I don't have an Android phone, so haven't tested Beeper Mini. But I do use Beeper Cloud on my iphone, ipad and PC, and it's great. It's been especially useful on my PC so I can send+receive...
I don't have an Android phone, so haven't tested Beeper Mini. But I do use Beeper Cloud on my iphone, ipad and PC, and it's great. It's been especially useful on my PC so I can send+receive iMessage texts on it, which how all my family communicates with each other. And it's also super convenient for receiving SMS 2FA confirmation codes on my PC, which Beeper can even automatically copy to your clipboard for easy pasting.
And Beeper also supports Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Google Chat, LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, and Google Messages SMS/RCS, so you can consolidate them all into a single app instead of needing separate apps for each.
The devs are also awesome, super communicative, and super responsive as well. When I first signed up for Beeper, it wasn't showing all my Slack channels properly, so I filed a bug report. They responded almost immediately, and had the problem sorted out by the next day. So IMO it's a great app, run by a great team (who I have casually chatted with a few times in the Beeper Help channel), and so I highly recommend giving it a try. I only wish they would hurry up and add Steam Chat support, since then it would be the absolute perfect app in my eyes. :P
yeah I actually used it on your recommendation because I got tired of switching apps. Signal I still keep separate, however. I am looking forwards to Mini integrating everything again though!
yeah I actually used it on your recommendation because I got tired of switching apps. Signal I still keep separate, however. I am looking forwards to Mini integrating everything again though!
Oh, right. I remember that convo now. I thought you said you didn't have a use case for it? :P Not having to constantly switch between apps was enough for me to permanently make the switch to...
Oh, right. I remember that convo now. I thought you said you didn't have a use case for it? :P Not having to constantly switch between apps was enough for me to permanently make the switch to using it too. ;)
it's like a brain worm, when i started realizing how many times I was switching apps I started getting fed up with it, there's probably a name for that.
it's like a brain worm, when i started realizing how many times I was switching apps I started getting fed up with it, there's probably a name for that.
Funny story, I just had to relog for Beeper for an update, and I actually had an email from them from a recruiter back in May. If I was less busy at the time and actually went through with the...
Funny story, I just had to relog for Beeper for an update, and I actually had an email from them from a recruiter back in May. If I was less busy at the time and actually went through with the interview this potentially could have been my first project, funny how that works out.
Just went to download this as I think it looks excellent. I'm 173k on the waitlist, so I'm clearly not the only one! Would you mind if I snagged a ref, too?
Just went to download this as I think it looks excellent. I'm 173k on the waitlist, so I'm clearly not the only one! Would you mind if I snagged a ref, too?
Sure. But, TBH, I'm not quite sure how the referral codes work. Their FAQ says they can only be used two times every seven days. So I will PM you the code, but it's the same code that I shared...
Sure. But, TBH, I'm not quite sure how the referral codes work. Their FAQ says they can only be used two times every seven days. So I will PM you the code, but it's the same code that I shared with two other people who already used it to register this week, and so I'm not sure whether it will actually work for you too.
Edit: Yeah, didn't work. "Error: Referring user has invited too many other users recently, please try again later."
Blue bubbles are how text messages appear between two iPhones. Normally an Android phone will have bubbles appear as green on an iPhone. This allows you to use an Android phone and not be outed to...
Blue bubbles are how text messages appear between two iPhones. Normally an Android phone will have bubbles appear as green on an iPhone.
This allows you to use an Android phone and not be outed to all your iPhone friends.
As an iPhone user, I find the whole green bubble thing to be kinda sad and overblown. Corporate fandom to the point of shaming someone elses purchases is pathetic
As an iPhone user, I find the whole green bubble thing to be kinda sad and overblown. Corporate fandom to the point of shaming someone elses purchases is pathetic
It's super dumb. Especially when you consider there is an actual issue beyond the color of a text. I recently made the switch from iOS to Android (I like to bounce back and forth every couple...
It's super dumb. Especially when you consider there is an actual issue beyond the color of a text. I recently made the switch from iOS to Android (I like to bounce back and forth every couple years), and it's completely impossible to send large images or videos to iOS users via text. Even a tiny (by modern standards) 5mb video was too much for MMS to handle.
Thankfully that's not going to be true next year, but this whole time while people bickered about the color of their text, there were actual, annoying issues communicating between the two platforms.
I thought it was fairly obvious, but the color represents the issues. It's the association with the issues that makes the color difference matter. If you see a green bubble, it can be associated...
but this whole time while people bickered about the color of their text, there were actual, annoying issues communicating between the two platforms.
I thought it was fairly obvious, but the color represents the issues. It's the association with the issues that makes the color difference matter. If you see a green bubble, it can be associated with all of those annoying issues before they've even happened. Apple did all of this on purpose, knowing it would create such associations and the lock-in effect.
Pretty much everyone in my life does this with the exception of large quantities of images or a video longer than a few minutes. I would imagine this is pretty common with how well messaging apps...
Pretty much everyone in my life does this with the exception of large quantities of images or a video longer than a few minutes. I would imagine this is pretty common with how well messaging apps like iMessage handle photos and videos. Maybe nobody in your circle does this, but I see it all the time.
I’ll chime in to say this lines up with my experience. The only time I have seen someone share pictures through a cloud service is when I show them how. And it is always through sms or iMessage.
I’ll chime in to say this lines up with my experience. The only time I have seen someone share pictures through a cloud service is when I show them how. And it is always through sms or iMessage.
People with kids and lots of videos/images to send to grandparents for one. Why use a 3rd party app when the functionality is natively present in your phone? The vast majority of my contacts are...
People with kids and lots of videos/images to send to grandparents for one. Why use a 3rd party app when the functionality is natively present in your phone? The vast majority of my contacts are iOS users, so before I switched to Android I pretty much always used iMessage to send large images/videos when I needed to. And once Apple adopts RCS I can continue doing so natively on Android. Until then I can use this Beeper thing to basically give me the same functionality now without having to resort to using something developed by Meta or inconveniencing people with links to my nextcloud.
You're not wrong but it's young people, what are you gonna do? Xbox vs Sony, iPhone vs Android (or Samsung to most), the list goes on. I'd say there is a sizable population of iphone users that...
You're not wrong but it's young people, what are you gonna do? Xbox vs Sony, iPhone vs Android (or Samsung to most), the list goes on.
I'd say there is a sizable population of iphone users that don't know or care but they're probably less likely to proselyte as well.
Seconding this. When I was in grad school recently, the professor I worked for teased me about turning our work group chat green, and she's like 50. It didn't bother me except that I couldn't...
Seconding this. When I was in grad school recently, the professor I worked for teased me about turning our work group chat green, and she's like 50. It didn't bother me except that I couldn't believe she was seriously bringing it up.
Yeah It's a weird thing more than anything. Before I knew there were functional differences I was like "I can make my messages any color on my phone wtf is wrong with yours" And now it's "this is...
Yeah It's a weird thing more than anything.
Before I knew there were functional differences I was like "I can make my messages any color on my phone wtf is wrong with yours"
And now it's "this is Apple's fault so stop blaming me"
The first time I'd heard about the different colors for texts on iPhone was when my wife's friends started shaming us for sending them "green messages". I was a bit taken aback. Later they mocked...
