Update 21/12/2023 at 12:18pm ET: Beeper just announced it will give up on its iMessage on Android dream. In a blog post, Beeper’s CEO wrote that the company “can’t win” and that it was “unsustainable” for it to keep trying to fix Beeper Mini whenever Apple breaks it. The company is putting its focus elsewhere, and if Apple breaks Beeper Mini again, so be it.
Read more here.
While commendable, Beeper Mini’s efforts to bring iMessage to Android have also become increasingly insane. The company’s latest plot involves asking users to acquire and jailbreak old iPhones or rent jailbroken iPhones from Beeper itself.
MacRumors spotted this arguably unhinged plan in a Beeper blog post published and quickly removed on Wednesday, but not before the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserved it. The blog post outlines how Beeper solved the phone number registration problem with the Beeper Mini app, but the solution requires an old iPhone, Mac computer, or a friend with a Mac.
In case you haven’t followed the Beeper saga so far, here’s a quick summary. Beeper launched the Beeper Mini app on Android earlier this month, allowing Android users to register their phone number with iMessage and start sending and receiving iMessage. Apple quickly broke the service, but Beeper was able to restore it without phone number registration — instead, people needed to use an Apple ID.
But, Apple “deliberately” blocked messages to some Beeper Mini users, claimed Beeper, and so it dropped a new solution earlier this week: use a Mac. In short, that works because when users sign into iMessage, the service checks for ‘registration data’ from a real Apple device. Up until this point, Beeper used its own fleet of Mac servers to generate this data. However, that made Beeper Mini users an easy target for Apple since they were all using the same registration data.
Beeper’s jailbroken iPhone plan
Hence, the ‘use a Mac’ solution. I can go into more details, but I’ve already broken down this solution here. As for Beeper’s since-removed jailbreak solution, it uses the same underlying principles of leveraging a real Apple device to generate registration data for Beeper Mini users.
Excerpt from the removed Beeper blog post detailing the use of jailbroken iPhones to fix Beeper Mini.
Per the removed Beeper blog post, users with an old iPhone (or the means to acquire one) and either a Mac or Linux computer can jailbreak it an install a Beeper tool to generate registration data, then enter that on the Beeper Mini app. Once that’s completed, the phone number registration will work again, but users need to leave the iPhone turned on, plugged in, and connected to Wi-Fi. The blog post also detailed Beeper’s plan to provide old iPhones pre-loaded with that same tool. Users could rent an iPhone for a few dollars per month, or buy it for around $30-$50 USD (about $39.91 to $66.52 CAD). Beeper planned to make that service available in 2024 if there was “enough interest.”
And that’s all just to enable phone number registration in Beeper Mini again. If you don’t care about that part, you can still use the company’s previously detailed Mac solution with an Apple ID to send iMessages.
Can y’all just download another chat app already?
If that all sounds needlessly complex, well, that’s because it is. The primary appeal of Beeper Mini was that it easily brought iMessage to Android. Complex solutions involving the use of old Apple devices to bring iMessage to Android have existed for years, but Beeper Mini was impressive in that all people had to do was enter their phone number, and they could start chatting.
Anyone who wants to iMessage badly enough that they’d buy an iPhone probably already bought one. I can’t imagine anyone would be willing to jump through this many hoops just for some blue bubbles.
And as I’ve written repeatedly now, this whole blue bubble thing has been blown entirely out of proportion, to the point that U.S. senators are looking into whether Apple’s being anti-competitive by blocking Beeper. The reality is Apple made the default messaging experience on its phone shitty if you message someone who doesn’t use an iPhone. Apple’s RCS adoption might improve the experience, but if that’s not enough for you (or if you don’t want to wait), it’s time to use one of the several free chat apps that offer an equal or better experience to iMessage and are available across multiple platforms.
Source: Beeper blog (Internet Archive) Via: MacRumors
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