this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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42
Beeper Mini is the iMessage for Android app we’ve been waiting for - Mishaal Rahman (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Personally I don't care about this since apple is adopting rcs next year. But its a great thing for people who want iMessage.

all 14 comments
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

It looks like Beeper has purchased the software from the person who developed this, but his GitHub repo for it is still up.

He has also created a way to permanently side load apps on iPhone without jailbreaking. I imagine Apple will be working on both of these "problems".

iMessage reverse engineering hack that was purchased by Beeper: https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

iPhone side loading: https://github.com/SideStore

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Definitely going to look into this when I have the time. If it's not using your Apple ID for authentication (like the article says), what's to stop anyone from spoofing anyone else's phone number?

The pypush readme doesn't have a lot of details so I guess I'll just need to try it to see.

Edit: Looks like he's distributing "a framework from an old version of macOS, in order to call some obfuscated functions", which the script pulls from his GitHub. This is likely a copyright violation. If Beeper Mini is doing the same thing, I'd expect them to get sued into oblivion the second Apple takes notice.

It's not clear which version of macOS he pulled this from. There's always the risk that Apple will simply axe support for it. I don't recall them breaking support for older OSes with iMessage in the past but I haven't followed that closely so I'm not sure.

Update:

Just ran it on my desktop. It immediately prompts for a username and password, presumably for an Apple ID. I didn't continue because I don't want to use my real Apple ID. The article says Beeper Mini doesn't need an Apple ID at any point. After a little searching, it looks like iPhones actually don't need an Apple ID to use iMessage. I was not aware of that. So I guess Beeper is not using the exact same mechanism as pypush.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Beeper has been working in this space for awhile - there's no way they would publish an app with a copyright violation. I assume they have a workaround for that aspect.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

a text message for verification from Apple confirms ownership

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I think it's awesome that they paid the dev. More companies should do that for open source projects

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago

Eh, imessage isn't worth paying a subscription for. Not a monthly one for sure. Like, I'm glad people have the option now, but I just don't see the benefit being high enough to warrant a subscription.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (3 children)

tbh, I don't like where this new product seems to be taking Beeper. I was a giant fan of Beeper because they were a huge contributor to the matrix project. But with them creating an entirely new app that doesn't rely on matrix at all, it looks like they may be looking to pivot away and create their own client-side implementations rather than use matrix bridges. It would be sad to lose a contributor to the matrix space.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

In the future, we are planning to add Matrix network support back in, along with support for the 15 other chat networks in Beeper Cloud. Read more about our roadmap.

from the beepers own post instead of this reblog

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Beeper Mini is also unfortunately closed source

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Yes. Hopefully they'll continue to maintain the mautrix bridges they already have.

Also it's sad to see Beeper misusing the term open source for the source available SSPL [1]. Beeper is free not to use an open source license. But an open source "license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor" [2], so it's misleading to call their demo [3] open source.

I do believe supporting the different messaging services client side could be a better experience than relying on a server to translate between different protocols.

[1] https://blog.opensource.org/the-sspl-is-not-an-open-source-license/

[2] https://opensource.org/osd/

[3] https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Downloaded out of curiosity but my Micro-G based ROM isn't supported.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Stock pixel is giving me error.null when trying to sign in, I think the release is just bugged