The first time I'd heard about the different colors for texts on iPhone was when my wife's friends started shaming us for sending them "green messages". I was a bit taken aback. Later they mocked her for taking photos on her android because "why bother if you don't have an iPhone". Eventually I got her an iPhone, and frankly it underperforms my android in literally every way. And it costs three times more. We both made the iPhone swap, but I switched back within a few months because I couldn't stand the lack of user control and how, in nearly every use, ios tries really hard to push you into their proprietary ecosystem. I wanna use the software I like, dammit!
I'll stop ranting now, but yeah iPhone/blue bubbles is definitely a status thing for large swaths of the population who are convinced that Apple makes the superior product.
Well and if they have an iPhone they think Android phones are the problem. Like that's the mind boggling part of it. Like they told you, "why bother taking pictures with an android" Because they...
Well and if they have an iPhone they think Android phones are the problem. Like that's the mind boggling part of it. Like they told you, "why bother taking pictures with an android"
Because they thought the small pics meant shitty cameras.
Hard agree on everything you said. Had to use an iPhone for work a few years ago and basically started using my personal phone for work instead because everything (third party apps) was just...
Hard agree on everything you said. Had to use an iPhone for work a few years ago and basically started using my personal phone for work instead because everything (third party apps) was just seamless on my android. My take is android is a computer with telephony, iPhone is a phone with some computer fuctionality. Trying to customize an iPhone to the level of an android was next to impossible.
All of that being said, everyone should use what works best for their situation. Not every user is a power user. And both have decent camera fuctionality. That's not even an issue unless you need a real camera and then that becomes a whole different discussion.
I (an android user) only care about it when my friends with iphone give me crap because they cant use their group chats with me. I truthfully couldnt care less about any of it, I am just glad...
I (an android user) only care about it when my friends with iphone give me crap because they cant use their group chats with me. I truthfully couldnt care less about any of it, I am just glad they'll shut up about it now. I agree though it is such a non-issue to me.
There is at least one good reason to differentiate: security. It may be controversial about how good or bad or different, but imessage protocol is superior to sms, and i adjust what i say based on...
There is at least one good reason to differentiate: security. It may be controversial about how good or bad or different, but imessage protocol is superior to sms, and i adjust what i say based on which protocol i am using.
The color is a half meme. The main issue with "green bubbles" is that you don't get iMessage, which means you don't get the comforts of messaging over IP as opposed to the slow, unreliable nature...
The color is a half meme. The main issue with "green bubbles" is that you don't get iMessage, which means you don't get the comforts of messaging over IP as opposed to the slow, unreliable nature of SMS.
What compounds it is that "green bubbles" are like GPL - if there's a green bubble in a group chat, the entire chat is downgraded to SMS. Not only is this just annoying - reactions get converted into this horrible "👍 to 'message'" response, images are low quality - worse of all, the reliability of the chat goes down the drain and messages are liable to lost to the ether.
It's not really about not being outed - if they're IRL friends, they obviously know you don't use an iPhone. It's more that Android users tend to get left out of group chats if you're in iMessage circles.
Well, I'm not a fan of either Apple or Google having a stranglehold on the phone market due to their own proprietary services and making iMessage and RCS not cooperate is on them.
Well, I'm not a fan of either Apple or Google having a stranglehold on the phone market due to their own proprietary services and making iMessage and RCS not cooperate is on them.
I did some reading and green bubbles also lack the same security standards cause it's apparently just SMS, which I think is a pretty good defense for the bubble color. Honestly even with RCS, the...
I did some reading and green bubbles also lack the same security standards cause it's apparently just SMS, which I think is a pretty good defense for the bubble color.
Honestly even with RCS, the actual blame lies with the GSM foundation being incapable of coming up with a secure standard.
What compounds it is that "green bubbles" are like GPL - if there's a green bubble in a group chat, the entire chat is downgraded to SMS
I think they kind of have to do that with group chats. It would possibly misrepresent the privacy of the conversation if they did partial iMessage blue bubbles and partial SMS. The messages being...
I think they kind of have to do that with group chats. It would possibly misrepresent the privacy of the conversation if they did partial iMessage blue bubbles and partial SMS. The messages being sent to other iPhones could in theory be encrypted, but since those same messages are also being sent to the SMS recipient, the privacy level of the message isn't the same, there's potentially intermediates that could view the conversation of the chat because of this.
I don't recall all what other features work or don't work in group chats, but that could also get messy in the case of the reactions and such because you could end up with SMS users getting spammed with "Liked" SMS messages (though Google has alleviated that issue somewhat), but other features might produce undesirable results as well.
Having said that, I'm sure there's some element of it that Apple does intentionally reduce functionality to further make their users hate Android users. Like renaming the group chats, I'm not sure if there's a reason why they couldn't allow people to rename the chat, I can't think of a good reason.
I would just like to say that group renaming being synced to all users is, in my opinion, a bad thing and should be able to be disabled. I have an iMessage group with my parents. I want to name it...
I would just like to say that group renaming being synced to all users is, in my opinion, a bad thing and should be able to be disabled. I have an iMessage group with my parents. I want to name it “Parents”. If I do that, they also have the group named Parents, which makes no sense. I have all sorts of weird names set for my groups because they need to be sensible to everyone, not just me.
Sure, but they know what you get when you message over IP - reactions, the ability to send large filesize media, read receipts, and much higher reliability of message transmission (and, of course,...
Sure, but they know what you get when you message over IP - reactions, the ability to send large filesize media, read receipts, and much higher reliability of message transmission (and, of course, you don't need a cellular connection).
Oh wow, it's really that big of a deal? Paying a monthly subscription to appear blue sounds bothersome, I guess I'm lucky no one made a deal out of it when I changed phones
Oh wow, it's really that big of a deal? Paying a monthly subscription to appear blue sounds bothersome, I guess I'm lucky no one made a deal out of it when I changed phones
I've only had one time where someone said "Oh, someone's green." for a group chat and it didn't bother me any but I could see for a younger person the peer pressure and all that.
I've only had one time where someone said "Oh, someone's green." for a group chat and it didn't bother me any but I could see for a younger person the peer pressure and all that.
The last place I worked at (a small business, more than 30 employees but less than 50), I was left out of group chats that the owner was involved in occasionally and I was told something along...
The last place I worked at (a small business, more than 30 employees but less than 50), I was left out of group chats that the owner was involved in occasionally and I was told something along these lines by my boss 'the owner hates green bubbles' and my role was bordering on management. They did not provide company phones generally unless the person's job involved talking to customers outside the office (so generally sales people but also some management though most already had iPhones and didn't want a second phone), but I was the unofficial IT person so I ended up commandeering a phone without anyone approving it and then suddenly I was in more group chats.
It's not the color that matters, the color simply represents all the technical issues introduced with the tech that is associated with the color. If an iPhone user sees green, then that means all the iMessage features and functionality go away. It's not like the owner of the company just didn't like the color green, he didn't like the fact that his message functionality was reduced. It happened that within his circles enough people used iPhones that he could make a distinction about the conversations he was willing to have in some cases and who was excluded from them. It's not like he never texted me or I was never in any group chats at all, but it was clear that in some ongoing chats where it wasn't essential for me to be in, that I wasn't always being included. In that type of business, it has the effect of making it harder to expand your role because you get left out of conversations.
