- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- android@lemdro.id
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- android@lemdro.id
• A new Android app called Beeper Mini allows users to send iMessages as blue bubbles from non-Apple devices.
• Beeper Mini bypasses traditional iMessage hacks by directly sending iMessages from Android devices.
• The app has been praised for its smooth functionality, sending messages seamlessly between Android and iPhone users.
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Exactly. I don’t understand the interest and effort put in these makeshift solutions to integrate into a closed ecosystem managed by a company with so little interest in building interoperable solutions.
They’re a cancer to the computing industry that is metastasizing, let’s not help them at that.
Fuck apple and their walled garden.
I don’t disagree with you, but open source has a long history of this sort of hostile forced-interoperability. Look at stuff like uBlock, there’s a real case to be made that it shouldn’t need to exist, and yet someone built it. Hostile “patching” of proprietary systems is not ideal, but fix barriers help in the short term.
They are going with USB C and RCS messages in the next iphone though. This is good news. The android imessage app is very late, considering.
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Hate to say it but who gives a fuck?
Just use signal.
The hardest thing about switching communication apps is that you have to convince everyone you talk with to switch as well. I’m stuck in WhatsApp because that’s what my friends and family all use.
Right? I feel it’s really snobby and disingenuous to just snap back and say “just ditch that and use so and so messaging app”, as if messaging platforms didn’t require your direct peers to also use them. As long as messaging platforms operate as walled gardens, we have little say on what apps we use. We’re at the mercy of the general populace and that’s all there is to it, at least until the DMA changes things. I really tried to make people jump ship from WhatsApp to telegram during what seemed like a mass exodus from even businesses (yeah bad choice but I didn’t know back then), ended up back on WhatsApp some 3 months later with my tail between my legs, nobody stayed on telegram even though a ton of people downloaded it and jumped in. Now imagine trying to get them all to use a privacy-focused app that gives them a hard time using it in multiple devices. Convenience is the reason why Meta, Apple, Google, MSFT, etc. are on top. You can’t expect the general populace to sacrifice it for privacy, not after continuously giving up freedom and privacy for the sake of convenience for decades in the digital space.
People who say that are essentially saying “stop using the messaging app that allows you to talk to everyone regardless of platform and use a proprietary walled garden where you can only talk with those people also using that same app.”
At least the iPhone messages app lets you send SMS and iMessage, switching seamlessly.
I just said fuck it one day, deleted WhatsApp and explained to family and friends why I did it. Slowly but surely, almost everyone switched.
But I do realize this will not work for everybody. Your contacts have the same right to use their phone as they see fit as you do, after all. And this kind of freedom is something super important, too.
Gotta find the compromise that works for both parties. If there is one to find, that is.
There’s been some social discrimination occurring around people who don’t have blue messages being excluded, or being seen as poor. Not a great use base but the fact I am even aware of blue Vs green messages means some people do.
This is the only semi-legitimate reason I can get behind. For kids in grade-school.
If anybody outside of grade-school brings this up, I would laugh and ignore.
Also the image and video quality problem.
I have to convince every one of my friends to switch because they all use SMS/iMessage. Outside of the US, you would have to convince every one of your friends to switch from WhatsApp.
iPhone users be like “but I paid $1200 for this blue bubble!”
1200 for a shitty subpar phone
And a software design 15 years old. None of the added stuff like notification drawer and updates over air is by Apple.
I’ll just continue to use my old strategy of not voluntarily communicating with people who care about what color my text bubble is.
At this stage in the game, isn’t that basically the only difference?
I’ve never understood how this became an issue of shaming and exclusion.
Literally just star bellied sneetches.
It’s not the only difference. It indicates the difference in experience parties receive. Higher quality pictures & video, E2E encryption are some of the differences. I’m not shamed for being on android but I can’t have the same quality conversations without convincing lots of people to use something like signal (which I do use with those I have convinced).
LOL. Thanks for the sneetches comparison!
Fucking insane a 16 year old kid figured it out.
