Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users::The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. A startup called Beeper, which had been working on a multi-platform messaging
i had no idea that having green chat bubbles upset people so much.
The issue isn’t so much the message color. It’s the ability to send videos that aren’t potato quality and other media.
Which should go away anyway once Apple bakes in RCS support
Which they will surely do with no caveats whatsoever.
They’re doing the GSMA standard and nothing else. I think they refuse to play ball with any standard Google controls either directly or indirectly.
I hate apple as much as the next guy, but I respect them for that
It’s just smart business. Why give up any level of control of anything to a direct competitor when you don’t have to?
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oh, can’t android users receive high-quality videos and photos? after 16 years of smartphones, you’d think they’d have that figured out…
Yeah the whole reason Apple won’t allow it is because they expect you to conclude exactly this.
👆 your average apple user, oblivious to the world around them
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android is 70% of the world, so stop acting like only USA exist
I wasn’t the one who brought up the world or USA, or who even made this a competition
Reading comprehension doesn’t appear to be your strong suit.
Don’t blame me for your sense of self importance, lol
It’s not the android side that’s failing, it’s Apples refusal to implement anything other than SMS for cross ecosystem compatibility.
It’s also why third party messaging apps like Whatsapp are thriving, much to the consternation of every person on the network. I used to be able to pick up the phone and call or message anyone. Now I need to check compatibility first. Wtf apple.
@Mountaineer @gregorum Apple is going to implement RCS, the EU put pressure on them.
However I am surprised that Beeper was able to do this in software. With everyone else using an Apple device as a proxy, I figured the protocol required a magic handshake from the TPM chip in an Apple device. That would be easy to do.
There’s some gotchas in Apples statement:
They have promised to implement “RCS Universal Profile”
This means the bare minimum, not the advanced features implemented by Google and Samsung etc.
An example of a missing feature from Universal Profile is end to end encryption.They also said: “This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.”
The implication of this is that it won’t be in the iMessage app, it will be in a separate but official app, siloing your Android friends from your iPhone friends.When this comes out, every European is going to shrug and keep using Whatsapp.
@Mountaineer Encryption needs to be added to the standard, and then Apple will be expected to implement it. Hopefully the EU knocks some heads together and makes this happen.
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and has ads, which is two good reasons not to use it. Europeans are just as “stuck with a bad standard” as Americans are here.
I use RCS quite a bit and like it. Although nothing on a phone should be regarded as truly secure.
The implication of this is that it won’t be in the iMessage app, it will be in a separate but official app, siloing your Android friends from your iPhone friends.
Lol wut
SMS and iMessage both work via the same Messages app. All they’ll do is add RCS functionality to the Messages app, and iPhone users will continue using the same app they’ve always used.
what? that’s not the implication at all. it’ll work just like SMS does now. same app, just RCS instead of SMS
it’ll work just like SMS does now
I agree with this part of your statement 100%.
It will work POORLY.Whether it’s in the same app or simply a different colour like SMS is currently, it’ll be a half assed implementation, designed to segregate your iphone and android friends.
Got an existing iphone group chat? Bet you can’t add an RCS participant to it.
Create a new RCS group chat so you can include everyone? Bet it’s missing features that you’d get in imessage.
Receive a high resolution video from a friend via imessage? Forward that to another friend via RCS and they’ll receive 5 blurry pixels.And throughout all of this, apple will blame the RCS protocol and say “We’re actively working with GSMA to improve RCS”.
No one trusts apple for the very simple reason that they have a habit of saying the quiet part out loud: Tim Cook Says ‘Buy Your Mom An iPhone’
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@BearOfaTime I have RCS and use it. It works fine. I have not noticed significant reliability problems, using Google’s servers. If there are problems it’s likely the carrier’s garbage implementation.
There is no standard here in the USA except SMS.
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You need to think of iMessage as Google messages, Whatsapp, telegram, signal, etc. Except this is only installed on iPhones and they want everyone to know it. It’s arrogant and stupid. The app could just be released for Android and it would be no different than the others I mentioned.
