1y ago

Beeper Mini Is Back

blog.beeper.com

Beeper Mini Is Back

89 comments

If Apple doubts the security and privacy of our app, we’re willing to share the entire Beeper Mini codebase with a mutually agreed upon 3rd party security research firm.
What a beautiful way to call out Apple's bs.
- Apple is just going to turn the codebase to iMessage over to a 3rd party?
  You've got that backwards - beeper was offering to do that for their own codebase.
  
  Read Beeper's statement again, because you misunderstood it.

I can’t see Apple letting this ride
- Which is rich considering they reverse-engineered MS Office formats to get their office suite to work
  
  Is that true? I thought the specs were publicly available
  
  I think most if not all of those formats are plaintext? Open a .doc and it’s a heap of garbage XML-like soup.
- Well they've blocked it once. It'll be interesting to watch. Not sure of the legalities. Hard to say.

I'm still unclear on why this whole thing is so important that it's worth putting time and money into finding a solution for the color of word bubbles.
Edit: all this time I thought it was just an argument over bubble colors. But no, it's also potato quality videos and pictures ruining every group message with both Apple and Android in the mix.
- Its not just the word bubbles. Pictures and videos come through on Android like complete shit. I can't even have my wife send me pictures of the kids cause I can't see them on the other end. Nor can I watch family videos sent to me. Its much more than simple colors, but of course kids are getting bullied for that.
  
  Now this makes sense, thank you. Garbage quality video and pictures are a so annoying. It seems to ruin an entire group chat if one of them is on an iPhone. I often have to wait until I see someone in person or have them send it through a different app for the video to work.
  I have yet to get a group conversation to switch to Signal or something to avoid the potato quality videos
  
  Tell the wife to use telegram or another messaging client. There are plenty of perfectly good alternatives to imessages.
- I'm still unclear why this gets asked every post unless people keep ignoring the answers.
  
  Me too, really do not understand this on Lemmy of all places. It isn't and never has been outside of people still school age been about the color of the bubble. I truly want to understand this to the point I'm going to start asking anyone who posts this personally the following:
  Do you A) really think that the following are not at all important to people:
  Read receipts
  Typing indicators
  Reactions
  Transferring photos/videos in a way that doesn't look they were shot on an early 90s camera phone
  Potential E2EE *(Potential because my points are not necessarily specific to Beeper Mini and iMessage, but also relevant to the conversation around Apple supporting RCS and the unknowns about how that will work)
  B) Not aware of these things or any of the differences between iMessage, SMS, RCS, etc and truly believe the only difference is the bubble color? C) Is this just a smug reaction to the possibility that one of these App work arounds work iMessage will no longer be as exclusive if they were to succeed, and trying to reduce down the desires of those who would use it (and also the desires of Apple users who want these benefits with everyone regardless of who manufactured their phone)
  @Usernameblankface@lemmy.world I'd be curious to know which phone platform you use?
- I have a friend who use iMessage on their Mac and will check that more often than their phone. If I text them during work hours, it'll be hours before hearing back from them. Turns out, from what I'm told, iMessage on Mac has a setting to not show SMS on the desktop, so my messages were only going to their phone, which wasn't checked as frequently. I guess when you enable SMS, notifications get messed up, and read SMS on your iPhone aren't synced, and show up as unread (or something like that). In anycase, SMS got turned off at some point.
  Obviously, none of this is really my problem, but it's frustrating, more than just the color of the bubbles. The Network effect is real, and asking someone to switch to a new platform is not as easy as it sounds.
  