When COVID hit and schools shut down, all of my collaboration and communication with other teachers moved to group chats on our private devices (we don't have Slack or Teams or anything like that,...
When COVID hit and schools shut down, all of my collaboration and communication with other teachers moved to group chats on our private devices (we don't have Slack or Teams or anything like that, and even if we did, most of the staff wouldn't use it).
I was the only Android user of all my colleagues, and I singlehandedly "broke" every group chat I was in because my presence in the group kicked things off iMessage down to MMS. Also, I was in a lot of group chats -- different grade levels, departments, social circles, etc. It was a miserable time even independent of COVID. I would miss messages; they would arrive out of order; sometimes I'd get duplicates; forget about pictures or reaction gifs or videos. Everybody, including me, was unhappy.
Most people I work with didn't even know enough about the "blue vs. green bubbles problem" to know what was going on -- they simply had no idea why their reactions weren't working correctly and why they couldn't rename the chat or add/remove people as needed. I was also the unofficial tech support guy, so I had to do a lot of explaining of what was going on to people who legitimately didn't know that group chats even could break like that.
I ended up getting an iPhone simply to make my professional life way easier. It's not like anyone was trying to shame me or anything. Instead, it was a sad comment on the loss of interoperability. MMS was an outdated standard that should have been supplanted by something newer and better, but instead of committing to continued interoperability, all of the tech giants had since tried to silo interpersonal communication as a method of user lock-in. Apple is definitely guilty of this, but so are Google and Facebook. The fact that Beeper exists to put fifteen (!!!) different chat apps under one roof is proof that they won and we, as users, lost and lost big.
I recently connected with a friend who I'd fallen out of touch with for a bit. I texted him that I was going to call him in a bit, and he responded with "Which app?" It felt funny, despite it being a perfectly valid question to ask! There used to be a potential future in which my preferred app would have been able to call his preferred app -- even if they were different apps -- because interoperability was a virtue on which a lot of modern technology was built, but I think we're officially locked out of that future now.
The doors on a lot of different barns have closed. There's no getting them back open again, and there's definitely no getting everyone under one roof.
My friends and I have separate group chats for those who have a green bubble. It really hinders our ability to share pics, vids, memes etc etc and makes the messenging experience worst
My friends and I have separate group chats for those who have a green bubble. It really hinders our ability to share pics, vids, memes etc etc and makes the messenging experience worst
Trying to convince your friends and family to swap to X random messaging app is how you divide your friend group. Well, more likely everyone ignores you, so dividing yourself from everyone else...
Trying to convince your friends and family to swap to X random messaging app is how you divide your friend group.
Well, more likely everyone ignores you, so dividing yourself from everyone else more likely.
I think the blue v green thing is just a marketing gimmick. Or rather it's representative of larger issues communicating between iOS and Android. For example, you can't send even moderately sized...
I think the blue v green thing is just a marketing gimmick. Or rather it's representative of larger issues communicating between iOS and Android. For example, you can't send even moderately sized images/videos from Android to iOS because it can only communicate via MMS and there are very low size limits there.
I just started the trial, not for the blue/green thing (could not possibly care any less about that), but for being able to send large images/videos to people without having to upload it to a server first. At least until Apple adopts RCS support next year.
So it's just a product invented to combat some kind of FOMO? I don't understand. I don't really even use imsg that much anyway (We're all on whatsapp in the UK). Does it have some hidden feature...
So it's just a product invented to combat some kind of FOMO?
I don't understand. I don't really even use imsg that much anyway (We're all on whatsapp in the UK).
Does it have some hidden feature compared to regular txt or a facebook msg / whatsapp?
Having access to a device that can do imessage isn't really a flex in any way idk...
Now you can send and receive blue bubble texts from your phone number. As soon as you install Beeper Mini, your Android phone number will be blue instead of green when your iPhone friends text you.
I was referring to your response. The article explains a lot but not what blue bubbles actually are to someone who's never heard the term. I understand now that the difference is iMessage and its...
I was referring to your response. The article explains a lot but not what blue bubbles actually are to someone who's never heard the term.
I understand now that the difference is iMessage and its benefits.
This problem could be avoided if everyone to moved onto a proper cross platform IP messenger like signal or WhatsApp? Outside of the US I don't know anyone who still uses SMS. I suppose with the...
This problem could be avoided if everyone to moved onto a proper cross platform IP messenger like signal or WhatsApp?
Outside of the US I don't know anyone who still uses SMS. I suppose with the high apple market share over there it made sense for people to get used to using iMessage. It's a chicken and egg situation I guess, you'd need a critical proportion of the population to switch for it to work out.
signal and whatsapp have their own problems. signal is not easy-to-use to the same degree iMessage and SMS are. moving your signal contacts and chat history to a new phone can actually be a pain...
signal and whatsapp have their own problems.
signal is not easy-to-use to the same degree iMessage and SMS are. moving your signal contacts and chat history to a new phone can actually be a pain in the butt if you do not plan ahead, and the end-to-end encryption isn't quite as seamless as iMessage. It's not a problem for people who are even a little tech savvy, but I don't think I could get my parents using it. Their desktop client also leaves a lot to be desired.
whatsapp is owned by facebook, so i do not trust it on principal. last i used it, chat sessions were not encrypted by default, and enabling encryption resulted in a less fluid experience (i.e. encrypted chat sessions not synchronizing across multiple clients signed in to the same account)
i hate to say it, but if imessage was available cross platform, it would be the messenger that offers the best mix of privacy and ease of use, which is probably why apple values it so highly as a tool to drive their hardware sales.
I think you might be confusing WhatsApp with Telegram which has had this issue for a long time. WhatsApp has pretty much always been encrypted by default. I agree that the Facebook thing isn't...
chat sessions were not encrypted by default
I think you might be confusing WhatsApp with Telegram which has had this issue for a long time. WhatsApp has pretty much always been encrypted by default. I agree that the Facebook thing isn't great, but honestly WhatsApp is one of the best tools out there for doing convenient e2e encrypted-by-default messaging - Signal, as you say, favours privacy over usability and is therefore more painful to use, and Telegram favours usability over privacy and therefore makes it sometimes quite difficult to use encrypted chats. WhatsApp mostly just works.
Signal’s desktop app isn’t amazing either, which may seem like it shouldn’t be a big deal but it’s something that those who are sitting in front of a computer for the better part of every day care...
Signal’s desktop app isn’t amazing either, which may seem like it shouldn’t be a big deal but it’s something that those who are sitting in front of a computer for the better part of every day care about.
On macOS iMessage has the best desktop app, but probably the best that’s cross platform is Telegram. Unfortunately, by default Telegram chats aren’t encrypted.
Almost nobody talks much via SMS, even in the US, but there isn't a default like Whatsapp, so it seems like everyone always uses SMS, since it's the default for establishing contact before finding...
