Beeper Mini Is Back After Dispute With Apple, But With A Few Big Changes

Beeper Mini is back and once again offering iMessage access on Android after an outage on Friday seemed poised to be the end of the fledgling service. The Android app, which reverse-engineered Apple's iMessage protocols to allow blue-bubble messaging between iPhones and Androids, was active for less than two days before users began to report an inability to send or receive messages. It appears Apple took measures to lock Beeper Mini users out of its servers. However, with a new update containing a few big changes, Beeper Mini users should once again be able to experience blue bubble magic.

With an update pushed to Google Play, Beeper Mini is back, but there are some new caveats. The app previously did not require users to sign in with an Apple ID, but the updated version will now require one. In a joint post to the Beeper Blog Substack by cofounders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray, the pair claim nothing has changed in terms of security, and that Beeper Mini iMessage chats are still locally end-to-end encrypted. Because of the ongoing instability, they've also opted to make Beeper Mini free for users. Previously, the service was $1.99/month after a 7-day free trial. "Things have been a bit chaotic, and we're not comfortable subjecting paying users to this," the co-founders wrote.

In their joint Substack post, Beeper cofounders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray expressed outrage at a statement made by Apple to The Verge over the weekend. The tech giant told the news organization that Beeper Mini's iMessage workaround "posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks." Migicovsky and Murray called Cupertino's position "1984-esque doublespeak" and "complete FUD" (fear, doubt, and uncertainty), claiming that Beeper Mini enhances security on both Android and iOS by allowing users to communicate between platforms over iMessage rather than falling back to the far less secure SMS standard.

Regarding the need for users to sign in with their Apple ID on the updated Beeper Mini, the cofounders state that phone number registration is not working and that iMessage chats are being routed through email addresses. They add that they're "working on a fix." They emphasized that neither Beeper Mini nor Beeper Cloud run on Mac relay servers, a security concern that arose with other Android iMessage clients.