Security and privacy concerns caused Apple to block messaging service Beeper Mini, the company said Sunday. But on Monday Beeper Mini got around the block and pledged to keep making its service available.
This followed Beeper Mini’s highly publicized launch on December 5. It said it had successfully reverse-engineered iMessage to turn green Android text bubbles blue on iPhones.
From that moment, many people wondered how long Apple would let it stand (just a few days, it turned out).
Update: Beeper Mini is back with improvements, according to a new blog post that puts the ball back in Apple’s court. Beeper said it’s willing to share its codebase with an independent research firm and reirterated it could add a pager emoji to enable filtering of Beeper Mini messages in iMessage. See more on the story so far below.
Apples cites security and privacy concerns in shutting down Beeper Mini
Beeper Mini launched Tuesday with the big news that it would let Android users send encrypted messages in blue bubbles instead of green ones to iPhones. By Friday, the app suffered an outage widely suspected to be Apple’s doing. Cupertino commented on the shutdown over the weekend, according to reports in The Verge and elsewhere.
Apple said it wanted to protect users’ security and privacy, particularly concerning metadata exposure and the possibility of phishing attacks.
“We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” Apple senior PR manager Nadine Haija said.
Read Apple’s full statement:
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.
A short-lived innovation?
Beeper Mini appeared to be a more-successful attempt to merge the iMessage and Android texting worlds than other recent efforts. Those include Nothing and Sunbird’s joint failure to put iMessage on Android last month. It was exposed as a huge security problem for users.
Beeper Mini did, however, incorporate deception to allow Android phones to send encrypted messages like iPhone, but without an Apple ID. After all, it worked by fooling Apple servers into thinking notifications came from a genuine Apple device when they didn’t. Read more about how Beeper Mini says it works.
Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky said he still hopes to get Beeper Mini working again and finds Apple’s position hard to understand.
“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?” he asked.
In his conversation with The Verge, Migicovsky even offered to differentiate Android-generated messages over Beeper Mini with a pager icon as a way to let users know they’re not from an iPhone even though they’re blue.
“What we’ve built is good for the world,” he said. “It’s something we can almost all agree should exist.”
But given Apple’s iron grip on iMessage, it’s not easy to picture Beeper Mini convincing Cupertino to cooperate, particularly given its understandable preference that everyone simply buy iPhones.
