Beeper Mini's iMessage For Android Offline For Some As Apple Reportedly Pulls The Plug

For a brief, glorious moment, Android users were granted access to iMessage, but it appears that moment was fleeting. Beeper Mini, the app that made waves this week as it launched an iMessage client for Android, is now suffering from an outage. In a post to X on Friday afternoon, Beeper said it is "Investigating reports that sending/receiving is not working in Beeper Mini." The service was launched publicly on December 6, meaning it will have lived for less than two days if Apple has indeed found a way to exclude it from iMessage.

Beeper dominated tech headlines this week as it launched Beeper Mini on Android. The app allows any Android user to use iMessage with almost complete functionality without needing an Apple ID, a capability Beeper said was made possible by reverse-engineering aspects of Apple's technology. Unlike other iMessage for Android solutions like Nothing's collab with Sunbird, Beeper Mini requires no Apple hardware, eliminating the security concerns associated with its competition.

The extent of the Beeper Mini outage is unclear. In response to the company's post on X about the ongoing issues, users gave conflicting reports regarding their ability to use the service, but it appears that some of those users are not using Beeper Mini, but rather Beeper Cloud, which uses a different method of accessing iMessage. Internally at SlashGear, some staff are experiencing the reported Beeper Mini outage while others remain able to use the service.

According to a statement obtained by TechCrunch from Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky, "all data indicates" that the outage is the result of Apple finding a way to cut Beeper Mini off from its services. Apple, which has long seen iMessage as a strong form of platform lock-in for iOS, has likely been working to unplug Beeper Mini from iMessage since the service went live. Cutting the Android app off on Friday may also have been a strategic play since Beeper staff will now need to scramble as the weekend begins if they hope to engineer a new way to keep the service running.

Apple has announced RCS chat support for iPhone will be coming at some time in 2024, but as of now, Beeper Mini was the only way for Android users to send rich messages and high-resolution media to iPhone users without a third-party service like WhatsApp.