Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android [UPDATED]
Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access after launch of service that brought iMessage to Android [UPDATED]
Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage,
UPDATE: Beeper, through their Twitter account, is saying that they're working on it and "hope to have good news to share soon":
Work continues to fix the issue causing the Beeper Mini outage. We know how hard this has been for those who loved using Beeper Mini, and we're extremely sorry for the inconvenience. We are feeling good, though, and hope to have good news to share soon.
To the surprise of no one.
I, for one, am shocked. Shocked I tell you!
Afaik apple can't block this without also blocking iMessage on older devices that no longer receive updates.
Pretty sure I saw on Reddit beeper is already working on a fix.
without also blocking iMessage on older devices that no longer receive updates.
My guess at Apple's response when they do block them: "Buy a new phone"
This is the company of "you are holding it wrong" after all.
Has there been any news of people with older Mac's unable to use iMessage anymore because of this?
iMessage is one of the largest enablers of ostracization and teen bullying. It's a stupid cult - people see green text in their chats and they freak out. Apple knows this extremely well, and profits from it. Apple couldn't give two shits about the degraded security either. They know this pressures their users to be locked in to their platform, and pressures people outside to buy into it or suffer being on the outside of their cult. This quick move to cut off Beeper makes Apple's disregard for teens, security, and their own users painfully obvious. So long as they can coerce people into buying into their locked and incompatible system, Apple will continue to fuck everyone.
iMessage is one of the largest enablers of ostracization and teen bullying
This feels like a strange trivialization of teenage bullying thought up by someone who hasn't been a teenager in a long timr.
You sound like someone with green bubbles.
Gross an apple user.
Eww, keep your rotten apples away from me.
On the other hand, if this is true, kudos to society for clamping down on teen bullying. There wasn’t much (if any) bullying in my high school, but not long ago bullying and ostracizing was more… physically painful.
Like yeah it sucks that there’s still any, but this green text nonsense is a hell of a lot better than having one’s head flushed inside a toilet and the like. Good to see society making forward progress.
Apple flexing their anti-competitive muscles again.
From locking down the OS to proprietary charging and a staunch opposition to right to repair, their track record has been nothing but anti-consumer for the last decade and a half.
And the worst part is that they've gotten away with it for so long and so often that they managed to inspire Android device manufacturers (ahem...Samsung) to follow in their footsteps. Someone really ought to step in and break up the company, Microsoft anti-trust style.
Apple flexing their anti-competitive muscles again.
The EU will protect us, right.... Right?
No, because iMessage isn't a gatekeeper in the EU. It's comparable to Signal in size, depending on the country.
Hopefully with Apple adopting RCS they fix the spec to include e2e encryption. At the moment only Google's proprietary client does RCS with their own encryption.
A) Apple stop being scummy
B) USA gets a grip on this bubble colour nonsense and stops using iMessage
Which comes first?
It's not about the bubble color, it's about not being able to use modern messaging features cross-platform.
I think you're being optimistic in thinking that either of those is going to happen.
Lol classic Apple.
Yeah I'm not buying apple for myself that's for sure
Well that's not anti-competative. We're at or above Carnegie and Standard Oil levels of monopoly shenanigans.
It's a text message protocol not fucking Standard Oil... Pull your head out of your ass.
I don’t get what all the fuss is with iMessage. I got my first iPhone last year with work and it texts just like my old phone did.
What other features really am I getting that I didn’t have before? Delivered and read confirmation? Laser beam effects?
High quality picture and video? Have you never exchanged pictures or video with a non iPhone user from your iphone? Pictures aren't always horrible but video is basically unwatchable. Also end to end encryption, which is less obvious. Group chats are also borked by having a single non iPhone user in them. Android to android in most cases lately has high quality multimedia but that's not true of mixed interactions.
99% of arguments I hear about iMessage are really just blue bubble vs green bubble, and that A LOT of people are extremely hung up about having to have a blue bubble.
Personally I have never gotten the bubble fixation.
If you're on Lemmy, you're already set up to "not understand". You probably have no trouble installing a new chat app and using it.
I chat with 20-30 people in my neighborhood, all middle aged adults, and they all have iPhones. If I were to ask, only one would accommodate my request to use a different app, and it'd still be disruptive to his routine. I'm not angry at any of these folks; I blame Apple. Though they have a good product, they are totally behaving like a monopolist.
It's not the features and never has been. It comes preinstalled, it just works, and it works perfectly with most people. No one calls it "iMessage". They call it "texting".
The ability to reply, edit, and delete are pretty cool. Yes, you can do that with RCS too, but unfortunately you can't do anything cross-platform.
When iMessage user sends messages, videos, pictures, gifs to another iMessage user, it sends over via data. Similar to Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, FB Messenger, etc.
When an iMessage user sends to an Android user, it sends it via SMS/MMS which is very limited.
Capitalism at its finest.
No one who used I message after this could reach me it was so weird
It wouldn't surprise me if you're experiencing that old bug that happened when iOS users went to android. Their phone number would be in apples system as an iMessage number, and wouldn't recognize that it wasn't. So people would message you, and the message would get lost in the aether.
I don't understand what beeper is doing (cause I'm dumb and too lazy to look it up) but your number might be stuck. Your friends might need to manually turn off iMessage for you (it used to be long pressing the send button in the message till it turns green)
I reallt hope apple actually adopts RCS next year. The standard is so much better than iMessage.
You just need to deregister.
My friends said they had a button pop up to instead send as SMS yesterday. Beeper sent notifications the service was down and shortly after my number was deregistered with imessage without me having to do anything.
This was exactly it I had to not only deregister from Apple's services but my friends also had to turn off iMessage send me a message and then they can turn it back on and nothing would be broken. Must be some kind of caching we've decided just to switch to Discord much safer that way
It's not a bug.
You need to de-register your number.
Beeper already deregistered the numbers, but it takes 24 to 36 hours for Apple servers to forget the deregistered numbers.
So is it working again, or no? It seems to be on again, off again, on again at the end of the article. I think I'll just wait until they either figure it out for good, or get permanently banned. I can't have text messages going to a black hole right now.
according to https://nitter.net/onbeeper/status/1733385534545052129 it's only Beeper Cloud they're talking about in the update, they're saying "work continues on Beeper Mini" meaning it's likely not operational yet and users in that thread seem to confirm it
Thank you. It's a bad-ass concept, and I hope they get it worked out.