Almost nobody talks much via SMS, even in the US, but there isn't a default like Whatsapp, so it seems like everyone always uses SMS, since it's the default for establishing contact before finding out whether you and your interlocutor have Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Wire, whatever. iMessage is basically RCS (in functionality), so iOS users are already getting all the benefits of it and have for years, so any change is going to be seen as a compromise, since, gosh, all the people they talk to already use iMessage! (having conveniently stopped talking to android users for convenience)
So we really need something that is 0 friction to replace SMS, a massive rush to a single platform that ends up with a critical mass of users within months, or we need the government to strongarm Apple into either fully opening iMessage or at least making it interop nicely.
Yes, but it supposedly "will work alongside iMessage", not in it, and so will still break groups and almost certainly be perceived as stooping to talk to Android users just like SMS.
Yes, but it supposedly "will work alongside iMessage", not in it, and so will still break groups and almost certainly be perceived as stooping to talk to Android users just like SMS.
To my knowledge, Apple has not actually elaborated exactly what that means, so that would appear to be the worst possible scenario. iMessage works alongside SMS, and yet it still provides a...
To my knowledge, Apple has not actually elaborated exactly what that means, so that would appear to be the worst possible scenario. iMessage works alongside SMS, and yet it still provides a seamless integration. The Apple messaging app is just called Messages, not iMessage; iMessage is the protocol.
If SMS were seamlessly integrated, there wouldn't be the bizarre "ew greentext" meme. If RCS is conflated with iMessave for all intents and purposes of users, I'll be shocked if it doesn't come...
If SMS were seamlessly integrated, there wouldn't be the bizarre "ew greentext" meme. If RCS is conflated with iMessave for all intents and purposes of users, I'll be shocked if it doesn't come from a regulatory menace. The interpretation I have taken is hardly a minority opinion, even among apple tech bloggers. They haven't entirely ruled out a better UI integration, but what in Apple's history indicates they would prefer to be interoperable when they have the option otherwise?
When you send a message with the messages app, it attempts to send it through iMessage first, and if it cannot do so it will send an SMS/MMS message instead. That's pretty seamless to me. Before...
When you send a message with the messages app, it attempts to send it through iMessage first, and if it cannot do so it will send an SMS/MMS message instead. That's pretty seamless to me. Before iMessage was a thing all SMS/MMS messages were green; blue was chosen as a way to tell the user that the message came through iMessage instead. What do you want, that it be kept secret instead? The fact that they have historically decided to handle everything in one messaging app instead of putting it into seperate apps seems like a good enough reason to assume they would do the same going forward, to assume otherwise seems unnecessarily pessimistic.
But in any case, speculating about what they will or won't do outside of their statements seems like a rather pointless exercise in my opinion. I couldn't care less if they put it in a separate app. If they did, then I would just never open the Messages app again because RCS will just work no matter who I need to communicate with.
Appreciate it. I was talking about the division in the market, that causes it to seem to non-North Americans that we use SMS constantly. I went into why I thought it'd take a lot to change the...
When you send a message with the messages app, it attempts to send it through iMessage first, and if it cannot do so it will send an SMS/MMS message instead.
Appreciate it.
I was talking about the division in the market, that causes it to seem to non-North Americans that we use SMS constantly. I went into why I thought it'd take a lot to change the current fragmentation. That's why I'm making baseless speculations, because the comment I originally replied to wanted to know why we all don't just move to a single IM service. To what end are you arguing?
My point is that with Apple adopting RCS there will finally be a strong de-facto standard for messaging - at least in the US market. It’s a very imperfect solution - I’m particularly unhappy with...
My point is that with Apple adopting RCS there will finally be a strong de-facto standard for messaging - at least in the US market. It’s a very imperfect solution - I’m particularly unhappy with the requirement for phone service, which incurs a cost to maintain - but that unity is something that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time
I do wish that people settled on something better like Signal or encrypted XMPP, but it would appear that people only want solutions that have already been chosen and set up for them. Heck, at least it’s not owned by Meta.
I'm a huge advocate for Signal. I push aggressively to get everyone I know to use it. An actual private means of communication in this day and age is so rare. Its frustrating that the discussion...
I'm a huge advocate for Signal. I push aggressively to get everyone I know to use it. An actual private means of communication in this day and age is so rare. Its frustrating that the discussion is over Blue or Green bubbles as opposed to owning your data or trusting your data with a company.
Its also frustrating that we don't have open standards to allow users the choice of platform, device and messaging service.
Its cool to see Beeper putting in the effort to support multiple messaging services. However I long for the days of interoperability when you could just choose whatever messenger you wanted, then talk to people on AIM, MSN, Hangouts, etc.
AFAIK there was never true interoperability even back then though, except in the case of IRC which uses an open standard, and specifically between MSN and Yahoo who had an interoperability...
I long for the days of interoperability when you could just choose whatever messenger you wanted, then talk to people on AIM, MSN, Hangouts, etc.
AFAIK there was never true interoperability even back then though, except in the case of IRC which uses an open standard, and specifically between MSN and Yahoo who had an interoperability arrangement with each other that excluded everyone else. So much like today, Trillian, Pidgin, Odigo, and all the other consolidated messenger apps from back then also relied on reverse engineering proprietary protocols, and using other hackish ways to get every messenger service under one roof.
I mean, this is the main thing. My sisters have an iMessage group chat that I can't be in because I'm the only one using Android. Now that I've moved to Europe, all my local conversation happens...
Outside of the US I don't know anyone who still uses SMS. I suppose with the high apple market share over there it made sense for people to get used to using iMessage.
I mean, this is the main thing. My sisters have an iMessage group chat that I can't be in because I'm the only one using Android. Now that I've moved to Europe, all my local conversation happens via WhatsApp or Telegram. But US Americans do exist, and it's non-trivial to get them to download an entirely new app (most Americans don't use WhatsApp at all) just for you.
Yeah once there's a critical mass of users it's hard to see everyone switching at once, which is why I sort of get the iMessage issue. Most of my friends and family use WhatsApp. Some of my more...
Yeah once there's a critical mass of users it's hard to see everyone switching at once, which is why I sort of get the iMessage issue. Most of my friends and family use WhatsApp. Some of my more techie friends and I chat via Signal, but even for me where privacy is important it's a little annoying having two apps.
It would be cool if there was a common IP protocol / messaging backbone which any app which can match a spec could use. That would allow users to pick and choose an app that works for them. That's probably impossible due to technical and social reasons though.
I am seriously impressed. They actually did the difficult work of RE'ing iMessage to create a fully Android native solution. I wonder how brittle it will be (maybe not so, given that unless Apple...
I am seriously impressed. They actually did the difficult work of RE'ing iMessage to create a fully Android native solution. I wonder how brittle it will be (maybe not so, given that unless Apple directly targets them, Apple themselves has to maintain compatibility), but for now, brilliant achievement.
"They" is actually a high school programmer - https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/ - who sold their POC to Beeper, which to me is even more impressive.
I'm using it on my laptop running Linux, it works great and is something I've wanted for a long time. I reckon once it gets enough traction Apple will find a way to make it not work anymore. We'll...
