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Beeper Mini team says a fix is ‘coming soon’ and promises to extend users’ free trials (www.engadget.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I agree with the other commenter in general but I'll give you the bullet points.

Old news:

iMessage is a proprietary chat protocol that only works on Apple devices. Apple has indicated multiple times they have zero intention of porting this to other platforms
Apple users texting each other default to iMessage
iMessage has a lot of useful features over SMS texting that are highly desirable and convenient
On iPhones, when iMessages are being successfully sent in a text, the chat bubbles are blue. If they are SMS, they are green
The US additionally has a weird culture of some iPhone users shaming Android users because of the inability to communicate via iMessage, often referred to by the green/blue bubble appearance
There have been a few attempts to circumvent this, mostly by having a Mac somewhere with software installed to it that forwards iMessages to your Android device, though this is extremely cumbersome as it requires having an entire computer on 24/7 to make sure you receive these messages

New news:

Beeper Mini was released earlier this week, which actually runs a reverse-engineered iMessage client that tricks Apple servers into treating it like an Apple device
It was fully functional for about one day with almost all iMessage features working
Apple made some variety of change on their end that broke Beeper Mini functionality

And that's about it. For those of us that would like to have easy communication with our iPhone-using friends and family, yet don't want to change phone ecosystems to do so, this is a problem that would be awesome to see solved.

There are folks that, either because of ignorance or pigheadedness, like to chime in on these threads that they don't care about having blue bubbles. That is the least important aspect of this to most people following this, for the reasons I mentioned above.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thanks. That helps a lot. I never knew that iMessages was integrated with sms, just thought it existed as a internet protocol like many other proprietary ones.

Basically it's all the same usual problem of using a closed proprietary chat protocol that a single stake holder has the power to change however and whenever they want.

Like whatsap, facebook and others which any alternative has to keep catching up to the changes that the companies do and which is very hard to maintain the reverse engineered protocols.

It never crossed my mind that I don't usually see alternative clients for imessage, but makes sense, didn't think it would be so hard to do.

So these guys came up with a implementation that works and apple just wants to crush them to destroy any alternatives. Business as usual.

It's hard to understand these news when all the lingo used implies you already know the thing being talked about. An article talking about "Blue bubbles" makes no sense whatsoever to anyone not used to apple ecosystem.