It’s gatekeeping.
That is not the issue. At all. Lol
Android to Android, sure.
But Apple and Google refuse to play nicely with each other, so Android to Iphone or Iphone to Android both suck.
It’s not a lack of capability, it’s the refusal to implement it to try and force users to pick a side.
But Apple and Google refuse to play nicely with each other, so Android to Iphone or Iphone to Android both suck.
Yeah this is a gross mischaracterization of the situation.
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Google is more than happy to “play nicely” with Apple. They’re the ones who convinced Apple to adopt RCS. Apple is the one holding out.
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They totally do “play nicely” on literally every messenger app in existence except iMessage, which is the only SMS app you’re allowed to use on iOS. This is not any sort of hardware or software limitation, this is purely greed from Apple to control their users and create a walled garden, to the detriment of their own customers.
This entire shitty situation is 100% on Apple and their users.
To be fair, Google’s messaging plans and implementations have been all over the place for a decade. Apple still should have been more proactive. They promised iMessage would come to Android until they realized how much of a moat it became for their business.
Apple has no obligation to use any of Google’s or Google’s preferred communication standards. They can open up the iMessage protocol or they can use literally any other open standards (like Signal’s).
I don’t really care which of them is responsible for it not working decently, that’s why I didn’t point the finger at one in particular.
Point is, it’s between these two companies to agree on a solution that works for both of them and actually implement it. Yet after all this time, they still haven’t to the detriment of consumers globally.
I’ll believe the IOS RCS implementation when it’s actually released. Promises from corporations are worthless.
that’s why I didn’t point the finger at one in particular.
No you pointed the finger at both of them, which is why I corrected you.
Point is, it’s between these two companies to agree on a solution that works for both of them and actually implement it.
Point is you can’t have an agreement when the other party won’t even entertain a conversation, nor do they want to come to an agreement.
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Google chat, or whatever they call it now, fixed that.
If you’re talking about RCS, androids newer native messaging system, no apple has not implemented that yet.
There has always been dozens of messaging apps users can use, including Google Chat, but they are all seprate apps that both you and the recipient have to choose to install and use. That’s the main problem.
The goal is to have the native messaging apps on both platforms be able to speak to each other with the same quality right out of the box, just as they can within the same platform right now (apple to apple, and android to android).
you can when it’s android to android. as soon as an iphone is in play, the iphone immediately decreases the quality, even though the MMS standard allows for attachments up to 100MB in size
Android uses RCS now, a higher quality and more feature rich standard than SMS. However… Apple hasn’t added it to iOS, so it doesn’t work to send to iPhones and they receive bog-standard SMS from Android devices.
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You’re joking, right?
i’m laughing, if that’s what you mean.
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I’ve seen a lot of people complain online about getting dropped by a tinder date/etc because they swapped numbers and the other person realized they didn’t have an iPhone from the green text. Probably best not to date someone who would drop you over that, but there’s a weird elitism over blue/green texts.
Attempting to get a date in the current US scene was hard enough without this petty bullshit. While it was certainly disheartening to see another one slip away, knowing I was dodging a bullet was worth the time. I did enjoy (only once) getting “ugh green bubbles? Srs?” And sliding back “yeah sorry I have a Fold#, iPhones r for brokies” and blocking the contact
(People are free to own iPhone and you’re free to make your own descicions or debate the merits of android/iphone, I am more just intolerant of the fan elitism - not iPhone owners in general, hope you have a nice day)
Weird, is that an excursively US American thing? I am European and have never experienced “phone racism”.
It has started in Sweden with younger generations that wants to replicate everything from the US.
Don’t you guys use WhatsApp though as the base messaging app?
Swedes don’t use whatsapp. Mostly Facebook messenger or sms/imessage.
I’ve never heard of that, that’s kinda hilarious and really helps them dodge a bullet.