I'm using it on my laptop running Linux, it works great and is something I've wanted for a long time. I reckon once it gets enough traction Apple will find a way to make it not work anymore. We'll see.
There's a few things that people have questioned about this with regards to what Apple might try to do to stop them. Some say they might try some legal tactics, cease and desist etc. and some...
There's a few things that people have questioned about this with regards to what Apple might try to do to stop them. Some say they might try some legal tactics, cease and desist etc. and some wonder if they can just change how it works to break what they reverse engineered. That last part is assumed in generally all cases it would require Apple to update new and old iPhone Messages apps in order to be able to update this system to break what Beeper is doing, and even that is iffy because they can make the updates, but they can't necessarily force people to accept the update. Then they would be breaking messaging functionality of iPhone users.
However one thing I hadn't seen mentioned much is that a key element of this Beeper mini app is the Beeper Push Notification Service. Basically you won't know when you've gotten any iMessages without this unless you open up your app and look. So I wonder if Apple can target the servers that Beeper uses in it's Push Notification service, by identifying the servers making these connections and blocking them, they can prevent pretty important functionality of this app without having to break functionality of iPhone users.
I don't know how much I necessarily trust Beeper. I heard about them years ago (on Tildes) and was on the waitlist for years. When I finally got in, I went to sign up and put everything into the...
I don't know how much I necessarily trust Beeper. I heard about them years ago (on Tildes) and was on the waitlist for years. When I finally got in, I went to sign up and put everything into the app. One of my apps notified me that the server requesting access to my account was based out of Iran and I immediately stopped everything and deleted my account. They said it was an error on their part and they would work to fix but I didn't reengage with them or the app.
You can always inspect the code, and self-host it if you don't trust their cloud hosting: https://github.com/beeper https://github.com/beeper/self-host Eric Migicovsky, the Beeper co-founder, is...
Eric Migicovsky, the Beeper co-founder, is also a Canadian now residing in Palo Alto (where the company HQ is), and was a Partner at Y Combinator (who runs Hacker News) that was responsible for running their Startup School. So I don't think there is any nefarious Iranian intelligence gathering thing going on with the company. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmigi https://www.linkedin.com/company/beeperhq
It depends on if Apple implements the main RCS standard as supported by carriers, which isn’t encrypted or Google’s variation which is. It’s possible that Apple can’t implement encrypted RCS...
It depends on if Apple implements the main RCS standard as supported by carriers, which isn’t encrypted or Google’s variation which is. It’s possible that Apple can’t implement encrypted RCS without relying on Google servers (not sure how RCS works internally).
RCS will bring many of the modern chat features to non-iMessage conversations with iPhone users, but without encryption there’d still technically be a reason to use Beeper Mini instead.
Apple has said they intend to implement the carrier-standard RCS, which makes sense. Apple is replacing SMS with RCS, not iMessage. Part of the confusion from the general public over this is that...
Apple has said they intend to implement the carrier-standard RCS, which makes sense. Apple is replacing SMS with RCS, not iMessage. Part of the confusion from the general public over this is that SMS and iMessage live in the same app for iOS users. A big part of the draw early on was that you didn't need a second app, you would get all the iMessage benefits (encryption, rich messages, better multimedia support, free) to any other iOS user automatically. You just send a message and everything else is figured out for you; it sends and SMS but if it finds out the person you're talking to has iMessage on, it subsequently sends iMessages. It's the origin of the blue bubbles, in fact. Everything was green on iOS, blue was added to show the message was an iMessage, and when iMessages fail it falls back to SMS.
Anyway, all of that to say Apple has no intention of adopting Google's version of this, but they are onboard with updating a carrier standard and replacing the SMS fallback with what amounts to "SMS 2."
I'm still on the waiting list for Beeper Cloud. I signed up when it was announced it would be free. Has anybody here been signed up via the waiting list? How long does i normally take?
I'm still on the waiting list for Beeper Cloud. I signed up when it was announced it would be free. Has anybody here been signed up via the waiting list? How long does i normally take?
I don't have an Android phone, so haven't tested Beeper Mini. But I do use Beeper Cloud on my iphone, ipad and PC, and it's great. It's been especially useful on my PC so I can send+receive iMessage texts on it, which how all my family communicates with each other. And it's also super convenient for receiving SMS 2FA confirmation codes on my PC, which Beeper can even automatically copy to your clipboard for easy pasting.
And Beeper also supports Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Google Chat, LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, and Google Messages SMS/RCS, so you can consolidate them all into a single app instead of needing separate apps for each.
The devs are also awesome, super communicative, and super responsive as well. When I first signed up for Beeper, it wasn't showing all my Slack channels properly, so I filed a bug report. They responded almost immediately, and had the problem sorted out by the next day. So IMO it's a great app, run by a great team (who I have casually chatted with a few times in the Beeper Help channel), and so I highly recommend giving it a try. I only wish they would hurry up and add Steam Chat support, since then it would be the absolute perfect app in my eyes. :P
yeah I actually used it on your recommendation because I got tired of switching apps. Signal I still keep separate, however. I am looking forwards to Mini integrating everything again though!
Oh, right. I remember that convo now. I thought you said you didn't have a use case for it? :P Not having to constantly switch between apps was enough for me to permanently make the switch to using it too. ;)
it's like a brain worm, when i started realizing how many times I was switching apps I started getting fed up with it, there's probably a name for that.
The frequency illusion / Baader-Meinhof phenomenon fits, maybe?
Funny story, I just had to relog for Beeper for an update, and I actually had an email from them from a recruiter back in May. If I was less busy at the time and actually went through with the interview this potentially could have been my first project, funny how that works out.
Beeper looks great and I'd like to give it a try, any chance I could get a referral code to access it?
Sure. PM'd.
Just went to download this as I think it looks excellent. I'm 173k on the waitlist, so I'm clearly not the only one! Would you mind if I snagged a ref, too?
Sure. But, TBH, I'm not quite sure how the referral codes work. Their FAQ says they can only be used two times every seven days. So I will PM you the code, but it's the same code that I shared with two other people who already used it to register this week, and so I'm not sure whether it will actually work for you too.
Edit: Yeah, didn't work. "Error: Referring user has invited too many other users recently, please try again later."
Thanks! We'll see how it goes.
I'm a bit confused, what are blue bubbles in this context?
Blue bubbles are how text messages appear between two iPhones. Normally an Android phone will have bubbles appear as green on an iPhone.
This allows you to use an Android phone and not be outed to all your iPhone friends.
As an iPhone user, I find the whole green bubble thing to be kinda sad and overblown. Corporate fandom to the point of shaming someone elses purchases is pathetic
It's super dumb. Especially when you consider there is an actual issue beyond the color of a text. I recently made the switch from iOS to Android (I like to bounce back and forth every couple years), and it's completely impossible to send large images or videos to iOS users via text. Even a tiny (by modern standards) 5mb video was too much for MMS to handle.
Thankfully that's not going to be true next year, but this whole time while people bickered about the color of their text, there were actual, annoying issues communicating between the two platforms.
I thought it was fairly obvious, but the color represents the issues. It's the association with the issues that makes the color difference matter. If you see a green bubble, it can be associated with all of those annoying issues before they've even happened. Apple did all of this on purpose, knowing it would create such associations and the lock-in effect.
