𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙

Beeper Mini is no less private than using iMessage on an iPhone.

It doesn’t even require an AppleID let alone require your credentials for one.

The cloud service that Apple didn’t block is the one that requires you to give your Apple credentials to a cloud bridge.

that is protected by the DMCA?

Reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is legal under DMCA.

I’m happy to pay to support them.

If you’d rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.

The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can’t just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.

The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.

I’m just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users’ data.

Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.

Same thing that’s been in the news about some sharing info with police. The comment of the messages are ete encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not

Beeper Mini’s GCM server only handles a “new message waiting” trigger, it doesn’t contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.

Notifications are generated after the message is pulled from Apple’s servers to your device.

The push messages just tell your device a message is available to be pulled. It doesn’t contain any message contents or metadata.

It’s basically just “you have a new message waiting” and then your phone will ping Apple’s server to request the message.

Running BlueBubbles at the moment, eagerly awaiting someone to build a self hosted implementation of this so I can stop relying on my macos VM.

Beeper Mini does not require a Mac VM or any Apple products. There’s no cloud proxy to self host. It registers your phone number directly with Apple’s servers, you don’t even need an AppleID at all, just like on an iPhone.

It’s indistinguishable from an iPhone on Apple’s end and your iMessage encryption keys never leave your phone

Ah but the difference is that Linux doesn’t force you to install those updates.

I have a dual GPU laptop with an AMD base and an Nvidia GPU.

Hasn’t been a problem at all (though it certainly was when I tried a year and a half ago)

When’s the last time you loaded windows and sound didn’t work out of the gate?

I had trouble getting Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Zero Dawn, and BG3 to open at all on Windows at various times.

All of them work great for me on Linux.

I think 99% of my issues with Windows were due to Windows Updates messing with my drivers but the point is I don’t have those problems on Linux. You never hear about Linux forcing updates that break your system.

Yeah I mean if the game you want to play doesn’t work then maybe Linux isn’t for you, at least not at this time.

Not saying you have to switch.

Just that my personal experience with it has been very good, better than I expected, and way better than my previous experience not long ago.

As others have mentioned, you can check the status of your preferred games on websites like ProtonDB beforehand, you don’t have to format your Windows drive and install Linux before finding out if your games will work.

Check out my reply

I posted some links that get into the details of how the tech works

For sure, but these days the main offenders are online multiplayer games with restrictive anti-cheats.

I would go so far as to say if those specific types of games are not your thing you aren’t likely to experience any issues gaming on Linux.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but every time I think “oh this game for sure won’t work” I have eaten my words.

And it’s like a night and day difference from the last time I tried to do this about a year and a half ago. The progress I’ve seen is almost more impressive than the performance gains. 🤷

Working great for me.

And from what I’ve looked through so far of the pypush code it seems pretty legit.

IMessage being only for iPhones is officially over.

This isn’t something Apple can just block or patch without also affecting every iPhone that doesn’t download the patch update beforehand. Any device that isn’t patched in advance will also lose access to iMessage.

It’s actually quite impressive how it is done and it’s truly innovative. It’s very much a significant step forward compared to the implementations we have seen before.

Here’s a simple picture with minimal reading required.

This is very different to the technology used in the free/wait-list Beeper Cloud app and all the other previous attempts at an iMessage for Android app.

To summarize:

All messages are sent directly between your device and Apple’s servers. You do not even need an AppleID. There is a cloud server involved but it’s only job is to send push notifications to Android so they app knows when to download new messages (securely with iMessage encryption) from Apple’s servers.

No message contents are sent through the cloud server, it just notifies your device when there are new messages. This is necessary because Apple servers obviously do not support Android push notifications.

Sort of.

All messages/etc are sent using iMessage encryption directly between your phone and Apple’s iMessage servers.

But there is no Android push notifications from Apple’s servers.

So in order to be notified about new messages in a timely manner without killing your battery/data plan a cloud server is required to trigger your phone that a message has arrived so your phone can then request the message from Apple’s servers.

This is actually a really common implementation, many apps use Firebase or similar to handle push notifications that are only used to trigger a “pull” of a larger chunk of data.

The push notifications being used here don’t contain any private data, they just tell your device when to collect that private data securely.

How did they get around this?

This blog post does a fairly good job outlining the tech

You can also take a look at the pypush proof-of-concept code that this is based on

Having recently switched myself I actually have experienced less issues and better game performance from Linux than I did on Windows, at least with the games I play and the hardware I have.

Definitely not what I would call cancer

Notice how in the article they say “we’re not the middle man… Any more”? That’s because, up until now, Beeper has been working on a system where they operate as a middle man for your data.

To be fair they never claimed otherwise and all of the code for the bridges are open-sourced and can be run on your own servers so that those servers you control (as opposed to Beeper-owned servers) act as a “middle man” and none of your messages need be trusted to a 3rd party.

To put it simply: only the actual bridge on Beeper Cloud has access to unencrypted messages and you do have the option to run the bridge yourself while continuing to use the Beeper app. You can use as many or as few self-hosted bridges as you’d like.

A few bridges are preconfigured for self-hosting with just a couple of clicks for free through fly.io here

No, with this new app messages are encrypted between you and Apple’s iMessage servers using iMessage encryption more or less the same way an iPhone does.

The push service simply notifies your device it has a message waiting, no message content passes through Beeper servers.

But gaming on Linux is cancer.

Your information is outdated