What a difference a week makes. Last Tuesday, the future of messaging interoperability between iOS and Android seemed brighter than ever. Not only is Apple’s adoption of RCS coming sometime in 2024, but Beeper Mini —a new app from the minds behind Beeper— reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubbles to Android. It took about72 hours for much of that progress to fall apart, though, with Appleadmitting it had made changes to iMessageto prevent Android users from signing up. Now, Beeper Mini is back, though with a massive downgrade in functionality.
Although the company says it’s reached out to Apple directly to discuss the effective deactivation of Beeper Mini over the weekend, it’s received no response. That said, Beeper is doubling down on its statements that the app makes iMessagemoresecure, not less, going as far to call Apple’s claims of “significant risks to user security and privacy” FUD and doublespeak.
Frankly, I can’t say Apple’s efforts here to shut down Beeper Mini are particularly surprising. As I brought up in my hands-on with the app, this is the same company that spent months fighting with Palm over its unauthorized access to iTunes syncing (now that’s one sentence truly stuck in 2009). iMessage is, almost inarguably, more important to the future of Apple’s platform than iTunes ever was, so it only makes sense for the company to take steps here to protect its messaging investment. So while Beeper is more undoubtedly more secure than SMS on its own (assuming the client’s encryption works as promised), of course Apple would fight back on the ground that, well, those after truly secure messaging should justbuy an iPhone.
In a wild aside to this story — one that truly shocked me when I saw it appear in my Twitter-I’m-not-calling-it-X feed this weekend — Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted her support of Beeper Mini on Sunday, effectively calling for secure interoperability between smartphones. Do I think the US government will do a fraction of the targeted regulation the EU has spent the last couple of years implementing? Nope. But hey, it’s a small step in the right direction. I just want to know which of Warren’s social media interns signed up for Beeper Mini last week.
I’m hopeful Beeper Mini gets its full functionality back — I really did like the app for the few days it functioned as intended, and with SMS, RCS, and other messaging clients on the roadmap, it was looking like the ultimate tool for someone who jumps from phone to phone like myself. Alas, the platform’s future is looking rockier than ever. While I’m happy to see development continue, I can’t imagine a world where Apple doesn’t continue to fight back.
