Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app
It took less than a week for Beeper Mini to run into a wall.
“Oh, what’s this unauthorized bullshit on our servers?”
[block]
I’m just surprised that it took this long
same. there seems to be a lot of people that don't realize some things don't get done, not because they're impossible, but because as soon as they do it a company will put a stop to it.
it's like cracking a Xbox or something. the very next patch will render the method obsolete and nonviable. when i heard this workaround was coming for Android, my immediate reaction was how long it would last before Apple just changed something so that it doesn't work.
Probably had to be extra careful to test. MDM software software might get glitched out.
I'm really curious about how it was detected, how it was different from Apple devices. If nothing else I'm looking forward to reading about how that all worked.
It is usually easy to detect a specific client. Like even if you ignore the keys there are dozens of little details like the TLS fingerprint of whatever library they use not matching iOS. Things that are easy to miss and sometimes hard to bypass. Then there are heuristics on how it is used is likely unique.
From what I understand, their guess is that Apple is now checking if the device also has support for other services, such as FaceTime. Beeper Mini and pypush don't pretend to support FaceTime, so it breaks.
Can all the folks saying "I don't care" on this just stop? If this doesn't affect you, why are you commenting at all?
Some smart folks managed to reverse engineer Apple's secretive tech that they refuse to put on any platform they don't own, which is fucking awesome. Even if you don't give a shit about using iMessage, it's awesome they were able to stick it to Apple at all, and make the gap between iPhone and Android that much smaller.
And of course Apple comes in and breaks it. Do you not wonder why? Does this mean there was a minor security hole that was exploited or was it something else that changed? This arms race is fascinating, regardless of your preferred mobile OS.
We're literally on a platform designed to escape these closed ecosystems and walled gardens. A platform built around open communication standards.
And still there's a downright bizarre contingent of people around here that seem to be chomping at the bit to defend or downplay Apple's iMessage shit.
That's funny when most of the comments are saying "just use WhatsApp" as if that's not a walled garden for messaging.
I’ve found the complete opposite on here. Outside of the apple communities but even those get trolled/downvoted from nerds browsing all like everything else.
I read that it was a 16 year old kid which makes it more fascinating
The “I don’t care” crowd could be the rest of the world, that use messaging apps instead of SMS or iMessages. Try to consider this factor first. Not everything should be centered in America, or exclusively to what happens there.
I understand that. But that doesn't have anything to do with my point, which is that if someone doesn't care about this issue, they don't need to show how much they don't care.
In fact, I would argue that your general sentiment -- that of considering others in different situations than oneself -- applies more to the people acting like this topic doesn't matter because it doesn't affect them personally.
Rule no°1 on Reddit/Lemmy: Every user is part of the US unless stated different.
Can all the folks saying "I don't care" on this just stop? If this doesn't affect you, why are you commenting at all?
Haven't you heard? Lemmings are all about "Stay alone in a basement and never get out and socialize, because people use something you don't agree with. If they really want to talk to you, they'll switch."
They didn't, but now they're on lemmy with more people with the same attitude, trying to socialize but never realizing why they don't have any friends.
Reddit migration brought all the entitled, self agrandizing, freeloading, weirdos to the fediverse.
people use something you can't use because walled garden
joined 1 month ago
The fact that people care about whether their messages are blue or green is so absolutely ridiculous.
I've known people who literally refuse to message anyone who doesn't use iMessage (and by extension has an iPhone).
Every one of them turned out to be a twat in every other facet of their personality as well.
yeah people should use this a a filter for people they should be avoiding.
That's what I'd do if I ever came across such a person. I haven't had the pleasure yet fortunately.
This reminds me of the blackberry ping days, everyone and their mom acting like a diva for having a sidekick blackberry just to use ping.
Those were better days financially.
Yes had a business owner come in and demand all employee phones be iPhone or get out. Jobs was his personal hero and thought Apple could do no wrong. The issue was the company he bought was run on software made for Windows. A lot of extra effort went into making it work on macbooks he insisted we all use.
In the end he believed he was as great as Jobs. Not sure that's a great role model across the board for those that know more than just the apple procducts. The family values and toxic *work practices were not for everyone.
I was glad to get out of that company and back to my android phone and now Linux computing.
