Beeper’s effort to make iMessage accessible on Android has gotten more complicated

Apple Shutdown of Beeper’s Mobile iMessage Service: An Analysis of a Claimed iOS-Apple Corrupt Messages App

A request for comment from Apple was not immediately responded to. It looks like Apple will try to get rid of Beeper’s ability to send iMessages again.

First, I’ll quote part of an explanation from Beeper about how its iMessage service works — and how Apple has been able to shut things down. A message was posted to a website.

Beeper claims the connection is reliable due to the mapping of registration data to individual users. This same Mac registration data will also work with Beeper Mini (the Android app that started this whole saga). However, Beeper will have to “periodically regenerate” the registration data — “roughly once per week or month” (that’s quite a range!) — which means you’ll have to turn on your Mac “regularly” to refresh it.

Beeper’s Mini app has been the subject of a letter sent to the Department of Justice, asking for an investigation into what happened when it was launched in the Play Store. It’s a dramatic turn for an app that was supposed to be a simple bridge between green-bubble and blue-bubble texts—and has firmly positioned the app as a David to Apple’s Goliath.

“There are real antitrust implications here, and most people aren’t really getting the full picture,” says Eric Migicovsky, Beeper cofounder and a well-known open source software advocate. They believe that Apple got exclusive rights to control access to it because it was made by the company. But when you make a phone that’s used by more than 50 percent of the population in the States, and you make your app the default, you’re held to a higher degree of rules and regulation.” Even though Apple’s market share in the US is less than 50 percent, it doesn’t preclude users from using any chat app they choose if they want to, and Apple default to Messages for incoming texts that are tied to a cellular number.

The Messages app is fully controlled by Apple, and it offers end-to-end encryption. It is only available on Apple devices, like the iPhones,iPads, and Mac PCs; Apple has expressed that making the app available on other platforms would hurt their lock-in strategy. So, if you’re on a group chat with a combination of iPhone and Android users all using their phones’ default messaging apps, the chat will use SMS texts and not Apple Messages.