Apple has spent a significant amount of effort over creating a sense of elitism for using its products but that’s largely unique to the western world. Most of the world uses android devices by far.
Western World
Did you mean mostly just the US?
Android has almost 83% market share in the EU.
An interesting fact while researching is that Iphone has over a 99% market share in North Korea. I assumed that the data might be thrown off by one individual maybe owning like ten thousand Iphones… but surprisingly NK is more connected then I thought with like 7M registered cellular devices
Nah bro, if they bought an iPhone that means I can’t trust them with money. Screw that noise
As much as I dislike apple, I don’t really hold it against people if they choose to use iPhones. Iphones are overpriced, but they’re decent phones and I can’t really blame someone for not wanting to learn a different mobile OS or lose out on all the apps they’ve paid for. Also a lot of android OEMs make terrible design decisions with their software modifications/bloatware, and it can be really hard for someone non-tech savvy to know how to buy a good android phone. Iphones are comparably simple to shop for, you only have a few options and they’re all going to be decent (if not necessarily a good value).
Iphone elitism really bothers me though, it feels like it’s taking a lack of knowledge/experience and turning it into something to feel smug about.
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As someone who started with Android, went to iOS, back to Android, and stayed with iOS I feel like you’re not trying to understand why some people choose an iPhone. I personally chose it because of the incredible battery life.
Skip the rest of this if you don’t want to hear a rambling mess of my phone history. There is a bit at the end regarding prices and why I own what I own now.
I had an HTC Desire, Samsung Galaxy S2, HTC One M7, Sony Xperia Z1, iPhone 7, Nexus 6P, iPhone X, iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 15.
I’ve rooted a bunch of the early Android phones, loved having removable batteries and having expandable storage. As the platform evolved and started following Apple’s lead on design decisions (no removable batteries, no expandable storage, etc.) I was wondering why I was still with Android. After having a the Xperia I noticed that the battery didn’t last as long as it used to and if I remember right (possibly not, a bit tipsy) the Xperia was advertised as having a very long battery but it didn’t last very long past a year or so (was getting less than a full day and having to charge when I was driving home). I also had how slow Sony was to get OS upgrades it I decided to try a new phone. At the time I cared more about the battery and the iPhone 7 was my next try. It was amazing, I didn’t actually enable iMessage because I hated the bubble bs that I heard about. Eventually the 6p was announced and I missed the freedom of android and decided to give it a try. This was the generation where Android started cracking down on rooting and the battery life was awful. I eventually went full in on iOS after that and here we are. I miss what Android was, I do sometimes miss the tinkering but I also don’t hate how things normally just work.
Now in regards to cost, the name brands for Android phones are around the same price. They usually promise 2-3 years of updates while currently Apple had a history of supporting phones for 4-5 years.
I understand you can get lower range phones for cheaper but I guess I’m not into the phone scene like I used to because I guess I assume the lower range phones aren’t getting the updates that the flagships are and I don’t want to have to either compromise security or shell out more money to get another phone. So for me, I’m typically buying around a $1000 phone but after 3 years I can trade in my phone for a decent amount of money off the new one, or sell it for even more and pay a mid range Android prices for a new iPhone. Or if I’m not feeling the upgrades are worth it I’ll just stick with my phone for the 5 years+ (only went to iPhone 15 to get USB-C and remove lightning from my place).
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I think they’re hated because they’re synonymous with broken group chats and low res photos. Hopefully EU forcing rss adoption fixes these instead of having to download an app to ‘fit in’.
why should the EU have anything to do with who “fits in”? maybe i misunderstood what you’re saying here…
EU implements legislation forcing Android + Apple to use standards that actually work properly with each other. (they usually spearhead this type of change)
People using android no longer break group chats or have terrible sent image/video quality when messaging Iphone users.
With this ammunition gone, teens stop using it to attack each other for their familys (lack of) income. Ie those kids ‘fit in’ better.
Oh, OK. I did misunderstand what was being said. Thank you for clarifying.
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Thats a fair argument; though in this context it’s more about how the teens causing social issues perceive it.