I will say the 3 good things about my iPhone was the camera, the full resolution media sharing with other iPhone users via iMessage, and the gallery uploading to other iOS devices.
The latter two are still a weakness with Google. At least they are addressing it with RCS but its still going to take time. Google photos has cloud back up but I've not really looked into how seamless the media backup to all android devices has been.
Google photos is just cloud back up like iCloud backup for iOS devices.
Google photos is also on iOS devices, so you could have your photos on any of your devices.
Apparently it breaks group chats, notwithstanding that it's an Apple problem, Signal exists and doesn't feature any of this nonsense.
I’m in more than one group chat with android people, and it’s fine.
It’s just that you can’t use some iMessage features. But nothing is really broken.
It’s because it breaks all the nice extra functionality of iMessage. iMessage is closer to Discord chats; You can do things like react to messages, send live emojis, spoiler/emphasize text, edit/delete sent messages, see when someone is typing, see read receipts, automatically send check-ins when you arrive at a destination, draw doodles, send full quality media, share galleries natively, etc… But as soon as someone with an android joins the group chat, all of that goes out the window and you’re stuck with boring old SMS.
Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified, because they’re left with a noticeably reduced feature set as soon as someone forces them to use green bubbles.
Is it intentionally hostile on Apple’s part to bar androids from joining? Yes. But the reactions from Apple users aren’t entirely unjustified
The reaction from Apple users is to blame Android users - which is entirely unjustified.
But of course, post purchase rationalization and brand loyalty play a big part in why people want to externalize blame rather than questioning their own decision or blaming their favorite company for providing a shitty cross-platform messaging experience.
So why not use something like WhatsApp or Signal instead then? Sounds like a terrible user experience to me. Nobody I know uses iMessage, everybody uses WhatsApp instead, which is platform agnostic.
But I'm European, so the iPhone penetration is lower iirc and they can't stay in their bubble as much.
is bullying justified
Welcome to Middle School. Blue bubble and 'Find My' support are feature drivers. You're either in or out.
Ironically, Spotify and x-platform playlist sharing (aka mixtapes) drive counter-adoption.
Go figure.
Beeper is more than that. Beeper MINI is about that. But I've been using Beeper on my PC for the past year because I am so tired of picking up my phone a million times a day just to send someone a message. I'd say probably 90% of the people I know use iPhone/iMessage so having the ability to message them on desktop was a lifesaver for me. Really bummed it's not working anymore.
Messaging apps in general are basically walled gardens.
Gasp, we should try making a federated alternative.
This is literally perpetuated by schoolyard bullying. Anyone over the age of 20 will very likely be entirely out of touch with how big a deal green/blue is for pre-teens and teens these days. It’s pretty much a cornerstone in teen social structures.
I don’t know what may have changed as I am an iPhone user, but about 10 years ago I worked in a small security role for a fairly large company, and the communications company we were using was more than happy to hand over sms logs as plain text. I would personally never send messages to anyone I was sure wasn’t encrypted and I can tell that by the blue bubble. I just don’t know when it is green.
I don’t know what has changed as I don’t keep up with it, but I am still dubious about messaging outside the Apple ecosystem, which is ok for me as I live in a country where most people use iOS
RCS on Android defaults to E2E encryption now since some year back, and Signal has been around for a long time now
Uh. It's not that. Along w that is videos w potato quality, messages that never make it. Of course anyone reading your comment knows you missed the point.
Its not absolutely ridiculous and you sound like an idiot who thinks that everyone lives in the same little bubble as you.
Thanks for proving my third statement.
You sure it's about that? What I heard is that being outside of "trusted" zone means less features such as media and encryption. Also the person in this article says apple users are basically forced to use sms to send messages to Android users. I too would not want to resort to plain paid messages if my partner doesn't have the right app.
I worked in the cellular space for about 20 years off and on before moving to other pastures. I guarantee you that maybe one in a thousand think like you.
BY FAR the average buyer that Apple targets come in two flavors.
First, the "I'm cool and all my friends are doing it" and second is the "I'm the father, I don't personally give a shit but my daughter/son wants us all to be on iMessage."
Apples was and is still extremely anti-competitive and anti-consumers oriented.
Apple has always been a closed ecosystem, doing things “their way”. When they only sold computers, it was a niche company, with a niche audience. Then they started selling music players and phones, and they became a popular company.