  If they enable iCloud sync for messages it will update everywhere, they can also make sure they have Text Message Forwarding selected on their phone. They’ll get the messages in a timely manner (I get mine at the exact same time as my phone) and read messages will be reflected in all locations. I’ve been using iMessage on a Mac, iPad, and iPhone in some combination or other since the feature was offered, and the only issue I’ve ever had with sync was when I did a clean setup on a new Mac instead of a setup from backup. The above options weren’t selected.
- I'm not either. considering that over 70% of the world is on android, you'd think the compatibility problem would be laid on Apple and not 3rd party applications.
  
  iMessage lock in is almost exclusively a US problem (maybe EU, but i have no experience living there so i'm not sure). I'm from Malaysia and 99% of communication here is done through whatsapp and I know this is true for many other countries too. Line is frequently used in korea, Wechat in china, etc. It was only when I moved to the US that I used iMessage in any serious capacity
  
  But Apple users don't care enough to solve the issue. Partly they see it as an Android problem,if they see the problem at all.
  In their defense, they have a messenger that works well, syncs to the desktop, sends high quality, etc, to other iOS users. So I can understand their not wanting to switch, or even seeing an issue.
- Group chat. You can’t have a properly working group chat if there’s an android in the mix.
  
  Now that people bring up group chat, I realized that the opposite is also true. One apple in the mix will ruin all the videos in a group chat.
  
  Group chat. You can’t have a properly working group chat if there’s ~~an android~~ SMS in the mix.
  This is by Apple's design choice, not because Android.
  Android can send as high a quality over SMS/MMS as the network will allow. iPhone can't.
  In Apple's defense, you'd still lose all the iMessage features when SMS is involved, because what else are you going to do when one participant doesn't have iMessage? You'll fallback to the lowest common mechanism.
  
  You can’t have a properly working group chat if there’s ~~an android~~ SMS in the mix.
  So anything that isn't iOS/iMessage.
- The reason is that if they have a solution, people will pay for it, and thus they'll make money.
- It’s really about interoperability of systems, protocols, services, and clients. Since we’re both using Lemmy I assume we both understand at least a bit about the significance of interoperability.
  I think it’s a shame that effort is put in to reverse engineering.
  
  I mean theoretically it would be possible for people to use apps that are already cross platform, like Signal. People just care less than the inconvenience of installing an app on their phone.
- Which is funny considering that apples current implementation is less secure because sending the non-imessage users from iMessage breaks the encryption, meaning everything sent to a non-imessage recipient is sent in plain text.
  
  Seems like it's designed to get Apple users to push away anyone who uses a non-apple device
- $10 says they want Apple to buy them out.
  
  They intend to work with lots of services, it's just that imessage is getting the most focus right now.
  If im not mistaken, they intend to eventually open source the code, so facebook/apple/google better buy quick.
- Because people are stupid and the whole world's gone fucking crazy.
  
  Your ignorance oh what transpires doesn't mean people are crazy.
  Annoying, yes. Crazy, no.
- OK. And?
  It's been posted many times around here.
  https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=Why+are+iMessage+blue+bubbles+so+important

I mean I applaud the efforts but if you can convince your friends a family to use Signal, that's way better
- My dad texts. I've mentioned we could share HD videos and Photos over something like signal. He refused. RCS was a godsend for texting him. Making people change their ways isn't feasible, even if you're OK with using like 5 different texting apps.

deleted
- Underlying implementation already is. You can connect to iMessage and send and receive messages using the python implementation on your PC if you want.
- Here is their POC in Python:https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush
  And their article explaining it: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works
- I mean, it won't be. It's quite clear that while the Beeper company may have good intentions on paper, they also definitely want to make as much money as possible. They aren't 100% bad, but also not 100% good either.
  Considering they directly communicate with Apples servers and make money from that, I can't believe that their company will last long legally. The only way to keep Android users being able to use this will be to make it open source and go "underground". But I hope Apple will have a massive PR disaster on their hands while this happens.
  
  Considering they directly communicate with Apples servers and make money from that...
  But, isn't that what APIs do? Why would that get Beeper in legal trouble if they are paying their license fee? I'm not being facetious, genuinely curious.

Saved my marriage.
I can’t tell if this guy is great at being sarcastic and I’m too dense to appreciate it, or if he’s genuinely clueless and thinks his complex relationship problems can be saved by a messaging app.

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