It’s not the Iphone users getting picked on in schools.
In the US, every millenial is a communist until a green bubble shows up in the group chat… then the poverty jokes commence
gen z*
Millennials are pushing 40
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Dumb kids are always dumb. And cruel.
Doesn’t bother me at all.
People are dumb af
It’s all the other features in iMessage that android users “ruin” in group chats. Things like read receipts, typing indicators, reactions, animated/spoiler text messages, sending media in full quality, etc… A single android user is enough to downgrade an entire group chat, so apple users tend to be a little bit resentful.
It’d be a little bit like if one person on a Discord server disabled all the fun parts of Discord, and it killed the functionality for everyone on that server. Now nobody in the server can add fun little reactions to messages, or start threads, or send embedded gifs. All because that one person decided they didn’t like it.
All because that one person decided they didn’t like it.
More like “all because Discord decided to remove those things from anyone not using Windows”
Nothing in this scenario is in the users hands, it’s all Apple, what any given user likes or want makes no difference.
This shit seems like a perfect target for an antitrust suit, no?
Apple, Google, and Microsoft commit antitrust violations too fast and numerous for the legal systems to keep up.
That and they spy on consumers for the US government so that gives them free passes at a lot of things.
I’m absolutely blown away by the number of people who actually think this is about bubble colors…
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This is a good video explaining things, for anyone who doesn’t know about the situation Apple created.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BuaKzm7Kq9Q
Alternative 🔗:
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=BuaKzm7Kq9Q
https://piped.video/watch?v=BuaKzm7Kq9Q
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They should add login and subscription handling on their website as well like so many do, with 30% off on the subscription fee because there’d be no Google tax.
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Looks like both. Beeper mini (and a lot of other apps) ask the play store if the user paid for the app, which is a heavily pretexts part of goggles services… so using non-Google services means I can’t sign into beeper mini at all. They can’t prove I paid for it, especially since I don’t have a Google account at all.
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Well I do have GCM, it’s how all my other apps are able to work, even pokemon etc.
I think it’s purely that beeper is relying on Google authenicating that I paid for the app. Could there be a cracked apk? Probably, but I’m not willing to risk using that.
What OS are you on?
CalyxOS, which uses microG.
Assuming that it’s actually reverse engineered, this is great news. If not, there’s a massive lawsuit brewing.
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They did for Beeper Mini but not for the original Beeper (now called Beeper Cloud) which uses Mac’s as a server.
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)
are people that stupidly superficial
Yes.
understandable i suppose, a good deterrent tho if they speak about it openly
The color of the bubble is only important because it helps iPhone users know who not to add to group chats, since the presence of a non-imessage user in an iMessage group chat downgrades the entire chat to grainy photos, no reactions/ read receipts, voice memos, typing indicators, etc. I don’t blame them at all, many of them don’t use any third party messaging apps because iMessage is built in and gives them everything that other chat apps have, with the benefit that they don’t have to convince anybody to install it because all their iPhone owning friends have it preinstalled.
are people that stupidly superficial about the color of y fucking message bubble?
Yes, apparently.
Lol the world we live in
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”]
No, they know that a message has been received, but the phone is what decrypts the message. Beeper can’t see it.
No, with this new app messages are encrypted between you and Apple’s iMessage servers using iMessage encryption more or less the same way an iPhone does.
The push service simply notifies your device it has a message waiting, no message content passes through Beeper servers.
I don’t know for sure, but often mobile notification protocols are more like “wake up and check your incoming messages” than “user foo says bar”. If this is true then the best they could do is collect timestamps of when you probably received messages.
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.
What exactly do you mean with it requiring Apple’s servers? All of the services Beeper integrates with require it to communicate with the servers those services belong to.
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I don’t, I want modern messaging features like typing indicators, read receipts, and videos that have more than 10 pixels total
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!
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?
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They do have to run servers in order to keep the service alive. If you want to run this stuff yourself on your own server that’s possible using PyPush. The reason they have to run those servers for you is to keep the notification service alive.