The blue vs green bubble is just an American problem, that still use SMS as their main messaging protocol. The rest of the world use messaging app, like WhatsApp. It’s truly fascinating watching these events from outside the US.
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that most Americans also use a messaging app (iMessage). The rest are just stuck with SMS to have compatibility with the iPhone users.
As the iPhone was (is?) not as popular in the Europe as it was (is) in the States that might also be one of the reasons why people here ditched SMS so fast once smartphones got popular.
Remember this is the same company that has to either comply with the EU bridging regulation between messaging platforms or withdraw from the market.
I think they dodged that as well... https://arstechnica.com/?p=1989111
"Android users' hopes that Apple's iMessage would be forced to open up in the European Union have been dashed. Bloomberg reports that iMessage won't qualify for the EU's new "Digital Markets Act," allowing Apple to keep iMessage exclusive to Apple users. ..."
Apple fanboys don't care one bit. As long as they can look cool and feel like part of the cool kids, they'll buy.
Honestly, people just know that blue = better quality, reaction emojis, and editing. They don’t know why that’s actually the case. Most laypeople don’t know a lick about things like RCS, E2EE, etc.
It's not that they're apple superfans that makes then like that or course, they're apple obsessed because they're fully brought into conspicuous consumerism - they love that apple is over priced and feature limited because it's a way of demonstrating their excess wealth.
Airlines are big on this with their 'show the world you're special by spending more than most people do on their whole holiday just to get a slightly bigger seat and complementary drinks that you could have brought for twenty dollars.' the same with cars that inexplicably cost the same as a house and why people need to have this year's overpriced car.
Apple not being laughed out of existence is a symptom of our broken society, and yes I know people are going to tell me that they have some obscene reason for using apple but that's just the very human trait of posthoc justification and rationalization of a choice made emotionally.
I remember in the ipod days plugging a CD into the aul PC and ripping all the files as aac... A format that would only play in iTunes
I had an arcos jukebox before the first iPod came out, every time they'd release a new version it's big feature would be something my jukebox had always done. Except it didn't have an awkward spinning selector wheel or celebrity endorsements.
I could connect it to the cd player and record the whole thing as mp3s, I think it even used to split the tracks automatically but I might be wrong. Plug it into usb and it's a HDD ready to have anything copied to it without hassle... No need for shitty iTunes, no complaints about wav files and never found an MP3 it couldn't play.
I remember thinking that surely people will realize over priced and feature limited products are an insult but no, the kids of the future I had so much hope for turned out to be gen z who care more about brand recognition than anyone ever before. I still think the feature rich generics will have their day, maybe generation alpha...
why can't you simply foster openness and community god fucking dammit
Money.
iPhone user here, because Apple likes money.
I would say: because Apple investors like money.
Scum company
Well, because it's Apple.
Because if they opened their walled off garden, there's a chance they might lose profit and if they do, their CEOs might not be able to afford their diamond studded swimming pools and solid gold Humvees. Those things don't grow on trees.
It's a very expensive walled garden
They're adopting RCS next year, what more do they need to do?
Putting iMessage on Android just gives them a whole lot more control over the messaging ecosystem.
There's dollars to be extracted.
I think it's a bit crazy to create a paid service on top of a reverse engineered product that isn't static. Indivious, NewPipe and other youtube frontends aren't going to create a paid youtube frontend, because they know Google could kill that at any point. Google could dedicate a full team to making youtube frontends non-functional.
Apple has a much bigger incentive to derail iMessage alternatives because they know that dumb parents have taught their kids how to live in a closed ecosystem and be slaves to Apple. 87% of USAian teenagers use Apple, which means it's only a matter of time before Apple becomes the dominant player on the market. If you want to keep making fat stacks of cash, the best thing you can do is control the market, which means killing of competition.
The only reason Apple would ever stop killing competitors is if it became legally and financially detrimental to do so. They'd have to reach Microsoft levels of antitrust and bad press before even considering backpedaling.
Everyone buying their products is helping Apple along to their goal of market dominance.
87% of teenagers use Apple
Do you mean US American teenagers, or North American teenagers, or who exactly? Surely that can't be global?
I mean, the proof of concept is open source, so anyone can go out and make their own iMessaging service now.
I'm okay with paying for this because they need to run a service for notifications and they also have to play this cat and mouse game with Apple.
