- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
• A new Android app called Beeper Mini allows users to send iMessages as blue bubbles from non-Apple devices.
• Beeper Mini bypasses traditional iMessage hacks by directly sending iMessages from Android devices.
• The app has been praised for its smooth functionality, sending messages seamlessly between Android and iPhone users.
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Fucking insane a 16 year old kid figured it out.
It’s always wild to me thinking how good kids are with tech these days to be able to crack something like this (assuming it’s true).
It’s what naturally happens when smart people have free time. And teenagers have a lot of that.
And teenagers have a lot of that
._.
Most kids are clueless with tech to be honest. Yes they know how to use it, but they have no idea how it works behind the scenes. This has pretty scary consequences on how they are easily manipulated or scammed.
Some of them are very smart, sure, but on average I’d say they are less tech savvy than Gen X and millennials who grew up at a time you couldn’t use computers without some kind of knowledge of how it works (and smartphones didn’t exist).
Right, I have to teach shortcuts to our young intern the exact same way as i had to do with my grandma. All the ui’s are so smooth now that even a context menu is too much.
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Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but it always seems to me that kids are living in a world where they need to as present in their digital realities as much, if not more than, their actual ones. At work it seems like they are trying to be in two places at once sometimes.
I wonder how much of that is down to their real world sucking and their digital world being pretty cool.
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Did you even read the article?
No, this works completely different. The iMessage protocol has been reverse engineered so there are no 3rd party servers and the app communicates directly with apple.
I’ll just continue to use my old strategy of not voluntarily communicating with people who care about what color my text bubble is.
At this stage in the game, isn’t that basically the only difference?
I’ve never understood how this became an issue of shaming and exclusion.
Literally just star bellied sneetches.
It’s not the only difference. It indicates the difference in experience parties receive. Higher quality pictures & video, E2E encryption are some of the differences. I’m not shamed for being on android but I can’t have the same quality conversations without convincing lots of people to use something like signal (which I do use with those I have convinced).
LOL. Thanks for the sneetches comparison!
Is the app already down? I can’t even read reviews of it on Google Play store
Seems available to me but I’m not paying $2/month to use it. I’d buy it but I’m not creating a perpetual subscription.
Other way, actually; it’s only just come out. Doesn’t look like there are any reviews yet.
im good thanks
Stop trying to make this a thing
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Exactly. I don’t understand the interest and effort put in these makeshift solutions to integrate into a closed ecosystem managed by a company with so little interest in building interoperable solutions.
They’re a cancer to the computing industry that is metastasizing, let’s not help them at that.
Fuck apple and their walled garden.
I don’t disagree with you, but open source has a long history of this sort of hostile forced-interoperability. Look at stuff like uBlock, there’s a real case to be made that it shouldn’t need to exist, and yet someone built it. Hostile “patching” of proprietary systems is not ideal, but fix barriers help in the short term.
Yeah fuck apple in the ass…
Well 1 is currently happening, the other never will.
They are going with USB C and RCS messages in the next iphone though. This is good news. The android imessage app is very late, considering.
Anecdotally, in my experience everyone in the UK just uses WhatsApp for group chats
Is this available on iOS?
Lol
The fact that people are using iMessage for group chats is which a weird concept to me.
That’s what discord, WhatsApp and Facebook messenger are for.
If anyone adds my primary text message service number to a group chat they are being blocked. Gross.
Facebook Messenger? Dawg… That shit will cripple your phone
can you elaborate?
https://www.androidpolice.com/messenger-wasting-battery-background-tests/
https://www.lifewire.com/how-facebook-messenger-apps-drains-battery-3880043
The app is constantly doing shit in the background (god knows what. You give permission to access your shit when you install it) to the point where there is significant noticeable battery drain. No thanks.
Now, maybe they’ve fixed that issue since, but we know that the “fix” would be focused on hiding it better rather than stopping the activity.
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It’s primarily not an active choice. For most iPhone users, it’s just what’s installed, so it’s what they use. The idea that there might be other options doesn’t really occur to them; iMessage came out before any of the other options really became popular, it worked well enough, and it was preinstalled, so that’s what people learned to use.