It’s always wild to me thinking how good kids are with tech these days to be able to crack something like this (assuming it’s true).
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it always seems to me that kids are living in a world where they need to as present in their digital realities as much, if not more than, their actual ones. At work it seems like they are trying to be in two places at once sometimes.
It’s what naturally happens when smart people have free time. And teenagers have a lot of that.
Most kids are clueless with tech to be honest. Yes they know how to use it, but they have no idea how it works behind the scenes. This has pretty scary consequences on how they are easily manipulated or scammed.
Some of them are very smart, sure, but on average I’d say they are less tech savvy than Gen X and millennials who grew up at a time you couldn’t use computers without some kind of knowledge of how it works (and smartphones didn’t exist).
Right, I have to teach shortcuts to our young intern the exact same way as i had to do with my grandma. All the ui’s are so smooth now that even a context menu is too much.
im good thanks
I don’t get why Americans are so obsessed with iMessage. There’s like a million chat apps out there.
Most Americans aren’t obsessed at all. They just want to use whatever is easiest, and iMessage is preinstalled and mostly works fine with pretty much everyone. The bias toward default is strong.
Bingo. People just use what’s on the phone at the start.
It’s the status symbolism of the green bubble vs blue bubble. Here in America we try to show off how rich we are by driving fancy cars, live in giant ridiculous houses, and buying all the latest most expensive tech the day it’s released.
You can see me in a fancy car or in front of my mansion, but how do you know i spent way too much money on the phone i text you from? If all texts arrived on your phone in the same color you wouldn’t be able to immediately identify which kind of phone i sent the text from.
Now here’s the magic: if i send your iphone (bc let’s be real, if you don’t have an iphone you aren’t someone worth talking to) a text, you know it came from an iPhone because the text bubble is blue. If you ever received a text and it was this hideous radioactive snot/puke green… Just delete. Just don’t even bother. I can’t believe I’m even typing these letters, it feels so gross… But that green bubble means you received a text from someone with an…Android. 🤮
So there ya go! 😀
But what if you don’t use texts, is there any way Apple could add that knowledge of superiority to other ways of messaging by default?
Sent from an iPhone.
Wish i could read your comment, it’s all grainy like potato. Gotta be this shite Android I’m on ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Your comment made me lol irl though, thank you 🙏
It’s because texting has been very cheap there for a long time. It’s now very cheap where I am too, but in high school everyone was using stuff like MSN Messenger where possible. At that time teens in the US were texting. It became cheap where I am by the time WhatsApp came out, so we have a mix of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and texting
Is this available on iOS?
Lol
I started using it mainly to not have pictures and videos sent get all degraded, it does work.
Anyhow all my friends were like OMG, YOU GOT AN IPHONE because my messages started coming through blue and I was like, why does that fucking matter?
This is like when I started drinking my coffee black and suddenly I knew the secret handshake at every coffee place I’d order at. Baristas would be like, “the way it should be” and wink and shit. Um. I guess I’m cool now or something
As nice as it would be to have all my messaging in one app rather than across a half dozen, I just can’t picture paying a monthly fee to do it.
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Might be good for business owners, having a single inbox.
I’m not sure what the business model is here (I have no interest in iMessage) but unlike the previous ones this solution doesn’t require a Mac mini farm. Messages are sent directly from the Android device.
So it doesn’t require a monthly fee to be profitable.
Stop trying to make this a thing
Can some American please explain this European why this is such a big deal?
Mostly because the iPhone’s dominance has led to iMessage being a very popular service over here. But Android users on the receiving end of messages from that service get images and videos in much lower quality, among many other quality losses.
I mean it’s kinda a chicken and egg problem but I’d argue that you’ve got it the wrong way around. I think the iPhone is so dominant only because of iMessage. It’s a status symbol to have blue bubbles, and there are people seriously not dating Android users for example.