The fact that Beeper has already come up with a patch to workaround Apple's block show's that they're going to work hard to keep this service running.
Edit: Beeper mini is still down, but Beeper Cloud is back up.
Yeah if Apple is willing to invest tons of money to keep using literal slaves (or at least to be intentionally ignorant about slavery in their supply chain) they aren't going to be chivalrous about someone circumventing their intentional attempts to amp up class based marketing pressure for their apps.
USAian
If you really want to go down that road, use something like “United Statesman” or something that actually fits the language. “Americanian” is absurd and people will take you less seriously for it.
Honestly let's have some dignity and not buy into this vapid pretentious idiocy.
Right, I don't understand why these weird hacky services are making headlines. If you want to have a blue bubble, just buy an iPhone. They're not actually THAT expensive, you can usually buy last year's model for under $500 if you wait for a deal and you're willing to commit to a carrier. Or if you really can't afford that, you can get an older iPhone basically for free. Even a 3 year old model gets you a blue bubble.
Or, if you're not an insecure child that gives in to peer pressure, get whatever phone you want.
is bad for environment
I have a 5 year old iphone, it’s great. I can’t imagine it’s worth anything, just noting it works for every day use. You don’t need a new phone at all for anything.
ETA: I just NFC-charged my local transit card with my ancient-ass iphone the other day which is a thing I didn’t honestly know it could do yesterday. I’m not trolling, I don’t know what has been offered in the last 5 years on either platform that is at all required to use a phone, as long as Apple continues to support the phone with OS updates.
My thoughts exactly. It’s fucking childish to make such a fuss over the color of a text bubble. These kids need to grow up.
Illegal Anti-Competitive / Cartel behaviour, yes??
Apple, you are only exempt-from-law UNTIL the regulators decide to do their jobs honestly.
THEN, you're hosed.
_ /\ _
I mean, even the EU already exempted iMessage from the new rules.
Because they already follow a standard. SMS and MMS.
And with them adopting RCS? There’s nothing they can force to open iMessage.
This doesn't matter because everyone should be using signal.
It is a great app, but you cannot fit everyone into a single app.
Examples why I personally sometimes don't want to use Signal:
Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.
no versions for systems other than Android and iOS
requires phone number (common argument)
Ok, those are legitimate complaints, and I suspect they're related too. It would be nice to have a web client.
hard to integrate bots, notifications and automatic services for the future use
Personally, I'd say that's a feature.
Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.
To be fair, signal is an open source protocol that anyone is free to implement. Signal protocol
I wish!
What's the point of even using iMessage when there's so many better options for messaging.
"It's installed by default and all my friends are on it" - 50% of Americans
They don't need to worry about the fact that the other half of Americans are not able to comfortably message them, or participate in group chats, because those are people poorer than them that they might not even want to interact with anyways. Some of them might even be not white.
This becomes even more extreme as ages become younger, with around 98% of college age students and younger having iPhones (this is obviously biased to higher income colleges in metropolitian area but the data is still useful). The peer pressure of not having an iPhone is genuinely incredible (trust me, i experience it). I have genuinely had people stop wanting to be friends with me once they learned I had an Android phone.
Apple has a monopoly so powerful that they influence the social circles of almost every grade schooler and college student in America. This is why they don't want to give it up.
The peer pressure of not having an iPhone is genuinely incredible (trust me, i experience it).
I wanna talk a bit about where this comes from. There are what, two or three models of iPhone that you can buy off the shelf right now?
Think about grade school kids and their first phone. What do they get? Well, parents almost expect them to break the phone. If it's an iPhone, then it's one of the three, expensive models. If it's an Android, it's probably a cheap piece of shit (because on Android those are an option). It's certainly not a Pixel or the latest Samsung.
So grade school kids learn that iPhone = quality, and Android = cheap pieces of shit. And even if at the high end Android is better, young people by and large don't experience that. And it sticks with them. Apple did a similar strategy with putting Apple computers into every grade school in the 1980s.
And Apple is doing everything they can to reinforce this marketing and peer pressure, especially the iMessage thing. The only reason the iMessage "issue" exists is because Apple wants it to exist. They want the $700 cosmetic for chat to continue to exist. It's a large part of their business model.
