by Jason Snell
Beeper brings on-device iMessage to Android–for now
Beeper, a startup led by former Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, announced a new version of its Android app that supports direct on-device compatibility1 for iMessage. Quinn Nelson has an excellent explanation video and Jacob Kastrenakes at the Verge has an article about it.
As Kastrenakes explains:
Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.
Can Apple just flip a couple of switches and stop these shenanigans? Based on how Beeper described its technology to Nelson and Kastrenakes, not easily. It’s not against the law for Beeper to circumvent Apple’s systems, and it uses a standard authentication method that’s also used by legitimate Apple devices.
In a time when Apple’s being assailed by multiple regulators for uncompetitive behavior, it would not look great if the company were to crush Beeper, even if it could do so easily. Instead, it might take a months- or years-long overhaul of its authentication systems to do so. And would it be worth it? Beeper is making a calculated gamble that Apple will let this go.
In the meantime, if you’re an Android user who desperately wants access to blue bubbles, here’s Beeper Mini.
- In other words, there’s no insecure server running in the middle that sees all your messages. ↩