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Yeah, sorry, I got confused. Beeper mini does need servers to keep the notification service alive. And thus not crazy to ask for 2$ a month. Beeper cloud could indeed do without servers I guess, but I don’t know anything about that. I was just keeping up with the development of pypush (the python poc) and reverse engineering progress.
I don’t understand your point of “you have to log in with a google account”. I understood that was a requirement to check subscription status (and as such limit fraudulent apk’s).
But that seems to be a different story than “opensourcing this would mean a competitor could do it for free”.
You can already do this for free with pypush. And if you want to use something else then python you could build something based on it with any language as pypush is completely open source.
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By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.
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I assume you’re not using iMessage anyway then because Apple’s Messages stack isn’t open source. If you’re not using iMessage anyway, it shouldn’t matter to you what Beeper Mini is doing. This app isn’t for the ultra paranoid. Neither is Google’s RCS in Google Messages. This is where Signal and Matrix would be better choices. If you are using iMessage on an Apple device, you’re choosing to trust Apple despite their app being closed source and you’re not choosing to trust Beeper, which is fine and I don’t judge you at all for that stance. But at that point, your qualms aren’t simply about Beeper Mini being closed source, the implication is that you don’t trust Beeper as a company and/or its developers which, again, is a valid stance even if it’s one I don’t share.
But I am personally pretty sure I can trust Beeper and Apple enough with my relatively meaningless conversations.
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Notice how in the article they say “we’re not the middle man… Any more”? That’s because, up until now, Beeper has been working on a system where they operate as a middle man for your data.
To be fair they never claimed otherwise and all of the code for the bridges are open-sourced and can be run on your own servers so that those servers you control (as opposed to Beeper-owned servers) act as a “middle man” and none of your messages need be trusted to a 3rd party.
To put it simply: only the actual bridge on Beeper Cloud has access to unencrypted messages and you do have the option to run the bridge yourself while continuing to use the Beeper app. You can use as many or as few self-hosted bridges as you’d like.
A few bridges are preconfigured for self-hosting with just a couple of clicks for free through fly.io here
This post is referring to beeper mini. It’s confusing naming, but that’s not the same as beeper(cloud service). Beeper mini is available to everyone on the play store and is not a cloud service. You just get it, login to Google (to pay the subscription cost) and it works. No invite needed
Want a invite code? Its just to prevent people from mass signing up
@Merlin404@lemmy.world
Yes please, I would love an invite code
@Merlin404@lemmy.world
Can I get a code, please please?
That’s to prevent multiple entries by one person. Their security is very good, with audits and their products being largely open source (for this, PyPush. For Beeper Cloud, their Synapse fork and their bridges.). Only the parts that don’t matter to security (the clients, mostly) are closed source.
Btw will they continue to live as Element changed licences to Synapse and Dendrite projects ?
Yes. They have a fork of Synapse that they can continue to use even if the license prevents them from using upstream (which doesn’t seem true, but I could be wrong).
We literally shut down another app doing this last week because it was so sketchy
The other app was running iMessage on Macs owned by the company and relaying the messages insecurely to its Android app. What we see here is a third-party implementation of the iMessage protocol running on Android devices directly, an example of adversarial interoperability.
The article specifically address this and explained the difference.
No. This is much more impressive, useful, secure, and sustainable because it’s totally different internally.
You literally didn’t read before speaking.
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
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Or read before typing? 😂
What security loss, mate?
These: 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
That’s about beeper, not beeper mini. Mini was just launched, that’s older information that only applies to the MITM version (beeper which is now beeper cloud).
Beeper mini talks directly to the services you use, no MITM, which is why they plan on adding more services to mini until it can replace the older Beeper (cloud).
My understanding is that this absolutely applies to their previous iterations, but not this – there’s no authenticating with your Apple ID, for example. It’s sending and receiving iMessage data directly between the Apple servers and your device, now.
