Was it too good to be true? Beeperthe startup that revamped iMessage to bring blue-bubble texts to Android users is facing a shutdown, the company says reported via a post on X on Friday. And it looks like it’s Apple’s fault. Users, including those of us at TechCrunch with access to the app, started seeing error messages when trying to send messages through the recently released Beeper Mini and messages not going through.
The error message says: “Failed to lookup server: lookup request timed out” written in red letters.
Image Credits: screenshot of the Beeper Mini bug
In response to a question about Reddit on whether or not the app was broken, a member of the Beeper team had earlier responded: “Report an issue with the app, give us a chance to look into it.”
However, Beeper’s CEO Eric Migikowski answered TechCrunch’s question about the status of the Beeper Mini by pointing us in the direction the X post that acknowledges the interrupt, and providing more details. Asked if Apple had found a way to kill the Beeper Mini, he replied: “Yes, all the data points to that.”
We don’t know what this means for the future of the Beeper Mini endeavors, unless the Beeper engineers are able to resolve the issue somehow.
Migicovsky, who previously founded the Pebble smartwatch, argued that the Beeper Mini was not only beneficial for Android users who wanted to finally join their friends’ iMessage group chats, but that it increased security for iPhone users as well.
In an interview before the launch of Beeper Mini, the founder explained that the green bubble texts were not encrypted.
“This means that whenever you send a message to your Android friends, anyone can read the message. Apple can read the message. Your carrier may read the message. Google… literally, it’s like a postcard. Anyone can read it. So Beeper Mini really increases the security of iPhones,” he told TechCrunch.
Apple, on the other hand, sees iMessage as one of the primary tools for locking users into its ecosystem, which is why it won’t release an iMessage app for Android. While there was some hope that EU regulations would force it to make iMessage more interoperable, news this week suggests that iMessage will get a reprieve from those rules because the service isn’t popular enough with business users. That means Apple has no reason not to try to shut down the Beeper Mini if it could.
Migicovsky is not at all happy with this turn of events.
“I’d be very interested to hear why they think worse security for iPhone users makes sense,” he said.
“If it’s Apple, then I think the bigger question is – if Apple really cares about the privacy and security of its own iPhone users, why would it try to kill a service that allows iPhones to send encrypted chats to Android users? With their announcement of RCS support, it’s clear that Apple knows they have a gap here. Beeper Mini is here today and works great. Why force iPhone users to go back to sending unencrypted SMS when chatting with friends on Android?” he asked.
Founded in 2020, the Beeper team originally worked on a cross-platform message aggregator, which was renamed Beeper Cloud this week as the Beeper Mini went live. The latter uses new technology which allows Android users to send messages to iMessage users as if they were also texting from an iPhone for just $1.99 per month. This means blue bubbles in the group chat, not green. Because the startup no longer used an intermediary — such as a Mac server that relays messages, as other iMessage-to-Android apps use — it essentially appeared to Apple’s servers that the Beeper Mini’s messages came from a device running iMessage natively. It’s not clear, then, how Apple was able to cut off Beeper Mini’s access.
What this means for the future of the Beeper Mini is uncertain.
“We will evaluate the options,” Migicovsky said.
An update, perhaps?
— Eric Migicovsky (@ericmigi) December 9, 2023
