Beeper has had a roller coaster ride in recent weeks. After boasting in early December about the legitimacy of its intriguing iMessage service for Android, the company discovered two days later that Apple disagreed and had closed the loophole that Beeper Mini relied on. Since then, the priority has been to find a workaround to keep the service running.
The first patch seemed to re-enable the iMessage functionality on the Android app, but added a new caveat: you had to sign in with an Apple ID and send and receive messages through that address, which wasn’t quite right. that people had registered. For. (In recognition of this fact, the service became temporarily free.) Worse, this method reportedly failed for more than half of users. But now Beeper thinks he has found a more satisfactory solution.
The problem, according to Beeper, was that Apple was able to identify and block iMessages sent through the app because many of them used corresponding registration data from Beeper’s fleet of Mac servers. To get around this, the company encourages users to get their own unique registration data…and that means having access to their own Mac.
To be clear, you don’t need to send and receive iMessages through the Mac, which would be completely unnecessary. Instead, you turn on the Mac every so often to “refresh” the data, and Beeper Mini uses that data to do the messaging work on your Android device. This means that it doesn’t even have to be your Mac, but could belong to a friend: as Beeper explains, “the registration data is used only to indicate that a Mac is available during registration. The Mac does not have access to your account or messages in any way.
(If you’re wondering how often you’ll need to turn on your Mac, you’re not alone, because Beeper’s best estimate is “about once a week or month.” If you’re also wondering how many Mac users will be willing to allow their computer to voluntarily participate in the Beeper workaround which may or may not work, we think it’s pretty close to zero.)
It gets more and more complicated; Before long, we can assume that Beeper Mini will work just fine provided you have access to the Messages app on an up-to-date iPhone. It’s tempting to wonder if all the hassle is really worth it when you can just buy an iPhone or wait for the benefits of Apple’s impending RCS move to pay off. But iMessage remains the big battleground in the current presidential election, iPhone versus Android, and no one wants to back down.
One thing is certain though: none of this is Apple’s fault.
