Beeper Blog

An interesting alternative to the SQFMI Beepy / Beepberry [0][1] which is just a rpi zero but has a Sharp Memory Pixel display that I love. Both could use some work on adapting the UI to the little blackberry touchpad. Neither using a mouse cursor nor meta/ctrl modifier combos are very ergonomic on these little handhelds. [0] https://beepy.sqfmi.com/ [1] https://blog.beeper.com/2023/05/16/beeper-x-sqmfi-beepberry/

Very similar to the Beepberry. Exciting to see someone else building into that form factor. Also love to fun to see the Nokia BL-5C battery (originally introduced in the Nokia 3650 in 2003) still alive and kicking 20years later. https://blog.beeper.com/2023/05/16/beeper-x-sqmfi-beepberry/

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531759 > Our long term vision is to build a universal chat app (https://blog.beeper.com/p/were-building-the-best-chat-app-on). Over the next few months, we will be adding support for SMS/RCS, WhatsApp, Signal and 12 other chat networks into Beeper Mini. At that point, we’ll drop the `Mini` postfix. We’re also rebuilding our Beeper Desktop and iOS apps to support our new ‘client-side bridge’ architecture that preserves full end-to-end encryption. We’re also renaming our first gen apps to ‘Beeper Cloud’ to more clearly differentiate them from Beeper Mini.

More in-depth on how Beeper Mini works: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works Really good article and it's great to see this come out right after the fiasco of Sunbird / Nothing Messages.

I am all against monopolies, I loved pidgin (and just saw that actually it still exists!), but the beeper-mini case was quite weird. > The user will create an account so IMO if I have an Apple account (I own an old Apple laptop) then WTF would Apple care I send the bytes from a differrent application. Actually, the initial version of beeper mini did not require an apple ID. And actually this was one feature they seemed to advertised a lot. Only the phone number was used: "No Apple ID is required" [1]. I guess the idea was that they could provide an upgrade to the current, unencrypted communication between iMessage and android (that does not require an apple id either). But I guess the issue here, was that people who used it did not necessarily have an apple ID, and thus not consented to apple's ToS, which as I understand makes it different than pidgin etc. And they actually say that this is a problem they are trying to fix: "Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this." [2] Unless I misunderstand something, beeper mini stopped working because apple somehow disabled this "feature". I mean I do not have any invested interest in this, I do not own an iphone and even if I did all people I know use other chatting apps, I do not own apple stocks or anything, I am all for piracy and whatnot, but I would not…

you probably meant to link https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-joining-automattic/ between this new/old enterprise of yours and the other stuff going on with automattic i am worried about beeper. sadly as i'm not allowed to pay for it i don't have a tangible stake in the product, so i can only ask nicely for a more explicit statement of future plans. it'd be a shame to see beeper (+texts) collapse.

Here's how it works: https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/how-beeper-android-works/

They actually reverse engineered Apple's iMessage and released a POC. At the time it worked and demonstrated on device bridges being a possibility. The runs locally and then encrypts it client side before it reaches beeper services. This can be enabled for Signal under experimental settings already. https://blog.beeper.com/2023/12/05/how-beeper-mini-works/

I am using Beeper desktop app on Windows for the express purpose of being an iMessage client. Their press release (https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-now-available/) says "Beeper does not currently support iMessage". Does that refer to the Android client? I hope they continue to support iMessage on the desktop.

Used to be that way, they decided to give it out for free for the time being. [1] [1] - https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-is-now-free

Beeper open sourced the iMessage bridge about 2 days ago: https://blog.beeper.com/p/imessage-and-phone-registration-are (although I realized one hour ago, that's why I posted it!)

This link is to the iMessage bridge that they open sourced 10 (edit: 2) days ago. Has anything changed since then, or is this a duplicate of this? Edit: 700+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722246 Edit: correct link: https://blog.beeper.com/p/imessage-and-phone-registration-are

> Beeper Cloud has always been free to use. This isn't true [0], unless you count "always" as meaning "always [after the time that the new iMessage bridge was introduced]." [0]: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-is-now-free

Beeper has explicitly suggested that. > If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users. https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-mini-is-back

Beeper (Beeper Cloud) is a cross-platform stack that supports multiple messaging systems (not just iMessage) and has been in development for years.[1] This is different from Beeper Mini, which is a recently launched Android-exclusive app that only supports SMS and iMessage.[2] The release of Beeper Mini certainly gained publicity for Beeper Cloud, and I don't see why Beeper Mini would cause Beeper Cloud to go defunct. [1] Beeper Cloud: https://www.beeper.com/cloud [2] Beeper Mini: https://blog.beeper.com/p/introducing-beeper-mini-get-blue

