iMessage is pretty great to use honestly. Supports encryption, Tapbacks, read receipts, sharing any file type (not just pictures and video). RCS isn’t implemented in iOS yet and on launch won’t support encryption (supposedly Google is working to add it to the RCS standard, not just Google’s fork, now that Apple announced future support for the standard).
I take it you’re not from the US 😅 texting is still the default here, and since apple refuses to open up iMessage and has not yet implemented RCS, Cross-Platform communication is pretty shitty. People get excluded from group chats because even a single user on a different platform will set it back to MMS
Yeah I’ve been excluded from work group chats on two separate occasions because they used iMessage and considering another platform was just entirely off the table.
Although to be honest, I consider being excluded from work group chats to be one of the best features of my phone!
Lol me too but I just had some friends that refuse to answer messages if its not on iMessage. I really hate Apple for doing this and I hope they get forced to open the protocol.
If only it was just teenagers, physically grown ass men and women do this too. Have had some I thought were good friends cut me off from talking to them “because I didn’t have an iPhone”.
Network effect. Gradually over time my whole extended family wound up with iphones for one reason or another, and Android phones would consistently break our group threads. The last few holdouts (not ideologically, they just didn’t need new phones) wound up switching to Apple afterwards to make everything smoother for the rest of us.
Their “how it works” blog article is worth a read - they’re using a blackbox reverse engineering of the protocol and re-implementing it natively in the app, so there are no man-in-the-middle servers. Impressive software engineering for sure.
I’m aware regular Beeper can be self-hosted, but Beeper Mini can too? Is there any more information on this or is that the “if you have the knowledge” part?
I’m aware regular Beeper can be self-hosted, but Beeper Mini can too?
The difference between old and new is that all the services on the old one rely on Matrix bridges and the new one will not. They claim iMessage, Signal and WhatsApp will all be working on-device. So those obviously won’t be self-hosted. The rest they have yet to decide exactly how they will implement them but Matrix is going to be part of it.
Brad Murray said the end goal is to have everyone messaging each other directly on Matrix.
The mini version doesn’t need hosting, it doesn’t have a proxy middle man. A 16yo kid reverse engineered the protocol and then got contracted by beeper to implement it as beeper mini. It’s a client directly connecting to apple like imessage native.
Will it break? I’d argue if the cost of breaking it in engineer time is worth doing to Apple, yes. All they’d have to do is roll their own crypto and reverse engineering that might be impossible. Probably easier ways to break it but then maybe it turns into a cat and mouse game.
Legally it’s hard to say if it’s OK too, the end user is likely fine, but the developer especially being contacted may not be since to reverse engineer it could be breaking terms of service or licensing clauses though I’m not really sure what kind of damages could be claimed. To reverse engineer they had to use the original on jailbroken iphones to go through the engineering discovery.
Anyway the point is, it’s not going through beeper or anywhere other than Apple. So there’s no component to host. It’s different to beeper.
huh, interesting. so from a security perspective is there any other concern with this protocol? at least they’re not using a mac relay server like Nothing Chats was
If you have any questions, I’m hosting an ask-me-anything on reddit.com/r/beeper - feel free to ask any questions you have for us there (after reading our blog posts first to see if it’s already been answered!)
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