Apple appears to have quietly shut down Beeper Mini, surprising no one

Macworld

Just a two days ago we told you about Beeper Mini, an Android app that sends iMessages. Unlike other services that route your messages to a Mac server farm (which requires them having your login token), Beeper claimed to have reverse-engineered Apple’s iMessage routing system and could trick the servers into thinking that a message was coming from a real Apple product.

Beeper gets no login details and doesn’t run servers—they just made Apple’s iMessage servers think that messages from Beeper Mini were actually messages from Messages on an iPhone.

It worked great, and the company was quite confident that it was on the right side of the law and that Apple couldn’t easily block Beeper Mini without blocking real iPhones. It went so far as to open-source much of their code.

It appears that confidence was misplaced, as it took Apple all of two days to effectively shut the app down. As reported on TechCruch, messages on Beeper Mini have started getting errors that read “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out.” TechCrunch asked the Beeper CEO, Eric Migikovsky, about the possibility that Apple had found a way to break connection with their app and got the reply, “Yes, all data indicates that.”

Apple hasn’t issued any statements on the matter, and nobody yet seems to know exactly how it has managed to differentiate between authentic Apple devices and those running Beeper Mini. It’s not clear if there is anything Beeper can do to circumvent the block.

Which brings us full-circle, again, to those seeking to somehow enable iMessages on Android phones. Either you put your privacy and security at risk (as in the recent Nothing Chats / Sunbird disaster) or you rely on a hack that Apple is almost certainly going to shut down immediately.

If you want a better texting experience between your iPhone and those with Android phones, you’re going to have to wait until RCS comes to Apple devices later next year.

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