Beeper: iMessage for Android — It Actually Works!
0Earlier this year, a developer slid into Eric Migicovsky’s DMs with a spectacular claim: that he had reverse engineered Apple’s iMessage, allowing any device — Android, Windows, whatever — to send messages as a blue bubble. Migicovsky didn’t believe what he was reading.
“I said, ‘Bullshit, no one has done that. No one on earth has done that,’” said Migicovsky, CEO of the messaging startup Beeper. He’d tried to do it himself, and he’d messaged everyone he could find who’d ever gotten close. “No one had put all the pieces together.”
But now there was this developer in his DMs — a 16-year-old high school student, of all people — linking him to a prototype. And it worked.
That prototype became the basis for a new Android app, called Beeper Mini, that Migicovsky’s startup is launching today. Open the app, and it’ll look at all of your text message conversations, figure out which ones are from iMessage users, and switch them over to blue bubble conversations on Apple’s platform. From then on, whenever you message an iPhone user through Beeper Mini, you’ll be using iMessage, and they’ll be none the wiser.
I’ve been using the app for the past few weeks, and I’ve been surprised at how smoothly it works. Messages sent from Beeper Mini on my Pixel 8 appear as blue bubbles on the iPhones of my friends and family members. Group chats I’m on automatically switched over to iMessage as soon as someone fired off a meme. Reactions, threads, photos, and videos (without the messy text message compression) all came through. The best thing I can say about Beeper Mini is that almost no one noticed I was using it: blue bubbles just started appearing — no lost messages to speak of.
Beeper Mini joins a growing list of apps trying to hack the iMessage experience onto Android, but Migicovsky is adamant that Beeper Mini is not like the other services out there: it is directly sending iMessages.
Other services — including Beeper’s previous iMessage implementation — would relay messages through a Mac hosted in the cloud. That poses real security problems, as recently exemplified by Sunbird and its Nothing-branded spinoff, Nothing Chats. Nothing’s app was launched and pulled in just four days after serious security issues were discovered; Sunbird pulled its app shortly thereafter.
Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.
“We jailbroke iPhones then dove deep into the OS to see how everything worked,” Migicovsky wrote to me over iMessage. “Then wrote new code from scratch to reproduce everything inside our Android app.”