The iPhone got popular for different reasons but the only reason why it’s so dominant in the states is that people started viewing blue bubbles as something desirable. And that is by design! Apple has deliberately made texting between iPhones and Android phones shit by not updating to newer official texting standards. They stuck with an SMS/MMS protocol from the 90s and early 00s, just so that people keep buying iPhones.
Honestly, if I met someone on a dating app, and she ghosted me early on for “having green text bubbles,” I’d consider that a bullet dodged.
oh, I completely agree. but it’s the world we live in.
There are lots of factors going into the dominance of the iPhone in the US. Platform lock-in, the ecosystem, the lack of an alternative with similar levels of polish for several of the early years, the mystique, the design, the build quality, Android’s formerly fractured lineup, the rise of the iPad, app development trends that for a while preferred iPhone first; and, yes, iMessage.
All of those have their own complicated and oroboros-like causes and effects, with some being force multipliers, meaning that pointing at any one thing as the cause for any other is a little bit of a fool’s errand, so I’ll just say they’re definitely related.
Which I guess is the chicken and the egg problem.
It’s not, it’s a superficial opinion on color and functionality that apple and Google want you to think is a big deal but in reality it’s two companies using two different protocols and they want you to pick up their product over the over. Even Americans don’t know why it’s a big deal, they see green in iMessage and freak out.
Sounds like you’re an iPhone user, or at least someone who doesn’t have kids with Android phones and doesn’t participate in group activities where the people primarily use iPhones.
I won’t bother explaining it all, but the real issues are group chats that contain both iPhones and Androids, and image/video quality, reactions, etc. The issues are bad enough that kids especially get left out of group chats over it, and bullying incidents are widely reported (and I’ve seen it first hand)
As an android user with a wife and kids that have iPhone, it’s obnoxious that any video my wife and kids attach to a group message gets auto-reduced to sub-potato quality. We send them with Facebook messenger now but I can see where other groups might simply exclude the people with Androids to avoid the need to use alternate apps. Apple k ows what it’s doing.
So if the app will be open source like they say, can’t we just build it ourselves and not pay $2/mo?
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There shouldn’t be any back end beeper servers with this implementation if they really do what they say and interface directly with Apple servers.
It’s a bridge for notifications. Since Apple’s APN notification servers require a persistent connection to work, meaning that the application must be running continuously to receive notifications, the Beeper servers push those notifications (messages) to your phone.
This means that the application does not need to be running continuously to receive messages.
Exactly. They host the Apple equivalent to GMS, which is called APN (or is it ANP? Apple Notification Protocol? I forget, but the Bubbler Mini devs explain it well)
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Here’s a simple picture with minimal reading required.
This is very different to the technology used in the free/wait-list Beeper Cloud app and all the other previous attempts at an iMessage for Android app.
To summarize:
All messages are sent directly between your device and Apple’s servers. You do not even need an AppleID. There is a cloud server involved but it’s only job is to send push notifications to Android so they app knows when to download new messages (securely with iMessage encryption) from Apple’s servers.
No message contents are sent through the cloud server, it just notifies your device when there are new messages. This is necessary because Apple servers obviously do not support Android push notifications.
Running BlueBubbles at the moment, eagerly awaiting someone to build a self hosted implementation of this so I can stop relying on my macos VM.
This implementation I think also allows you to use the phone number of your android device, which is a feature that not even the BlueBubbles method has been able to do.
Running BlueBubbles at the moment, eagerly awaiting someone to build a self hosted implementation of this so I can stop relying on my macos VM.
Beeper Mini does not require a Mac VM or any Apple products. There’s no cloud proxy to self host. It registers your phone number directly with Apple’s servers, you don’t even need an AppleID at all, just like on an iPhone.
It’s indistinguishable from an iPhone on Apple’s end and your iMessage encryption keys never leave your phone
Yeah I know I was referring to the notifications, because my understanding is that you need a separate server to forward notifications to your device from the APN…? Idk maybe the firebase free tier can handle this without the need for a desktop app running somewhere.