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I don’t know what sort of people you are getting into group chats with, but for me it’s not exactly people I can just decide to block on a whim. Family groups, employer groups, friends I was already friends with and would lose contact with if I blocked. I’m not going to torpedo my job and all of those relationships by making a big deal over what messaging service we use, even if their use of iMessage makes my experience worse.
I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.
As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.
Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.
Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.
What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.
I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.
We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.
This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA
Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.
I wouldn’t block them, but I’d be leaving the group chat.
That still means losing out on a lot of general life stuff. Just, overall.
As if i want my default sms texting app to be getting spammed by a big group chat.
I guess I don’t see how that’s made any different by the group chat being in a different app. I can turn notifications off or make them silent in either case.
Also the default at least here in Australia is pretty much Facebook messenger or maybe WhatsApp not because anyone likes it, but because everyone already has a Facebook account even if they don’t use it much.
Right. But everyone who has a phone has a phone number for texting.
Also it means you can easily have group chats with people who you need to communicate with but you don’t really want to have your number.
Yep, that’s definitely an advantage. I’m not trying to sell you on SMS or iMessage, I’m just trying to explain why it’s popular over here.
What a ridiculous notion to be using a platform specific service for a group chat, unless you are deciding your friends group or work colleagues based on the phone they use which again seems unfathomable.
Uh…wait. I don’t see how that’s different from Facebook or WhatsApp. Especially since iMessage does send messages to users on other devices, it’s just a worse experience for the recipient. Meta is still a platform, it’s just one you access by way of a username connected to your web activity instead of one you access by way of purchasing a specific device.
I am an iPhone user, in Australia and i have seen precisely zero iMessage chat groups even attempt to be created. Because everyone knows it’s a shitty pain in the ass service if someone doesn’t have an iPhone.
I’m glad people are so aware over there, but over here it’s very uncommon for people to even be conscious of what phones their friends use. So an app that works well enough, as far as they can tell, is going to be the accepted default.
We all blame apple for that as we should not the android user. How it ended up inverted in the US is beyond me but it’s backwards af.
Because marketing.
This whole thing is a non issue being caused by lack of thought and logic of the users apparently almost exclusively in the USA
No, it’s caused intentionally by Apple. They spent billions of dollars cultivating that perception in America, and it’s paid off for them.
Personally i wish the default here was discord or signal but messenger is still far better than iMessage at least from a cross platform usability standpoint.
Yeah, and I wish the default here was pretty much anything else too. Like I said, I’m not trying to convince you. Just explaining the situation.
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Impressive if true.
I’ve just gotten set up with it and it appears to be functional. I don’t have anyone awake to test with though. I’ll report back tomorrow.
How’d it go?
I have been able to join my partner’s family group chats at long last, to much fanfare. It’s nice, because there’s a lot of great people I just haven’t been keeping up with since I couldn’t join the chat and was not about to buy an entire phone for one chat protocol.
Only problem I’ve had so far is that I can’t see who’s specifically reacting to messages when I try to tap into it. IDK if that’s in line with the traditional iMessage experience though.
Honestly it’s borderline amazing that it’s that smooth and uneventful.
Working great for me.
And from what I’ve looked through so far of the pypush code it seems pretty legit.
IMessage being only for iPhones is officially over.
This isn’t something Apple can just block or patch without also affecting every iPhone that doesn’t download the patch update beforehand. Any device that isn’t patched in advance will also lose access to iMessage.
It’s actually quite impressive how it is done and it’s truly innovative. It’s very much a significant step forward compared to the implementations we have seen before.
Sunbird worked - I was in the beta - but it turned out to have no encryption whatsoever. I am skeptical.
Sunbird just relayed messages back and forth using a Mac mini in a warehouse. They probably had something that read the messages app on there and sent to their app on the phone through their servers, and seemingly forgot to encrypt anything during this process.
This is actually sending messages as iMessage. It’s been reverse engineered which is an incredible feat, iMessage has been out like …10+ years? And no one figured it out yet until this 16yr old rocks up.