Honestly though, who even does this? Use whatsapp or upload it to cloud and share a link.
sending MMS is wild
Pretty much everyone in my life does this with the exception of large quantities of images or a video longer than a few minutes. I would imagine this is pretty common with how well messaging apps like iMessage handle photos and videos. Maybe nobody in your circle does this, but I see it all the time.
I’ll chime in to say this lines up with my experience. The only time I have seen someone share pictures through a cloud service is when I show them how. And it is always through sms or iMessage.
People with kids and lots of videos/images to send to grandparents for one. Why use a 3rd party app when the functionality is natively present in your phone? The vast majority of my contacts are iOS users, so before I switched to Android I pretty much always used iMessage to send large images/videos when I needed to. And once Apple adopts RCS I can continue doing so natively on Android. Until then I can use this Beeper thing to basically give me the same functionality now without having to resort to using something developed by Meta or inconveniencing people with links to my nextcloud.
You're not wrong but it's young people, what are you gonna do? Xbox vs Sony, iPhone vs Android (or Samsung to most), the list goes on.
I'd say there is a sizable population of iphone users that don't know or care but they're probably less likely to proselyte as well.
It's very much not just a young people thing. I'm an elder millennial, it's still a thing for some reason, even among my family.
Seconding this. When I was in grad school recently, the professor I worked for teased me about turning our work group chat green, and she's like 50. It didn't bother me except that I couldn't believe she was seriously bringing it up.
Yeah It's a weird thing more than anything.
Before I knew there were functional differences I was like "I can make my messages any color on my phone wtf is wrong with yours"
And now it's "this is Apple's fault so stop blaming me"
The first time I'd heard about the different colors for texts on iPhone was when my wife's friends started shaming us for sending them "green messages". I was a bit taken aback. Later they mocked her for taking photos on her android because "why bother if you don't have an iPhone". Eventually I got her an iPhone, and frankly it underperforms my android in literally every way. And it costs three times more. We both made the iPhone swap, but I switched back within a few months because I couldn't stand the lack of user control and how, in nearly every use, ios tries really hard to push you into their proprietary ecosystem. I wanna use the software I like, dammit!
I'll stop ranting now, but yeah iPhone/blue bubbles is definitely a status thing for large swaths of the population who are convinced that Apple makes the superior product.
Well and if they have an iPhone they think Android phones are the problem. Like that's the mind boggling part of it. Like they told you, "why bother taking pictures with an android"
Because they thought the small pics meant shitty cameras.
In America, not really an issue this side of the pond. 95% of my messaging is WhatsApp, telegram and signal.
Sure, America is also weird for being so heavily iPhone users which exacerbates the situation. It's both things.
Hard agree on everything you said. Had to use an iPhone for work a few years ago and basically started using my personal phone for work instead because everything (third party apps) was just seamless on my android. My take is android is a computer with telephony, iPhone is a phone with some computer fuctionality. Trying to customize an iPhone to the level of an android was next to impossible.
All of that being said, everyone should use what works best for their situation. Not every user is a power user. And both have decent camera fuctionality. That's not even an issue unless you need a real camera and then that becomes a whole different discussion.
Sometimes I think my android-using friends care more about the fact that their bubbles are green on my phone than I do. It's such a non-issue.
I (an android user) only care about it when my friends with iphone give me crap because they cant use their group chats with me. I truthfully couldnt care less about any of it, I am just glad they'll shut up about it now. I agree though it is such a non-issue to me.
There is at least one good reason to differentiate: security. It may be controversial about how good or bad or different, but imessage protocol is superior to sms, and i adjust what i say based on which protocol i am using.
The color is a half meme. The main issue with "green bubbles" is that you don't get iMessage, which means you don't get the comforts of messaging over IP as opposed to the slow, unreliable nature of SMS.
What compounds it is that "green bubbles" are like GPL - if there's a green bubble in a group chat, the entire chat is downgraded to SMS. Not only is this just annoying - reactions get converted into this horrible "👍 to 'message'" response, images are low quality - worse of all, the reliability of the chat goes down the drain and messages are liable to lost to the ether.
It's not really about not being outed - if they're IRL friends, they obviously know you don't use an iPhone. It's more that Android users tend to get left out of group chats if you're in iMessage circles.
Well, I'm not a fan of either Apple or Google having a stranglehold on the phone market due to their own proprietary services and making iMessage and RCS not cooperate is on them.
I did some reading and green bubbles also lack the same security standards cause it's apparently just SMS, which I think is a pretty good defense for the bubble color.
Honestly even with RCS, the actual blame lies with the GSM foundation being incapable of coming up with a secure standard.
WHAT?
I think they kind of have to do that with group chats. It would possibly misrepresent the privacy of the conversation if they did partial iMessage blue bubbles and partial SMS. The messages being sent to other iPhones could in theory be encrypted, but since those same messages are also being sent to the SMS recipient, the privacy level of the message isn't the same, there's potentially intermediates that could view the conversation of the chat because of this.
I don't recall all what other features work or don't work in group chats, but that could also get messy in the case of the reactions and such because you could end up with SMS users getting spammed with "Liked" SMS messages (though Google has alleviated that issue somewhat), but other features might produce undesirable results as well.
Having said that, I'm sure there's some element of it that Apple does intentionally reduce functionality to further make their users hate Android users. Like renaming the group chats, I'm not sure if there's a reason why they couldn't allow people to rename the chat, I can't think of a good reason.
I would just like to say that group renaming being synced to all users is, in my opinion, a bad thing and should be able to be disabled. I have an iMessage group with my parents. I want to name it “Parents”. If I do that, they also have the group named Parents, which makes no sense. I have all sorts of weird names set for my groups because they need to be sensible to everyone, not just me.
casual users have no idea what that means.
Sure, but they know what you get when you message over IP - reactions, the ability to send large filesize media, read receipts, and much higher reliability of message transmission (and, of course, you don't need a cellular connection).
Oh wow, it's really that big of a deal? Paying a monthly subscription to appear blue sounds bothersome, I guess I'm lucky no one made a deal out of it when I changed phones
I've only had one time where someone said "Oh, someone's green." for a group chat and it didn't bother me any but I could see for a younger person the peer pressure and all that.
The last place I worked at (a small business, more than 30 employees but less than 50), I was left out of group chats that the owner was involved in occasionally and I was told something along these lines by my boss 'the owner hates green bubbles' and my role was bordering on management. They did not provide company phones generally unless the person's job involved talking to customers outside the office (so generally sales people but also some management though most already had iPhones and didn't want a second phone), but I was the unofficial IT person so I ended up commandeering a phone without anyone approving it and then suddenly I was in more group chats.
It's not the color that matters, the color simply represents all the technical issues introduced with the tech that is associated with the color. If an iPhone user sees green, then that means all the iMessage features and functionality go away. It's not like the owner of the company just didn't like the color green, he didn't like the fact that his message functionality was reduced. It happened that within his circles enough people used iPhones that he could make a distinction about the conversations he was willing to have in some cases and who was excluded from them. It's not like he never texted me or I was never in any group chats at all, but it was clear that in some ongoing chats where it wasn't essential for me to be in, that I wasn't always being included. In that type of business, it has the effect of making it harder to expand your role because you get left out of conversations.
