The new "iMessage on Android" app, Beeper Mini, was released on December 5 and offers iMessage blue bubbles and end-to-end encryption to Android users. On Friday, users found they could no longer send and receive messages.
  • dinckel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    734·
    11 months ago

    I admire their dedication, but at the same time strongly disagree with asking people to pay money for a service, that’s fundamentally based on a hole in a reverse engineered protocol. They won’t win this

    • doc@kbin.social
      12·
      10 months ago

      They’re doing more than riding on apples services for free. They had to build and run a notification relay server to make this work.

      Same thing that’s been in the news about Apple sharing info with police. The content of the messages are ETE encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not

      • 𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        Same thing that’s been in the news about some sharing info with police. The comment of the messages are ete encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not

        Beeper Mini’s GCM server only handles a “new message waiting” trigger, it doesn’t contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.

      • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        10 months ago

        My objection wouldn’t be that they didn’t put in enough effort, because it was clearly a lot, but that the service is a doomed idea.

    • kick_out_the_jams@kbin.social
      112·
      10 months ago

      If the open source community could provide such a thing for free I think they would have done it already?

      But presumably they lack the ability, the motivation or both.

    • homicidalrobot@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      You should look at american legal precedent surrounding reverse engineering. Legally speaking, it’s quite hopeful.

    • 𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      10 months ago

      I’m happy to pay to support them.

      If you’d rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.

      The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can’t just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.

      The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.

      I’m just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users’ data.

      Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.

    • paulsmith@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I wouldn’t mind paying $2 a month for Beeper. I’ve been using it for months to consolidate all of my messaging apps. It’s worth $2 a month for me. Beeper Mini is just iMessage, so I don’t know if it’s worth it for me. They said they’ll eventually move all of the other chat services over to Beeper Mini, at which point it will just be Beeper.

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    9·
    10 months ago

    There’s zero sense in charging anyone anything until apple decides to not find ways to block it. If there’s going to be a cat and mouse game going on, the product isn’t going to be stable enough to be worth using, so only die-hards are going to be willing to pay anything to begin with.

    Them getting shut down so fast is not making them look reliable at all

  • devfuuu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    10 months ago

    For people out of the loop what is this about? Is a new whatsapp clone being released? I read something about apple blocking something but don’t understand what’s going on.

    • capital@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      10 months ago

      I find that, generally, reading is conducive to absorbing information I want to have.