Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’::Beeper, like Sunbird and Texts, sought to find a way to bring iMessage to Android users. Its app, Beeper Mini, worked well. But a few days after it launched, Apple took steps to shut it down.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” Apple senior PR manager Nadine Haija said in a statement.
Beeper says its process works with no compromise to your encryption or privacy; the company’s documentation says that no one can read the contents of your messages other than you.
Apple has repeatedly made clear that it doesn’t want to bring iMessage to Android: “buy your mom an iPhone,” CEO Tim Cook told a questioner at the Code Conference who wanted a better way to message their Android-toting mother, and the company’s executives have debated Android versions in the past but decided it would cannibalize iPhone sales.
But Beeper Mini was exploiting the iMessage protocol directly, which clearly prompted Apple to tighten its security measures.
When I say that maybe Apple’s concern is that iPhone users are suddenly sending their supposedly Apple-only blue-bubble messages via a company — Beeper — they don’t know about, Migicovsky thinks about it for a second.
And Apple has made clear it intends to win that game, no matter how badly you want to send iMessages from an Android phone.
The original article contains 890 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Sounds like more people should use Signal
If you can get them to switch, I’d appreciate it.
I had people switching to Signal as their SMS replacement which was compelling for them. Then Signal dropped SMS support and those people reverted.
SMS support isn’t really as big of a deal as the Internet blows it up to be. It’s a usage pattern primarily in the US whereas the most of the world had comfortably adapted to other messaging options for years (WhatsApp reins king in Latin America, LINE in SE Asia, WeChat in China…)
The whole iMessage / blue bubble envy is real but it’s totally overhyped.
SMS support for signal isn’t a big deal? Well, it gets people on board. So yes, it’s that big of a deal. Without it, I have no way to convince people to switch. I had people switch before, and when signal dropped SMS I lost many of them.
And guess what, I live where that matters, so…
I’d also rather use SMS than any of those privacy violating systems. SMS isn’t secure, but those systems are designed to be adversarial. And at least iMessage is far more secure than any of those, even with it’s issues.
The blue bubble is an issue because we have so many iPhone users, and they, (like many Android users) , don’t want to have multiple messaging apps. I don’t agree with them, but I can’t make them change their mind. I have probably 5 messenger apps, Signal, Telegram, SimpleX, Briar, an XMPP client or two, Wire, etc. I’ll use anything that’s reasonably secure to replace SMS, but I’m not going to jump into garbage like WhatsApp
It’s really funny hearing you be dismissive of these issues yet ignoring there are at least 3 organizations working on interop, and lots of people signing up to use them. Want to tell them?
If it’s not an issue for you, good for you. But then why do you care so much to tell others it’s not an issue just because you can’t see it?
As I see it, why are you using garbage like WhatsApp or FB junk? They’ve repeatedly shown they’re not trustworthy. Oh, becuase you went along with what everyone else is doing around you, clearly without any consideration for who you’re giving your data to.
I’m sharing the international perspective. Like I said, it only really matters to people in the US, not much of an issue for the rest of the world. People have iPhones outside of the US and still use third party apps to chat away, life goes on.
Dismissive of what? All I talked about was SMS support, I didn’t mention anything about Interop, which I think is a great thing by the way, thank you very much for asking.
Again, what? You are setting up a straw man. Signal is my actual daily driver and I fortunately have been able to convert most family over. Of course, I still have to juggle multiple apps to talk to everyone else. But I’m not losing any sleep over it, and personally I think neither should you.
Or Threema since it’s from my country and we have a good privacy reputation 🇨🇭
And it works really well and allows you to do what you need it to do of course.
The problem with Threema is it costs money.
It’s not a lot of money. It’s not an unfair price. It’s completely reasonable to expect to pay for services rather than using things that spy on you. None of that matters though. I have a hard enough time getting people to use Signal, which is free; anything paid is a complete nonstarter.
Yeah, ive used Threema and Matrix and neither competes with the ease of adoption that Signal has for normies
Yep.
Base usage must be free.
And that base needs to compete with everything else.
Maybe a paid tier for media beyond a certain size, say 50mb or 100mb, I don’t know. If I had to pay for being able to have 50mb attachments, I’d be willing to work to keep the sizes lower, helping reduce their costs. If I felt I needed the attachment size, say for work, then I could upgrade.
Or maybe a paid tier for self-hosting that can interconnect with the rest of Signal.
Hell, once I can start using Signal as my primary (or if they brought SMS back), I’d happily pay.
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WhatsApp already had a very large userbase when in started charging, and IIRC only charged after the first year of use to better hook people. Given its dominance in certain markets (Europe comes to mind), WhatsApp could probably succeed with a paid model even today, but something with a tiny userbase isn’t going to grow that way.
Sounds like more people should just use the same Matrix bridges that Beeper is using for their main service and just spinning up their own Matrix server instead of trusting a third party with their Apple credentials logged into a Mac that lives on their property and is technically owned by them. The “original plan” was to send out refurbished iPhone 4’s to people to use, but apparently letting consumers have a little more control was going to be too confusing or something and instead they rolled out a fleet of Macs internally.
Matrix is trusted and secure. Why bother with a third party charging for a service of… setting it up for you, with a flashy front-end?