They’ll win if they file legal action. Their servers are not a public service and they offer no invitation for Beeper to use them for compute. A podcast app developer likened it to if a competing app tried to use his servers to sync podcast subscriptions. When you frame it as anything other than a big corporation stomping on a smaller company, it’s obviously stealing resources. I am not endorsing either side. Just stating a fact.
Beeper did mention the DMCA protection on reverse engineering.
That being said regardles if beeper wins or looses. If apple sues and at the same time breaks beeper mini they could run into financial trouble very quickly.
I don’t understand why there’s such a hard push for iMessage access on Android. The tinkerer in me finds this thrilling to follow, but the end-user in me is skeptical.
First, Apple being this hard-headed forces a marketplace for third party messaging apps. I don’t want to see Apple (or Google, or Facebook) be responsible for the dominant messaging platform in the US. If iMessage is on Android, the lure of being able to immediately add 50% of the country to your phone becomes compelling and gets rid of the need of third party services for a lot of people. I’d imagine this would cause Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, etc. to shrink.
Second, as an Apple user, I don’t see the excitement about having iMessage. I have group chats with all iPhone-buddies and mixed Android/iPhone. iMessage isn’t that exciting. The apps built around it and linked in Apple’s Messages app are the actual useful parts of it – Facetime to video chat and Find My to continuously show your friends on a map (great for traveling!). Maybe the games are silly fun from time to time?
I think the RCS adoption is what’ll solve a lot of issues that Beeper is wanting to solve here. Apple is supposedly working with the GSMA to create an E2E standard (vs. relying on Vibe’s proprietary encryption extension), we should be able to exchange higher quality media, and (I think) cross-platform interactivity around messages improves significantly.
I feel the same way. The tinkerer in me was interested when it was first announced, then saw they wanted me to pay for it and immediately lost interest because I didnt think the app would make it to the second billing cycle. Apple blocked them even sooner than I thought! I wish north americans could move on from sms…
I think the iMessage push is a US only thing, mainly because almost everyone uses SMS/iMessage for texting, and if you don’t have an iPhone you’re stuck with the standard SMS features.
In other parts of the world they use WhatsApp, Telegram, or other multi platform messaging apps, so no one really cares about iMessage.
Yeah, I’m in the US. A lot of folks I know distribute themselves over Discord, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, and in a few cases Viber. Most text conversations of mine are just exchanging numbers with people then immediately asking to use another service regardless of colors 😅
The apps built around it and linked in Apple’s Messages app are the actual useful parts of it – Facetime to video chat and Find My to continuously show your friends on a map
Plus, FaceTime is redundant many times over and Find My sounds like a privacy nightmare that I wouldn’t give any permissions to anyway.
I’ve been on an iPhone for about 3.5 weeks now and iMessage is driving me nuts. It might be the reason I go back to Android.
You cannot use any other apps for SMS messaging on an iPhone. iMessage is the only option.
Unlike Google Messages, it is impossible to use a desktop app to send and receive your text messages… unless you replace all your computers with Macs. Most iPhone users don’t have a Mac, so this is just missing functionality.
This is dumb. I used that feature constantly. It’s the worst thing about the switch.
When I tried it, the integration was pretty awful. Photos were difficult, and it only showed messages from the current session, not from all time. Searching or replying to a message from yesterday wasn’t possible. Maybe it has gotten better?
Your second point is exactly why I got on the beeper waiting list ages ago. It has been a game changer being able to text from my pc for the last 6 months or so, and I’m hoping it comes back… mine currently isn’t receiving messages.
Beeper on desktop user here for over a year! It’s still working great and I hope it never goes away. I believe it uses a different system than the android version.
I think I’m in that unlucky 5% of users that apple is blocking. Mine quit last week.
Edit: I should mention that I can still send texts, but receiving is broken and no amount of relinking iCloud account/reinstalling/yelling at the top of my lungs seems to fix it.
I used it for a bit. It was nice sending and receiving images from iPhone using friends that didn’t look like blown up 50x50 thumbnails of jpeg artifacting
I don’t really get the big deal, it feels like a janky workaround when people could just use a different messaging platform and wait till Apple complies with the EU order
Around where I am, lots of friends have Apple devices but chats are still scattered across various messaging platforms
Its just the silliest things. I would love for these people to be strapped into a chair, forcibly made to download Signal and open account, and be like “Oh, deng it Buck, its really not such a big fucking deal that I was bitching about nothing in relation to”
Do it to everyone who refuses out of non-principle and suddenly, the bullshit excuse (“but but nobody’s on it”) evaporates
Or, a step further, since the original Beeper is a Matrix server with various open source messaging bridges slapped on it, with a fancy client interface… Why not just fucking use a Matrix server with those bridges set up? Or even set up your own Matrix server and iMessage bridge?
Beeper is literally paying people to set up open sources services for you. I’m not against this, it’s a good business model, but Beeper has obviously put the cart before the horse here.
Its just not sustainable, any relation to closed fundamentally insecure “services” like iMessage. iMessage is dogshit, always has been, never won’t not be
I used Signal since it was called TextSecure and I don't think I ever successfully got another person using it.
Eventually uninstalled it because it was just largely useless, anytime I messaged a friend who seemed to be using it they were more confused than anything.
Are they simple? Like whats to be confused about? Its literally a fact its no more complicated than Whatsapp, what say you now (assuming we’re all still operating in good faith)
People who make extraordinar(ily)y silly claims like “Signal is HARD 😢”, I don’t think anyone can help them
I’d argue that Signal is the cleanest and simplest messaging platform out there
If anything, the complicated thing might be that the data is stored locally on your device, so you need to take extra steps to back up the data
But every platform has some small quirks to learn. People figure out how to adjust to all the other “big” platforms because they want to use them. It’s not that Signal or Fediverse is harder, some people will use it as an excuse to feel justified in not switching
No one I know uses WhatsApp either (thank fuck). No one wants to download another app that now they have to juggle between different sets of people. I’m a software dev and even I hate all this nonsense of ten different messaging apps. On any given day I might use slack, discord, Zulip, Google messages, imessage, and matrix. Two is too many, this is just ridiculous. Absolutely no one in America wants to be using this many apps to communicate. Which is why most people just use the default.
Last I checked, Signal still hasn’t fixed their giant UX problem, which is that when you first install the app, it announces you to other Signal users on your contact list. This makes it completely unusable for anybody who actually needs, you know, a secure messenger (like a domestic abuse victim).
I mean I use Signal every day and I love it. But it irks me that they’re like “Oh we’re super secure. Unless you’re trying to get help from your abusive husband, in which case, guess what, we just snitched on you to your abusive husband! Good luck with that!”
Signal notifies users who have your phone number in their contact list; it doesn’t matter if you have them in theirs. It’s an unfortunate side effect of their using phone numbers as identifiers instead of usernames or friend codes or something.
Still a problem, and you basically need a new number as a workaround if you’re trying to conceal that you’re using it. On the upside, they don’t get access to your profile without your permission, so if an ex sees that you signed up they don’t know if it’s you or if you changed your number
Signal is just another walled garden silo with no real value over WhatsApp just owned by a different organization. I won't use anything which is not XMPP compatible.
A wholly different organization; non-profit actually. And it is open source. Those are pretty big advantages over WhatsApp. I’m pro xmpp, but Signal is an improvement over WhatsApp.
Agree on the janky workaround. Though according to sources for Bloomberg, the EU might not consider iMessage popular enough for the DMA, in case anyone is actually holding out hope for that.
Seems like they’re shooting themselves in the foot with that one, non-Apple users usually aren’t willing to convert to Apple products, and this is only going to widen that gap.
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