When COVID hit and schools shut down, all of my collaboration and communication with other teachers moved to group chats on our private devices (we don't have Slack or Teams or anything like that, and even if we did, most of the staff wouldn't use it).
I was the only Android user of all my colleagues, and I singlehandedly "broke" every group chat I was in because my presence in the group kicked things off iMessage down to MMS. Also, I was in a lot of group chats -- different grade levels, departments, social circles, etc. It was a miserable time even independent of COVID. I would miss messages; they would arrive out of order; sometimes I'd get duplicates; forget about pictures or reaction gifs or videos. Everybody, including me, was unhappy.
Most people I work with didn't even know enough about the "blue vs. green bubbles problem" to know what was going on -- they simply had no idea why their reactions weren't working correctly and why they couldn't rename the chat or add/remove people as needed. I was also the unofficial tech support guy, so I had to do a lot of explaining of what was going on to people who legitimately didn't know that group chats even could break like that.
I ended up getting an iPhone simply to make my professional life way easier. It's not like anyone was trying to shame me or anything. Instead, it was a sad comment on the loss of interoperability. MMS was an outdated standard that should have been supplanted by something newer and better, but instead of committing to continued interoperability, all of the tech giants had since tried to silo interpersonal communication as a method of user lock-in. Apple is definitely guilty of this, but so are Google and Facebook. The fact that Beeper exists to put fifteen (!!!) different chat apps under one roof is proof that they won and we, as users, lost and lost big.
I recently connected with a friend who I'd fallen out of touch with for a bit. I texted him that I was going to call him in a bit, and he responded with "Which app?" It felt funny, despite it being a perfectly valid question to ask! There used to be a potential future in which my preferred app would have been able to call his preferred app -- even if they were different apps -- because interoperability was a virtue on which a lot of modern technology was built, but I think we're officially locked out of that future now.
The doors on a lot of different barns have closed. There's no getting them back open again, and there's definitely no getting everyone under one roof.
I just got my organization to use signal in that case.
My friends and I have separate group chats for those who have a green bubble. It really hinders our ability to share pics, vids, memes etc etc and makes the messenging experience worst
You could all get Signal and get above Apple and Google's shit without dividing your friend group.
Trying to convince your friends and family to swap to X random messaging app is how you divide your friend group.
Well, more likely everyone ignores you, so dividing yourself from everyone else more likely.
Seems like that already happened?
I think the blue v green thing is just a marketing gimmick. Or rather it's representative of larger issues communicating between iOS and Android. For example, you can't send even moderately sized images/videos from Android to iOS because it can only communicate via MMS and there are very low size limits there.
I just started the trial, not for the blue/green thing (could not possibly care any less about that), but for being able to send large images/videos to people without having to upload it to a server first. At least until Apple adopts RCS support next year.
Blue also signals end 2 end encryption
So it's just a product invented to combat some kind of FOMO?
I don't understand. I don't really even use imsg that much anyway (We're all on whatsapp in the UK).
Does it have some hidden feature compared to regular txt or a facebook msg / whatsapp?
Having access to a device that can do imessage isn't really a flex in any way idk...
The first sentence of the article.
I wasn't aware my number was green or blue in the firdt place, so not the most useful...
Not knowing about something doesn't dictate how useful something is or not, clearly it's useful to some people.
I was referring to your response. The article explains a lot but not what blue bubbles actually are to someone who's never heard the term.
I understand now that the difference is iMessage and its benefits.
This problem could be avoided if everyone to moved onto a proper cross platform IP messenger like signal or WhatsApp?
Outside of the US I don't know anyone who still uses SMS. I suppose with the high apple market share over there it made sense for people to get used to using iMessage. It's a chicken and egg situation I guess, you'd need a critical proportion of the population to switch for it to work out.
signal and whatsapp have their own problems.
signal is not easy-to-use to the same degree iMessage and SMS are. moving your signal contacts and chat history to a new phone can actually be a pain in the butt if you do not plan ahead, and the end-to-end encryption isn't quite as seamless as iMessage. It's not a problem for people who are even a little tech savvy, but I don't think I could get my parents using it. Their desktop client also leaves a lot to be desired.
whatsapp is owned by facebook, so i do not trust it on principal. last i used it, chat sessions were not encrypted by default, and enabling encryption resulted in a less fluid experience (i.e. encrypted chat sessions not synchronizing across multiple clients signed in to the same account)
i hate to say it, but if imessage was available cross platform, it would be the messenger that offers the best mix of privacy and ease of use, which is probably why apple values it so highly as a tool to drive their hardware sales.
I think you might be confusing WhatsApp with Telegram which has had this issue for a long time. WhatsApp has pretty much always been encrypted by default. I agree that the Facebook thing isn't great, but honestly WhatsApp is one of the best tools out there for doing convenient e2e encrypted-by-default messaging - Signal, as you say, favours privacy over usability and is therefore more painful to use, and Telegram favours usability over privacy and therefore makes it sometimes quite difficult to use encrypted chats. WhatsApp mostly just works.
Signal’s desktop app isn’t amazing either, which may seem like it shouldn’t be a big deal but it’s something that those who are sitting in front of a computer for the better part of every day care about.
On macOS iMessage has the best desktop app, but probably the best that’s cross platform is Telegram. Unfortunately, by default Telegram chats aren’t encrypted.
Almost nobody talks much via SMS, even in the US, but there isn't a default like Whatsapp, so it seems like everyone always uses SMS, since it's the default for establishing contact before finding out whether you and your interlocutor have Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram, Wire, whatever. iMessage is basically RCS (in functionality), so iOS users are already getting all the benefits of it and have for years, so any change is going to be seen as a compromise, since, gosh, all the people they talk to already use iMessage! (having conveniently stopped talking to android users for convenience)
So we really need something that is 0 friction to replace SMS, a massive rush to a single platform that ends up with a critical mass of users within months, or we need the government to strongarm Apple into either fully opening iMessage or at least making it interop nicely.
Apple has already announced that they will support RCS next year.
Yes, but it supposedly "will work alongside iMessage", not in it, and so will still break groups and almost certainly be perceived as stooping to talk to Android users just like SMS.
To my knowledge, Apple has not actually elaborated exactly what that means, so that would appear to be the worst possible scenario. iMessage works alongside SMS, and yet it still provides a seamless integration. The Apple messaging app is just called Messages, not iMessage; iMessage is the protocol.
If SMS were seamlessly integrated, there wouldn't be the bizarre "ew greentext" meme. If RCS is conflated with iMessave for all intents and purposes of users, I'll be shocked if it doesn't come from a regulatory menace. The interpretation I have taken is hardly a minority opinion, even among apple tech bloggers. They haven't entirely ruled out a better UI integration, but what in Apple's history indicates they would prefer to be interoperable when they have the option otherwise?
