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There’s a new iMessage for Android app — and it actually works (www.theverge.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.

yeah, I give it until Thursday.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It’s been out for a long time with limited access and nothing yet. Maybe Apple will change their mind toward it when it’s being used by a large group of people finally. Hopefully not.

Edit: I was wrong. See below.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It’s been out for a long time with limited access and nothing yet.

you're thinking of regular Beeper, wthich used Macs hosted by the company to relay iMessage messages.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That sounds exactly like what what Nothing Chats was shamed for a couple weeks ago, how has Beeper been fairing so well?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Beeper's entire premise is based on decrypting your messages on their servers, re-encrypting them and sending them to you, and pinky promising that they're not reading them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

So it really is the exact same thing as Nothing Chats then? I don't think I trust them any more than Sunbird...

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

Beeper can be self-hosted if you have a Mac, so you don't have to trust their servers
Sunbird's app (Nothing Chat) was riddled with its own security vulnerabilities that allowed users to read other users messages, which were all stored as unencrypted plaintext, all discovered by the community within 24 hours of launch
Beeper is actually open about how their technology works and what it's limitations are, while Sunbird/Nothing basically lied about their product and never provided any meaningful documentation

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The difference, as I understand it, is Beeper hasn't claimed to not be doing that. Sunbird/Nothing touted E2EE and that was a lie.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That makes sense I suppose. A company that doesn't outright lie about how their service works would have more goodwill behind it, wouldn't it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Beeper's backend is also fully open-source, there's nothing stopping you from hosting your own iMessage bridge and accessing it via any matrix client.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It wasn't just that E2EE was a lie, their own server software was full of its own bugs that allowed third party access to user messages, which were stored unencrypted in their database.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Not even close. Sunbird was not open source and was storing plaintext messages on their servers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Aged like wine!