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Kind of, but it’s more complicated. I’m not sure if the app itself will be open source, but currently, the method they use is. Either way, the hardest part is already done, but you still need a client (maybe; they might open-source it) and a notification server. I’m planning to attempt to build a Matrix bridge if I have enough time and it’s not beyond my skills, but if you don’t want the messages to be decrypted by the server, making the notification server and maybe client would be really difficult.
I’m pretty sure the point of this is that the official iMessage servers are the notification server.
Sort of.
All messages/etc are sent using iMessage encryption directly between your phone and Apple’s iMessage servers.
But there is no Android push notifications from Apple’s servers.
So in order to be notified about new messages in a timely manner without killing your battery/data plan a cloud server is required to trigger your phone that a message has arrived so your phone can then request the message from Apple’s servers.
This is actually a really common implementation, many apps use Firebase or similar to handle push notifications that are only used to trigger a “pull” of a larger chunk of data.
The push notifications being used here don’t contain any private data, they just tell your device when to collect that private data securely.
Ah, I see what you mean. That’s pretty neat architecture.
Don’t see why not. Whats the timline on this?
Its already available for download and use, but I can’t find the source anywhere other than a Python proof of concept project that beeper purchased the rights to to make this app.
Open source doesn’t mean it can be very conveniently free. Besides backend, building can be difficult, as you see in paid libre apps like Ardour
no, thx
The fact that people are using iMessage for group chats is which a weird concept to me.
That’s what discord, WhatsApp and Facebook messenger are for.
If anyone adds my primary text message service number to a group chat they are being blocked. Gross.
Facebook Messenger? Dawg… That shit will cripple your phone
can you elaborate?
https://www.androidpolice.com/messenger-wasting-battery-background-tests/
https://www.lifewire.com/how-facebook-messenger-apps-drains-battery-3880043
The app is constantly doing shit in the background (god knows what. You give permission to access your shit when you install it) to the point where there is significant noticeable battery drain. No thanks.
Now, maybe they’ve fixed that issue since, but we know that the “fix” would be focused on hiding it better rather than stopping the activity.
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It’s primarily not an active choice. For most iPhone users, it’s just what’s installed, so it’s what they use. The idea that there might be other options doesn’t really occur to them; iMessage came out before any of the other options really became popular, it worked well enough, and it was preinstalled, so that’s what people learned to use.
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I don’t know what sort of people you are getting into group chats with, but for me it’s not exactly people I can just decide to block on a whim. Family groups, employer groups, friends I was already friends with and would lose contact with if I blocked. I’m not going to torpedo my job and all of those relationships by making a big deal over what messaging service we use, even if their use of iMessage makes my experience worse.
I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.
As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.
Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.
Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.
What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.
I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.
We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.
This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA
Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.
I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.
That still means losing out on a lot of general life stuff. Just, overall.
As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.
I guess I don’t see how that’s made any different by the group chat being in a different app. I can turn notifications off or make them silent in either case.
Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.
Right. But everyone who has a phone has a phone number for texting.
Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.
Yep, that’s definitely an advantage. I’m not trying to sell you on SMS or iMessage, I’m just trying to explain why it’s popular over here.
What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.
Uh…wait. I don’t see how that’s different from Facebook or WhatsApp. Especially since iMessage does send messages to users on other devices, it’s just a worse experience for the recipient. Meta is still a platform, it’s just one you access by way of a username connected to your web activity instead of one you access by way of purchasing a specific device.
I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.
I’m glad people are so aware over there, but over here it’s very uncommon for people to even be conscious of what phones their friends use. So an app that works well enough, as far as they can tell, is going to be the accepted default.
We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.
Because marketing.
This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA
No, it’s caused intentionally by Apple. They spent billions of dollars cultivating that perception in America, and it’s paid off for them.
Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.
Yeah, and I wish the default here was pretty much anything else too. Like I said, I’m not trying to convince you. Just explaining the situation.
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Anecdotally, in my experience everyone in the UK just uses WhatsApp for group chats
