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
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.
RCS is too liitle, too late. It sucks. People have issues with it today… It’s less reliable than SMS, and it’s E2EE is problematic.
Fortunately much of the world has moved away from SMS already, so those folks aren’t coming back. I try real hard to get people away from it.
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
That is not the issue. At all. Lol
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
To be fair, RCS is only marginally more open than iMessage is. There’s a reason you can’t find a single open source app that implements it, there’s a reason the lion’s share of messages pass through servers owned by Google on one or both ends, and there’s a reason only Google has implemented E2EE with it.
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
You’re joking, right?
i’m laughing, if that’s what you mean.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
In the US, every millenial is a communist until a green bubble shows up in the group chat… then the poverty jokes commence
Millennials are pushing 40
gen z*
Dumb kids are always dumb. And cruel.
Doesn’t bother me at all.
I’m absolutely blown away by the number of people who actually think this is about bubble colors…
Well it is because that bubble color on Apple means issues for people on Apple devices.
I have millenial family members, they hear it from their peers. Probably even worse in younger folks.
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.
Is it even a garden though? I don’t see any benefit in using it over something like Signal other than it coming pre-installed on your phone.
Sure, but they wont. The insidious thing about iMessenger is that it isnt iChat. It is the apple default text messaging app. Which is good because it means that all your messages are in one place, and you dont have to try to convince your older family member to install a 3rd party chat app. You just have a chat app. This tricks users not into thinking that texting is just better on apple.
But its bad because it only works between other apple products and users. This is objectively Apple’s shortcoming, however there are enough iPhones in the wild and enough people in the US who defaulted to just hitting the sms/mms icon instead of downloading a chat app that the odd man out might be the android user. And it’s not just about the green bubble being green. If you invite an a green bubble to a group text then all your rich chat messenger features go away and it turns into an MMS thread. Which is objectively bad.
But yes they could just download and use whatsapp,line, telegram, signal, facebook messenger(and in the early days things like aim/yim/msn) But they dont. The fact is their default messenger app works, and it works well with most people they talk to so the problem is the green text.
It’s especially silly when you consider the “there’s an app for that” generation of user and so many things are apps but they refuse to engage on other chat channels. People download different apps to get dates, the navigate, to browse websites that shouldnt even be apps, to order food, order groceries, order taxi’s, but a chat app just to talk with you? ehhhhhhhhh.
You know honestly, now that I’ve typed that I’m not sure. I don’t do a lot of texting audio snippets or other stuff other people do, so maybe, maybe not.
The problem is, I should be able to text people at default without worrying I have cell signal or if group chats are going to work correctly, instead of needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer.
needing to ask people what 3rd party chat service they prefer
Yeah Signal’s great and all, but my spouse’s family refuses to use anything but WhatsApp, half my family uses FB Messenger while the other half use Discord (and they are feuding about it), the older folks in my hobby group refuse to learn anything but the default text on their phone (that group chat is an unmanageable NIGHTMARE), and anything from work uses teams…except the US folks who use slack, and now my friends want to get me on Signal, too? Relevant XKCD.
The solution to my problem is not yet another messaging app. I just want ONE inbox!
I’ve been pretty happy with Beeper so far. There are some features that aren’t quite as good as using each app natively, yet, but I think they’re off to a great start considering the sheer scale and variety of interfaces they’re working with. It even gives me tools to deal with the hobby chat anarchy, and now I can send default SMS messages from my computer!
In some cases you can manually select the type of service on your phone. Try changing your phone manually to 3g and see if that helps. I find it works well in areas where I have poor LTE/5G coverage.
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.
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.
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.
They didn’t reverse engineer shit. Not sure where this lie comes from
They did for Beeper Mini but not for the original Beeper (now called Beeper Cloud) which uses Mac’s as a server.
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.
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.
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?
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.
But to be fully trusted, Beeper Mini will need to be audited by a third party — something it has not yet done. In addition, Beeper uses certificate pinning, which makes network traffic analysis more difficult to perform in order to verify its claims.
And until they release the source code for their new app, something they probably don’t have a huge incentive to do (it would open them up to competition, or people who don’t need to charge you a $2/mo subscription for something that has nothing to do with their servers) there’s basically nothing guaranteeing their product is secure, or private.
By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.
I tend to trust actual open source projects over closed-source ones. Beeper Mini is closed source. And Beeper is a separate app not really relevant to this discussion.
They do have to run servers in order to keep the service alive. If you want to run this stuff yourself on your own server that’s possible using PyPush. The reason they have to run those servers for you is to keep the notification service alive.
Can you cite your sources? You appear to have confused Beeper Mini with Beeper…
- Mini only needs optional push servers to run.
- There’s no Beeper Mini source code
- You have to log in to Beeper Mini exclusively using a Google account
Yeah, sorry, I got confused. Beeper mini does need servers to keep the notification service alive. And thus not crazy to ask for 2$ 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.
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
Want a invite code? Its just to prevent people from mass signing up
@Merlin404@lemmy.world
Yes please, I would love an invite code
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
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).
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.
Why did you even ever care about your text messages being blue?
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.
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
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.
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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
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.
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).