Are you paying for this, or are all of the features you use part of their free offering? I didn't realize until just now that they created a free tier: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-is-now-free

> With Beeper, you have to give your Apple ID to a third-party app, which they then proxy through a server of some kind (https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/beeper-mini-is-back-in-ope... "signing in with our Apple ID generated an Apple prompt that noted our ID was being used to sign in with a device “near Los Angeles, CA” (where we are not located.)") I think they have another primary product of the same name that operates this way, but Beeper Mini never sends your credentials off anywhere other than Apple’s servers [0][1]. [0]: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works [1]: https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

Thanks I see that mentioned here https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

> Beeper Mini uses another workaround for the device UUID/serial/etc. requirement. Have you got a source on that? As far as I know, there's no workaround possible because the authentication blob is based on the UDID/serial. Put differently: without UDID/serial, there's no way of authenticating with the message servers. Beeper keeps referring to pypush when it comes to details in their write-up[0], and pypush, in turn, clearly states[1] the need for information like serial and UDID when dealing with the albert server and IDS registration request. As a “workaround,” they simply stuff fake serials, etc., and cross their fingers that it gets through Apple’s scoring mechanism. 0: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works 1: https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/

If you take a look at their How it Works post [1] this is not an entirety client side implementation, so there would presumably be a small number of IPs that would need to be blocked. [1] https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

Looking at the Beeper Mini announcement [1], they clearly state that a user doesn't need an Apple ID to register their phone number and send/receive iMessages. Also, they describe direct, device-to-Apple interactions. However, this article says: > IDS is used as a keyserver for iMessage... > The first step in registering for IDS is getting an authentication token. This requires giving the API your Apple ID Username and Password. > After registering with IDS, you will receive an “identity keypair”. This keypair can then be used to perform public key lookups. So how does the Beeper Mini app take an arbitrary Android phone number, register public keys for it with IDS, and perform public key lookup of recipients... all without ever using an Apple ID? [1] https://blog.beeper.com/i/139416474/security-and-privacy

https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works Very cool. A question: will you be revenue sharing with JJTech0130? Their work made this possible, correct?

> The phone number registration https://blog.beeper.com/i/139416474/sending-and-receiving-me... will make it possible to enforce legal action against malicious and spammy messages Like the legal action that is currently protecting us from robocalls? I don’t know if iMessage registration requires bidirectional SMS verification, though. If it does, that would be significantly harder to spoof than just caller IDs.

The phone number registration https://blog.beeper.com/i/139416474/sending-and-receiving-messages will make it possible to enforce legal action against malicious and spammy messages. Note that iPhones already receive SMS spam and fraud just like every other phone. However, you are correct that the blue bubble is no longer a guarantee that the bad actor is using an iPhone.

https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works > SMS access is used to send an SMS text message from your number to Apple’s “Gateway” service. The gateway sends a response via SMS, and the contents from that SMS response are sent to Apple to register your phone number as a blue bubble. Your SMS chat history is also used to determine if any of your recent SMS chats were with people who have iPhones. If so, these chats are shown in the inbox. Does this mean that Apple is sent the phone number of every person you have ever sent or received an SMS with?

Technical details in this blog post - https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

This is a really impressive reverse engineering feat of the iMessage protocol, all the way down to the iMessage auth flows and identity credentials. The deep dive the authors posted is interesting https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

The referenced technical write up is fascinating[0] I wonder how well this architecture (including privacy preservation) would work for LinkedIn messaging? Specifically the BPN service since that seems to come from a data center IP and more likely for Apple / others to have a choke point. [0] https://blog.beeper.com/p/721485af-aad0-4962-b418-eea9bc1e8f86

I'm surprised Apple hasn't cut them off yet. They must not be able to for some legacy reason. I suspect the only way to cut them off would be to cut off all the older phones like iPhone 3GS as well. >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. All messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple’s servers. The encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone. Neither Beeper, Apple, nor anyone except the intended recipients can read your messages or attachments. Beeper does not have access to your Apple credentials. >We built Beeper Mini by analyzing the traffic sent between the native iMessage app and Apple’s servers, and rebuilding our own app that sends the same requests and understands the same responses. https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works