The puns wrote themselves.Sunbird’s iMessage clientcomes crashing to the ground.Nothing’s partnership with Sunbirdflew too close to the sun. You get the idea. Those massive security concerns, combined with Apple’s confirmation thatRCS is coming to the iPhonesometime in 2024 — bringing improved interoperability between iOS and Android with it — seemed like a sure way to make the demand for an iMessage client on Android inevitably die down.
But a lot of questions remain over RCS integration, and at best, it’s likely nine months away. That’s a long time to leave interoperable messaging effectively broken in places where Apple reigns supreme, butBeeper is here with a fix. The company is launching an entirely new app built with iMessage support in mind, along with the renaming of its legacy eponymous app. Unlike the competition, Beeper seems to have done its homework, hopefully ensuring a way for blue bubbles to exist on Android for the foreseeable future.
This new app is called Beeper Mini, joining thenewly-renamed Beeper Cloudas a way to send texts across iMessage from Android devices. Unlike the traditional Beeper experience, however, the company has effectively reversed engineered Apple’s message protocol, thanks to the assistance of a security researcher going by jjtech. The result is the complete removal of Mac Minis from the operation; when you use Beeper Mini to send a message, it works just as if your device was an iPhone. Blue bubbles, read receipts, Apple’s own end-to-end encryption protocol — it’s all just as if you transferred to a whole new OS.
The best “iMessage on Android” experience yet
I’ve been using Beeper Mini for nearly a week (an upcoming review prevented me from testing it earlier, but rest assured I was able to secure plenty of time testing out the app). I’ve been a dedicated Beeper fan for a few months now, and found myself mostly right at home with Beeper Mini. This is a lighter, leaner application than anything the fully fledged variant that allows for importing all of your various chat apps, and I expect plenty of users to like that. At first glance, it actually looks more like Google Messages than anything else — a big departure from what Beeper Cloud looks like on mobile.
Setup is easy, even if you don’t have Beeper’s co-founder Eric Migicovsky walking you through it over Zoom (seriously, I accidentally skipped ahead because the process was so simple). Sign in with your Google account, sync your phone number with the service, and that’s it. Your phone number is registered with iMessage, and you can text any other number active on Apple’s service (though, at launch, you’ll need to keep using other apps for SMS and RCS).
Note what Ididn’tdo during setup: sign into my Apple account. Although you can pair your Beeper account with your Apple ID, it’s completely optional. If you’d feel safer keeping your account data separate — or you don’t have one to use in the first place — you won’t need it here.
Beeper’s setup process.
Beeper has a roadmap of what’s already built into its new iMessage client and what’s coming in the future, and speaking as someone who’s used iMessage in the past, nearly everything you’d hope for is either here or on the way. Direct and group messages, high-res media, read receipts and typing indicators, emoji reactions, and in-thread replies are all live on day one. More impressively, at least in my eyes, is the ability to edit and unsend messages and record and send voice memos — again, both live today.
Live location sharing and Facetime audio and video calls are planned in the future, though with no specific dates set for when these might arrive. I asked Migicovsky specifically about message effects — lasers and fireworks and all sorts of fun on-screen animations — and he confirmed they’re coming too. Really, the only thing unlikely to make the jump over are iMessage games. That’ll bum out some users, I’m sure, but there’s no shortage of ways to play titles like Connect 4 on mobile.
Security is everything
Unsurprisingly, security is a massive focus for Beeper Mini, and although we’ll have to wait for people far smarter than I to dig into everything provided today, from the outset, it looks like Beeper did its homework. The company cites end-to-end encryption, but unlike Sunbird and Nothing, is doing its best to back up its claims.
In short, Beeper Mini is effectively using the same push notification protocols as Apple to send and receive iMessage, connecting to its services over TCP. The only piece missing from Android is the ability to check for incoming messages in the background — as Beeper’s blog explains, this is handled natively by iOS. To that end, the company built itsownpush notification system to check Apple’s servers for new messages when the app isn’t running. At first glance, this could sound like a potential security risk, but because these credentials aren’t the same as what’s needed to decrypt and encrypt incoming and outgoing messages, there’s no issue.
Basically, Beeper can see you have a new message to trigger the chain of events necessary for you to see the text. But otherwise, everything else is handled how you’d expect an iPhone to send and receive texts. And frankly, that’s pretty impressive.
Personally,I’d suggest you read through Beeper’s various blogscovering both how the app worksandthe security measures put in place — me recapping these documents won’t do them justice. Although I’m sure a contingency of potential users will simply never feel safe using an unofficial iMessage application, Beeper Mini’s configuration is, by far, the most open example we’ve seen yet. You can even run a proof-of-conceptPython script found on Githubif that’s your jam (and, speaking of Github, Beeper Mini is open source — just like its predecessor app).
A sunny present, a cloudy future
Although I enjoyed my demo — and, indeed, testing out the app over the last few days — I haven’t been unable to escape my most pressing question: how is Apple going to respond to this? It’s one thing to rig up a server farm of Mac Minis for those willing to potentially sacrifice their security and privacy can join iMessage; it’s another to effectively fool Apple into registering a ton of Android devices as iPhones.
Migicovsky didn’t give me a direct, specific answer about what the future holds for Beeper Mini, but he seemed confident that his company actually benefits Apple. SMS, he tells me, is far less secure than sending an iPhone user a message through Beeper Mini, and the company has stated publicly that it’ll need to work with the GSMA to get RCS encrypted before it rolls out the feature to its users. With Beeper actually working to encrypt messages between iOS and Android, why would Apple evenneedto take action against the app?
I’m not sure I’m quite as optimistic — this is, after all, the same company thatspent 2009 fighting with Palmover the Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes. Sure, it’s been nearly fifteen years, but I’m not sure Apple’s outlook on the competition has changed much in that timeframe. Beeper’s FAQ, for what it’s worth, points to a portion of the DMCA that specifically protects reverse engineering, but I’ll be curious if Beeper Mini’s subscription fee — $2 per month — causes a couple of bumps in the road.
That’s a question for another day, though. For now,Beeper Mini is live on the Play Store, complete with a week-long free trial if you want to test out the service for yourself. Beeper plans to build support for other various chat apps into this new platform throughout the next year, including SMS and RCS. It’s coming to desktop and, in a fun twist, iOS, at a later date. And, as mentioned up to, Beeper Cloud will continue to run — you can even use the two services in tandem for the ultimate messaging experience.
