whatever reason American society rather focuses on iMessage than just to install Signal or whatever.
Pretty much it's the Beeper devs and one other. But the initial setups were really nothing more than using a Mac on the backend with a an adapter to Android.
Beeper and one (maybe two) other were pretty effective at it.
Beeper Mini is a different thing altogether. It uses a service to translate ANP (Apple Notification Protocol?) to GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), which are the respective notification handlers.
The Android client is able to comm directly with iMessage servers, unlike the original Beeper and the other ones.
You need to dream bigger. That should be the companies (Google, Apple, carriers, etc) working together and using a non-proprietary standard (an open RCS). Mini Beeper, to me, was just a proof of concept to show something akin to what Apple could do.
Those of use who have friends or groups of friends that use iPhones but us ourselves do not. In the US, iMessage is the #1 way to create a group chat, and if you don't have an iPhone you're often just excluded and rely on someone else to update you about plans, etc.
Lots of sarcastic comments in here, but Beeper’s method was to literally spoof the serial numbers and whatnot of real machines. Do people really not see how that would be a problem?
You can use any apple device to use iMessage, your account isn’t only usable on your device. They were effectively stealing people’s machine IDs to provide this service. That’s fucked up.
Former Apple engineer here. This architecture isn’t ideal if you intend the service to be portable - but we didn’t! Knowing the messages can only originate from a sealed application on a first party device eliminates a whole class of spam and security problems.
Beeper’s implementation spoofs Mac keys and requires you trust them with your Apple ID credentials if you want to be able to take full advantage of iMessage.
It’s just pointless. A huge security risk for Apple users and to zero benefit for Android users. Let Apple implement RCS as they promised and move on. Isn’t everyone on Telegram or WhatsApp anyway..?
Beeper already fixed iMessage on Beeper Cloud and is working on restoring Beeper Mini. Might take some back and forth but it still wouldn't be surprise if it makes their reimplementation more resilient to Apple tampering.
Apple broke Beeper Cloud too. If I had to guess, if Apple changed something that broke two different methods at the same time then it might be easier to fix by deducing from what they have in common.
Green/blue bubbles is just a simple way to say sms sucks. Besides those stories about teens getting social pressured, all anyone cares about is basically just sending photos that don't look like they were taken 20 years ago.