Doesn’t iMessage require some sort of Apple-issued device id? A key, unique to a device, hard-coded in the SoC? (which is easy to block if over-used).
Which is why hackintoshes used to require crazy workarounds to get this working, even with Apple’s own software, if I remember correctly (never tried myself, could be wrong).
How did they get around this? (did they?)
Thanks, the second link talks about this in the
"data.plist" and Mac serial numberssection.
It does, the article actually mentions that. Yes, they did get around or reverse-engineer it. The article does not describe how, though I imagine it’s doing the same sort of workaround that Hackintoshes have to do. Honestly, it’s quite a feat.
As nice as it would be to have all my messaging in one app rather than across a half dozen, I just can’t picture paying a monthly fee to do it.
Well you need at least 2 currently.
Might be good for business owners, having a single inbox.
Exactly, either setting themselves as an alternative to Twilio, or to be acquired by them. Companies will pay more than $2/month/user for customer engagement on all platforms.
I’m not sure what the business model is here (I have no interest in iMessage) but unlike the previous ones this solution doesn’t require a Mac mini farm. Messages are sent directly from the Android device.
So it doesn’t require a monthly fee to be profitable.
no, thx
Crazy to think this is just because of a different colored bubble
Only happens in Muricaland.
Not just in 'Merica, also in Canada eh.
Total time spent between all of the discussion, hand-wringing, programming, and reporting, this has got to be be pretty high on the list of colossal time-wasters.
People are fucking stupid.
Crazy to think people actually believe this has anything at all to do with bubble colors.
Doesn’t it have to do with Apple’s inability to play ball with Google and use a more universally accepted and accessible messaging protocol?
When people don’t know how things work, and can only associate bubble color with bad images, video, and group messaging issues, then bubble color is meaningful.
No it’s not
To those people it definitely is. And to Apple as well.
It has become for teens. It’s like wearing the right brand. To then, if you’re a green bubble, shame on you.
Of course it originates from the degraded experience, but at the moment, it all came down to the color of the bubble without taking into consideration the features/experience.
Counterpoint: teenagers.
It’s not the color of the bubble. It’s the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn’t iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
So, it’s an issue of Apple intentionally withering down the quality if it’s not iPhone-iPhone, rather than “incompatibility”
Well, obviously. It’s just a protocol. Why wouldn’t they be able to make it cross-platform if they wanted to?
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
It’s obvious they’re restricting the quality but it could be that they implemented the MMS handling in 2008, when other phones could only support 3gp and the carriers couldn’t handle high bandwidth. I’d bet they haven’t bothered to update it since, and do the absolute bare minimum to keep it compliant with the carriers.
With all the so-called innovation and their absurd price tags , you’d think they would’ve updated it in the last 15 years
My Treo on Verizon in 2006 could send 10mb videos.
Over MMS? Without quality loss? To someone not on the same network?
No way was Verizon allowing 10MB videos over MMS in 2006. They don’t today. And that was the really early days of MMS when you were lucky if anything got delivered.
As I said, on Verizon. May have forgotten to say to other Verizon phones.
And yes, they did, and the do. I can send 50mb videos over MMS to Verizon iPhones. I’ve done it. Last time was last year as another test.
Verizon doesn’t seem to have an MMS limit.
But keep on gaslighting me and telling me I didn’t perform this test between a Verizon iPhone and a Verizon Android that I control.
The iPhone receives the video just fine. You can even see the size of the video. But when it sends it back, iOS butchers the quality.
It’s not gaslighting to be skeptical. There’s way way too much misinformation, guesswork, misinterpretation, etc happening in this thread . Yeah, I’m real skeptical. I even sent you links from Verizon about their limits that you’ve ignored. That’s not “gaslighting”.
Verizon says they currently supports 100MB MMS if you’re using their proprietary app. What are you using? And you’re not using RCS for this “unlimited” Verizon->Verizon texting you’ve done recently (since you’re saying today they support unlimited)? That also seems weird.
I can also send a 50MB file over ATT MMS. It doesn’t arrive 50MB.