I have never had an issue with messaging anyone in iMessage, regardless of what platform they are using. Serious question: is there something I am missing out on with iMessage that warrants investigating alternatives?
If you don't have a blue bubble on your friends phones, they will bully you until you take an AR-15 to school and kill everyone.
Either that, or suicide. Blue bubbles are a leading cause of suicide among tweens and teens in the US.
how could no one have forseen the most obvious outcome in the world coming?
Saw a few comments in the initial threads about it confidently claiming Apple wouldn’t be able to keep Beeper Mini out since doing so would mess with iOS too.
Super weird to be so sure about that when they obviously didn’t know shit about it.
From a business perspective, this was the stupidest possible investment. There is no way Apple was going to let this fly.
Why would you sink so much money into such a stupid product?
A lot of people seem to live in a delusional bubble where they don't realize all the shitty things about apple products are by design.
Back in 1999 MSN messenger had support for chatting with AIM users, it was quickly blocked by AOL and for a while there was a game of cat and mouse between Microsoft and AOL until Microsoft quietly dropped the feature
https://archive.ph/20120526215641/http://www.news.com/2100-1023-228960.html
Yep. I wish Beeper had just stuck with the PC and iOS apps.
Whoever gave it 24 hours gets a medal from me
Meanwhile, Whatsapp continues to be the most used messaging app in the world, with no sms or any other sort of fallback if you don't have an internet connection.
Yes. But America wants their blue message balloons. How else do you know who you need to ignore? /s
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It appears that Beeper Mini, an easy iMessage solution for Android, was simply too good to be true — or a short-lived dream, at least.
On Friday, less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages.
Several people at The Verge were unable to activate their Android phone numbers with Beeper Mini as of Friday afternoon, a clear indication that Apple has plugged up whatever holes allowed the app to operate to begin with.
The belief — or I suppose the hope — among Beeper’s developers and users was that it would be such an ordeal for Apple to block the Android app that doing so wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
Previous attempts to get iMessage working on Android — like Beeper’s original app — have involved complex systems with remote Macs logged into a user’s Apple ID.
Nothing, the startup from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, recently sought to bring iMessage to its latest phone, but that plan was quickly derailed by security and privacy concerns.
The original article contains 450 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Who fucking cares?
The original article contains 450 words, the summary contains 3 words. I am not a bot.
Edit: look at all the butthurt Apple fanboys.
At the very least, hopefully Apple will notice that there is enough of an appetite for iMessage on Android that people are getting innovative about it.
Apple reportedly built a version of iMessages for Android a long time ago. Then they realized how many phones their bubble scheme sold and reversed course.
Why do people want iMessage for Android? That gives them more control over the entire messaging ecosystem.
They're adopting the RCS protocol, that's what people should want. It's interoperable with all phones and not just the ones that happen to support iMessage. It's supposed to replace SMS and MMS, which are guaranteed to work between all platforms.
This iMessage vs WhatsApp vs other walled-garden messaging apps debate is stupid when an open protocol is right there.
They're adopting the RCS protocol, that's what people should want
Standard RCS is not e2ee, only google's implementation on top of it is. I feel most here would prefer an e2ee messaging protocol over something else that can be observed by third parties
Samsung is the only other company that integrated Google's e2ee implementation into their stock messages app fairly recently, it's supported standard RCS for a good number of years now
Couldn’t agree more.
What's their motivation? Unless they charge for it, the other service to non customers and remove one of the barriers keeping people in iOS. I've read that EU won't force it to open, so either there is profit involved or I don't see apple doing it.
Nobody (a small subset) uses that in the EU.
iPhones are a status symbol as they are in the US but only play a small part in here (65% Android).
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/184516/umfrage/marktanteil-der-mobilen-betriebssysteme-in-europa-seit-2009/
The US alone has a 53% share for iOS.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/77324/umfrage/marktanteile-der-betriebssysteme-fuer-smartphones-in-den-usa/
Who cares?
People that upvote the post, which seems to outnumber the people that are doing the opposite.
defederate facebook
No one that has a brain.
I don't give a flying fuck about it.
I have never needed iMessage in my life and I haven't even seen it. Proprietary messaging apps are not trustworthy.
No one with a brain does.
is opinion
I really don't understand who the fuck cares about this shit. OMG! Can't believe the world we're living in now