When you send a message with the messages app, it attempts to send it through iMessage first, and if it cannot do so it will send an SMS/MMS message instead. That's pretty seamless to me. Before iMessage was a thing all SMS/MMS messages were green; blue was chosen as a way to tell the user that the message came through iMessage instead. What do you want, that it be kept secret instead? The fact that they have historically decided to handle everything in one messaging app instead of putting it into seperate apps seems like a good enough reason to assume they would do the same going forward, to assume otherwise seems unnecessarily pessimistic.
But in any case, speculating about what they will or won't do outside of their statements seems like a rather pointless exercise in my opinion. I couldn't care less if they put it in a separate app. If they did, then I would just never open the Messages app again because RCS will just work no matter who I need to communicate with.
Appreciate it.
I was talking about the division in the market, that causes it to seem to non-North Americans that we use SMS constantly. I went into why I thought it'd take a lot to change the current fragmentation. That's why I'm making baseless speculations, because the comment I originally replied to wanted to know why we all don't just move to a single IM service. To what end are you arguing?
My point is that with Apple adopting RCS there will finally be a strong de-facto standard for messaging - at least in the US market. It’s a very imperfect solution - I’m particularly unhappy with the requirement for phone service, which incurs a cost to maintain - but that unity is something that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time
I do wish that people settled on something better like Signal or encrypted XMPP, but it would appear that people only want solutions that have already been chosen and set up for them. Heck, at least it’s not owned by Meta.
I'm a huge advocate for Signal. I push aggressively to get everyone I know to use it. An actual private means of communication in this day and age is so rare. Its frustrating that the discussion is over Blue or Green bubbles as opposed to owning your data or trusting your data with a company.
Its also frustrating that we don't have open standards to allow users the choice of platform, device and messaging service.
Its cool to see Beeper putting in the effort to support multiple messaging services. However I long for the days of interoperability when you could just choose whatever messenger you wanted, then talk to people on AIM, MSN, Hangouts, etc.
AFAIK there was never true interoperability even back then though, except in the case of IRC which uses an open standard, and specifically between MSN and Yahoo who had an interoperability arrangement with each other that excluded everyone else. So much like today, Trillian, Pidgin, Odigo, and all the other consolidated messenger apps from back then also relied on reverse engineering proprietary protocols, and using other hackish ways to get every messenger service under one roof.
Which is what allowed for and initially kicked off the "IM Wars" in the late 90s - 00s, where every major player started trying everything they could think of to undermine that reverse engineering and completely wall off their messenger services from everyone else. E.g. AOL intentionally exploiting a buffer overflow bug to prevent MSN and other services from connecting to AIM. And Yahoo's repeated attempts to block Trillian over the years.
I mean, this is the main thing. My sisters have an iMessage group chat that I can't be in because I'm the only one using Android. Now that I've moved to Europe, all my local conversation happens via WhatsApp or Telegram. But US Americans do exist, and it's non-trivial to get them to download an entirely new app (most Americans don't use WhatsApp at all) just for you.
Yeah once there's a critical mass of users it's hard to see everyone switching at once, which is why I sort of get the iMessage issue. Most of my friends and family use WhatsApp. Some of my more techie friends and I chat via Signal, but even for me where privacy is important it's a little annoying having two apps.
It would be cool if there was a common IP protocol / messaging backbone which any app which can match a spec could use. That would allow users to pick and choose an app that works for them. That's probably impossible due to technical and social reasons though.
Their technical deep dive here:
https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works
I am seriously impressed. They actually did the difficult work of RE'ing iMessage to create a fully Android native solution. I wonder how brittle it will be (maybe not so, given that unless Apple directly targets them, Apple themselves has to maintain compatibility), but for now, brilliant achievement.
"They" is actually a high school programmer - https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/ - who sold their POC to Beeper, which to me is even more impressive.
I'm using it on my laptop running Linux, it works great and is something I've wanted for a long time. I reckon once it gets enough traction Apple will find a way to make it not work anymore. We'll see.
There's a few things that people have questioned about this with regards to what Apple might try to do to stop them. Some say they might try some legal tactics, cease and desist etc. and some wonder if they can just change how it works to break what they reverse engineered. That last part is assumed in generally all cases it would require Apple to update new and old iPhone Messages apps in order to be able to update this system to break what Beeper is doing, and even that is iffy because they can make the updates, but they can't necessarily force people to accept the update. Then they would be breaking messaging functionality of iPhone users.
However one thing I hadn't seen mentioned much is that a key element of this Beeper mini app is the Beeper Push Notification Service. Basically you won't know when you've gotten any iMessages without this unless you open up your app and look. So I wonder if Apple can target the servers that Beeper uses in it's Push Notification service, by identifying the servers making these connections and blocking them, they can prevent pretty important functionality of this app without having to break functionality of iPhone users.
I don't know how much I necessarily trust Beeper. I heard about them years ago (on Tildes) and was on the waitlist for years. When I finally got in, I went to sign up and put everything into the app. One of my apps notified me that the server requesting access to my account was based out of Iran and I immediately stopped everything and deleted my account. They said it was an error on their part and they would work to fix but I didn't reengage with them or the app.
You can always inspect the code, and self-host it if you don't trust their cloud hosting:
https://github.com/beeper
https://github.com/beeper/self-host
Eric Migicovsky, the Beeper co-founder, is also a Canadian now residing in Palo Alto (where the company HQ is), and was a Partner at Y Combinator (who runs Hacker News) that was responsible for running their Startup School. So I don't think there is any nefarious Iranian intelligence gathering thing going on with the company.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmigi
https://www.linkedin.com/company/beeperhq
Won't this app be rendered pointless when Apple finally adds RCS support? https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/
RCS is still missing a lot of features iMessage has, including end-to-end encryption.
It depends on if Apple implements the main RCS standard as supported by carriers, which isn’t encrypted or Google’s variation which is. It’s possible that Apple can’t implement encrypted RCS without relying on Google servers (not sure how RCS works internally).
RCS will bring many of the modern chat features to non-iMessage conversations with iPhone users, but without encryption there’d still technically be a reason to use Beeper Mini instead.
Apple has said they intend to implement the carrier-standard RCS, which makes sense. Apple is replacing SMS with RCS, not iMessage. Part of the confusion from the general public over this is that SMS and iMessage live in the same app for iOS users. A big part of the draw early on was that you didn't need a second app, you would get all the iMessage benefits (encryption, rich messages, better multimedia support, free) to any other iOS user automatically. You just send a message and everything else is figured out for you; it sends and SMS but if it finds out the person you're talking to has iMessage on, it subsequently sends iMessages. It's the origin of the blue bubbles, in fact. Everything was green on iOS, blue was added to show the message was an iMessage, and when iMessages fail it falls back to SMS.
Anyway, all of that to say Apple has no intention of adopting Google's version of this, but they are onboard with updating a carrier standard and replacing the SMS fallback with what amounts to "SMS 2."
The same is true for SMS and RCS on Google Messaging. Both live in the same app.
If what you care about is blue bubbles, I doubt Apple is going to make RCS be blue.
I'm still on the waiting list for Beeper Cloud. I signed up when it was announced it would be free. Has anybody here been signed up via the waiting list? How long does i normally take?
I have a referral code if you want it, it'll let you skip the line! I can DM you it if you need.