I just had my Samsung-using friend send me (Motorola) a video on MMS . The quality suuuucked. We’re both on AT&T.
Its totally valid I think to blame Apple for not supporting RCS earlier (and for their reasoning behind it - platform locking). But blaming them for MMS quality sucking is pretty wrong. That’s almost entirely on the carriers.
Edit: actually I’m not even sure it’s fair to fully blame Apple. Google is supporting it via their Messenger but only because they’re paying for a ton of the infrastructure themselves (and likely justifying it by scraping every single message people are sending with it). Carriers have been notoriously bad about supporting it.
Might be more valid to blame Apple for never opening iMessage to other platforms. You could also say the same about other messaging system interop limitations, too.
Intentional ineptitude resulting from malice is still malice.
No… When you send a “blue bubble” photo on an iPhone the file size is around 1.5MB. When you send a “green bubble” photo I think they’re resized down to less than 300KB.
Any photo larger than that won’t be delivered by some carriers. Also while iMessage photos default to HEIF format - the same compression algorithm as Blue Ray videos - MMS uses JPEG which doesn’t have a target file size feature. All you have is the width/height in pixels and an arbitrary “quality” scale.
To guarantee your photo will never be over 300KB you need to set the width/height/quality to a number that will often be under 100KB… and that’s what Apple does.
Android has a size setting, and you’ll get a delivery failure error if you set it too high for the recipient’s carrier… a lot of carriers do support larger photos… But Apple doesn’t bother with that - they want it to “just work”. Which means 100KB for green bubble photos.
The reality is quality is always going to suffer - converting an image from HEIF to JPEG is a bad idea - it’ll never look anywhere near as good as the original no matter what resolution or quality the compression is set to.
Also… iPhones don’t even take ordinary photos… by default every “photo” is a short video. When you send those to another iPhone, they get the video. Green bubbles either get a still image or worse a 100KB five second video.
… So it’s still an iPhone issue … Also, i really don’t know what this “blue bubble”/“green bubble” is referencing (other than it being chats)
If you own an iPhone, when you’re texting with a person who uses iMessage, your outgoing messages have a blue background. When you’re texting with someone who doesn’t or can’t use iMessage (usually because they use an Android device) your outgoing messages have a green background. And since the message backgrounds are kind of shaped like speech bubbles from comics, they’re called bubbles.
The design is noticeably worse for the green bubbles; the contrast isn’t as good and the color scheme doesn’t seem to match as well as with the blue bubbles. And the fact that it’s the iPhone users’ outgoing messages—not the message of their recipient—that show up in this lower-fidelity way has a pretty powerful psychological impact.
Ostensibly the color difference is so that users know when their messages are being encrypted. But in reality, it seems pretty clear that Apple keeps this in place as a marketing tool, to encourage peer pressure so that users encourage other users to get iPhones.
And it works. Studies and reports keep coming out showing that, among high school students particularly, peer pressure against Android users is considerable; and even for adults, it’s not uncommon for Android users to be left off of group texts entirely.
There are other, more meaningful differences: like the fact that non-iMessage users receive photos and videos in much worse quality (which Apple’s upcoming RCS support should fix), and chats are only end-to-end encrypted between iPhones (which Apple’s implementation of RCS probably won’t fix). But the green and blue bubbles (which RCS definitely won’t fix) are, by Apple’s design, the thing that everyone is hung up on.
It’s still an iPhone issue of butchering quality when sending over MMS. Carriers are partly to blame, but even on Verizon which has no apparent MMS size limit, iPhones till butcher images.
See my other comments. I’ve tested this. It’s Apple making anything non-iMessage seem inferior. Not that they have to, but it makes people think iPhone is superior when it’s by design.
Yes. That’s exactly it
I have the same problem sending to a slew of Android friends from my Android phone. It depends on the phone they have, messaging app, and carrier.
I mean, I guess the above is partially correct but it’s also not the whole picture. But Apple = bad so it doesn’t matter, right guys?
It depends on if they’re using RCS or not.
Right but the discussions here are all about Apple having crappy MMS support or whatever.
