Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users

i had no idea that having green chat bubbles upset people so much.

It’s not just about the color of the bubbles. I have Wi-Fi at work but poor cell signal. Because I have an iPhone and my husband has an android, we have to use another chat client to text while I’m at work. No cell signal means no texting android phones for me, because I can only text people with iMessage over Wi-Fi.

Plus, remember: kids have phones. They do get bullied over chat bubble colors, just like I got bullied for wearing clothes from Walmart in school. It doesn’t have to be this way, it’s Apple’s fault for making iMessage a walled garden.

Before anyone tries, Beeper mini on the play store won't function without official Google play services. I emailed support to ask if there was another way I could pay for the subscription, succinctly, "no plans for that".

Bummer.

Assuming that it’s actually reverse engineered, this is great news. If not, there’s a massive lawsuit brewing.

Why is this even a need to be solved? are people that stupidly superficial about the color of y fucking message bubble? (im not american but where im from literally nobody wiorth their salt gives a hoot)

Seems like Beeper will see the cleartext of the replies, though, since they send the notifications via BPNs, right?

[edit: thanks for the replies. I see now the footnote on their BPNs diagram: “Push notification does not contain message contents” so it seems like the answer is “no they will not”]

It still needs Apple's servers, which tells me they will try and find a way to shut it down. Now that Apple is going to implement RCS, I care a lot less about this.

I really want to sign up for Beeper, but the fact I have to give them my phone number to sign up for a waitlist seemed like a red flag. How is their security profile?

Are their messages from their app going to show blue to iMessage users or something? Cuz I don't see why you'd need to reverse engineer that otherwise. Even then... How hard is it to spoof a Mac address or other hardware identifier that says the message came from an iPhone?

The fact this is even an issue is just ridiculous to begin with. If you give that much of a shit: Use a different god damn messenger that treats everyone the same.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

What may hold it at bay is the Digital Markets App (DMA), a law in Europe that says big tech companies will have to have an interoperable interface for their chat networks.

In addition, Beeper uses certificate pinning, which makes network traffic analysis more difficult to perform in order to verify its claims.

To work around this limitation, the team built BPNs to connect to Apple’s servers on the user’s behalf when the app isn’t running.

When the Android phone’s battery died, however, the texts reverted to green bubbles and did not make it to Beeper’s app — they went to Google Messages instead.

The company is also hoping to gain trust by building in public, with 50-plus projects that it’s published to GitHub with the open source code that goes into the app.

Founded in 2020, Beeper comes from former Y Combinator partner Eric Migicovsky and CTO Brad Murray, previously of wholesale marketplace startup Faire and Fitbit.

The original article contains 1,306 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

We literally shut down another app doing this last week because it was so sketchy

In exchange for security loss, is it really worth it?

Edit: the downvotes are very expected. You people need to lean about why this is important

https://www.androidauthority.com/beeper-app-opinion-3345142/

First, the elephant in the room needs to be addressed: security. In Beeper’s start-up guide, the first thing you see is a huge alert box: “Beeper may be less secure than using encrypted chat apps by themselves.” Fundamentally, there’s no way to fix this. To use any of the chat apps, you need to link Beeper to that service using your credentials, which is inherently more insecure than logging into the app directly. Beeper is quick to defend itself by pointing out its robust privacy policy, its ethical business practices with a user-centered focus, and its use of end-to-end encryption (E2EE). However, that doesn’t protect your credentials from hackers that could gain access to Beeper and send your grandma a message through WhatsApp pretending to be you and asking to wire $1,000 to an account in China.

More in depth: https://www.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/13hhx9e/transient_key_retention_a_suggestion_to_solve/?rdt=61709