Beeper Mini — the app that allowed Android users into to Apple’s iMessage walled garden via some clever reverse engineering — abruptly stopped working yesterday, just three days after launching. Now it seems certain that the sudden outage is a result of an Apple intervention.
While the widely shared Apple PR statement doesn’t mention Beeper Mini directly, it’s pretty clear that’s what it’s about. “We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” the statement explains.
The question of whether that leads to weakened security is a less clear-cut one, however. Beeper says that the app is fully encrypted and private, and that only the sender and receiver can read messages sent via it. It’s even offered to show its source code to a third party to verify this to Apple’s satisfaction.
The irony of all of this is that by integrating directly with Apple, Beeper Mini actually appears more secure than other Android workarounds.
“If Apple truly cares about the privacy and security of their own iPhone users, why would they stop a service that enables their own users to now send encrypted messages to Android users, rather than using unsecure SMS?”, asks Beeper founder Eric Migicovsky to The Verge.
It’s a good question, and one that Apple would argue is being answered by its belated embrace of RCS messaging next year. A more cynical answer would be that Apple knows iMessage’s platform exclusivity is a great way of retaining users and attracting new ones.
That’s especially true of young users who, as the Wall Street Journal famously explored, can be a bit judgemental about the second-class texting experience Android users get on the platform: basic text, horribly compressed media and the dreaded green bubble. Apple has confirmed that Android messages will still be green, even after the integration of RCS is complete.
Indeed, the WSJ article digs out a decade-old quote from Apple’s Craig Federighi, where he says that introducing iMessage to Android would only result in removing an “obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones”.
For now, Migicovsky appears bullish about the prospects of keeping Beeper going. “Beeper Cloud and Mini are apps that need to exist,” he wrote, in response to a tweet asking if “an endless cat and mouse game” is a reliable business model. “We have built it. We will keep it working. We will share it widely.”
It may be a moot point. One thing that people need from their messaging apps is reliability, and if persistent outages become part of the experience, then it’s hard to believe users will keep paying $2 a month.