The discussion shouldn’t be about what phone has subpar MMS support, it should be about why we’re still using MMS/SMS in the first place. Google has developed RCS and Apple has developed iMessage. The difference is that Apple has already decided not to release an iMessage client on Android, while Google has made public and private attempts to get Apple to adopt RCS instead of using MMS as a fallback.
Just as a side note, I don’t think either corporation are the “good guys”, but my desire to get E2EE and full resolution photos and videos cross platform make my goals temporarily align with Google in this particular case.
If they’d sent a link instead of the video itself you’d have seen the whole thing though.
Yes, but iPhone people are typically pretty tough to convince. The “it just works” branding is so strong that they think any flaw must be in the non-iPhone user.
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You’re missing my point, but it looks like you’re not the only one. Your friend should have sent it differently.
I mean you just missed your chance at clarifying said point in the very comment I’m about to respond to.
Try again?
Nah I’m good. I’m not getting paid to be your tech support here, if you’re not going to pay enough attention to understand plain English that’s on you.
It’s cool silly, at least I’m able to write cogent statements.
Original statement was
It’s not the color of the bubble. It’s the downgraded chat experience: grainy pictures, pixelated videos, and no E2EE.
Our kid was at a sleepover, recently. We got a video of all the kids playing together, but because it wasn’t iPhone to iPhone the video was a low resolution pixelated mess.
All you said was a half-coherent statement about sending a link instead, to which I attempted to respond. Now you can’t handle getting called out for having spaghetti for neural pathways, and here we are. Let me know if I need to buy you some crayons for further explanation.
Good luck in life, looks like you’ll need it 🤭
They’re saying that MMS is trash and everyone should know that by now.
Might be the only thing he’s been right about, but poor writing skills make his statement… let’s say, ambiguous.
The funny thing is MMS is effectively a link.
When you send an MMS, it’s uploaded to a server via http where a link is generated. Then the link is sent to the other phone, where the MMS service retrieves the file via that link. We just don’t see it happening.
Yeah, my sister-in-law has an iPhone and all of my wife’s pics and videos turn to garbage in transit. For the longest my SIL just thought Android cameras were terrible and it locked her in to iPhones at upgrade time - which is exactly what Apple intended.
That’s the carrier requiring really rediculously small sizes for MMS.
If I remember correctly AT&T is still limiting videos to 2MB tops. Which is crazy.
And Apple forcing shit quality on ALL MMS, even when the carrier allows higher quality/size.
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
What’s really frustrating is MMS is just a web server on the other end. Since the time of data connections (~2005) vendors could’ve easily made it so MMS on data-capable devices is transported to the web server over data rather than through the voice channel frames (which is what SMS and MMS do).
Though if you had a data-capable device back then, you had to get a data plan to send MMS, so apparently this is what they were doing. They just don’t want to upgrade the MMS hosting servers and have the extra traffic.
I mean, I have the same problem on Android talking to android friends who don’t use an rcs-coompatible messaging app. Which is more rare than it used to be, but still.
Again, that’s the carrier limitation at that point.
If you were both on Verizon, which doesn’t seem to have an MMS limitation, this wouldn’t happen.
Which exposes that Android can do it, when the network allows it, while iPhone never can.
What? iPhone can do it. If the network allows it. Same as Android.
Also. Verizon has severe MMS limits. Which are less severe if you’re using their proprietary app.
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T-Mobile has a 1MB limit for MMS
Right, there you go.
Because Apple decided all media over SMS should be sent in a shitty downgraded form.
This is all on Apple wanting to make iMessage look better than SMS, and Apple look better than everyone else (and to be fair, iMessage is the right approach to the SMS issue, just not as a walled-garden version).
iOS can’t send hi quality videos or images over SMS. It’s a choice made by Apple.
I can send large videos (more than 50mb, for sure) over SMS from my Android phone on Verizon to a Verizon iPhone. They receive it in same quality. When they send it back, the iPhone butchers it.
Verizon, unlike other carriers, doesn’t seem to have an MMS size limit.
So Apple and carriers are to blame for this.
