There’s a new app that lets Android users use iMessage without needing an Apple ID. Your phone number is your identity. The app lets you send and receive text messages in a blue bubble. You only need to install Beeper Mini. Now if you send and receive messages from your phone, it will show a Blue bubble in place of green.
Beeper Mini doesn’t use a Mac relay server in a data center. It directly connects to Apple servers to send and receive messages and it also doesn’t require Apple ID to work. All the messages are also end-to-end encrypted and the Encryption keys never leave your device.
To make this app a reality, the developer behind the app deconstructed Apple’s messaging pipeline to figure out where to send the messages. The hardest part of the work was cracking Apple’s padlock on the whole system.
“This is now possible because the iMessage protocol and encryption have been reverse engineered by jjtech, a security researcher. Leveraging this research, Beeper Mini implements the iMessage protocol locally within the app,” said Eric Migicovsky, cofounder of Beeper.
The app has a clean, modern, and straightforward design that you expect from a modern chat app. Several people who have used the app were also surprised by how well the app works. All the messages sent from Beeper Mini show blue bubbles on the iPhones. All the features including reactions, threads, photos, and videos work fine.
The developer has also published a proof-of-concept Python implementation on GitHub. If you know how to code, you can download the code and run it on your computer to check how the app works. It doesn’t require Apple hardware to work. You can read this detailed article to learn more about how Beeper Mini works.
The previous version of the app called Beeper relied on external Mac mini servers but that was expensive. They used more than 700 Mac mini servers to run a beta version of Beeper. That implementation was also not secure and private.
Beeper Mini is working fine and will work until Apple finds a way to kill it. Let’s see how Apple responds to this.
A limited version of Beeper Mini is now available for Android users. The app costs $2 per month. There is also a 7-day free trial if you want to try it before paying for the app.
