The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. Call a startup Beeperwhich was working on a cross-platform message aggregator, is now live a new app called Beeper Mini which will allow Android users to send and receive end-to-end encrypted iMessage conversations for just $1.99 per month. Beeper Mini was made possible because the team behind the app managed to reverse engineer the iMessage protocol, they say.
“This is the big breakthrough,” explains Beeper’s co-founder and CEO Eric Migikowski, previously founder of smartwatch startup Pebble. “We are no longer intermediaries. The research we’ve done is actually reverse engineering the iMessage protocol, down to the lowest level of the protocol. So Beeper Mini doesn’t use a Mac server as a relay like all the other apps – they have a Mac Mini in a data center somewhere. And when you send a message, you’re actually sending a message to the Mac Mini, which then forwards it to iMessage,” he explains. “Beeper Mini is a native implementation of the iMessage protocol.”
Beeper does not have access to the content of users’ messages, the company claims. And unlike Sunbird’s recently aborted efforts to solve the same problem, the messages aren’t sent in clear text.
Instead, the message you send from an Android phone using Beeper Mini is end-to-end encrypted at the recipient, the startup says. It is encrypted on the device before it leaves the app. Encryption keys are stored exclusively on your phone in the Android file system, similar to other apps like Signal and WhatsApp. The app doesn’t connect to any servers in Beeper itself, only to Apple’s servers, like a “real” iMessage text would.
This means Beeper Mini can act as a real iMessage client, supporting high-resolution photos and videos, threads, replies, read receipts, direct messages and group chats, emoji reactions, editing and unsending messages, and support for stickers. GIFs, voice memos and more. Features such as live location sharing, message effects, and support for FaceTime audio and video calls are not yet supported. Users will not need an Apple ID to use Beeper Mini.
“It’s a full iMessage app,” says Migicovsky. “For all intents and purposes, the Beeper Mini looks like an iPhone.”
So Apple might not be able to just automatically block the Beeper Mini’s texts if it wanted to take action against the company, though the co-founder admits that how Apple will react is still uncertain.
However, he points to a provision of the Copyright Act, The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201F) which says that reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability is protected. That won’t necessarily stop Apple from sending Beeper legal a Cease and Desist, of course. Apple previously sued spyware maker NSO Group to stop it from using Apple services, and could likely pursue a legal case here as well if it chooses. What might keep it at bay is the Digital Markets App (DMA), a law in Europe that says big tech companies will have to have an interoperable interface for their chat networks. There’s also turmoil in antitrust efforts in the US, where Apple is under federal scrutiny, which could make it bad timing to target Beeper, too.
But to be fully reliable, the Beeper Mini would have to be tested by a third party — which it hasn’t yet. Additionally, Beeper uses certificate pinning, which makes it more difficult to perform network traffic analysis to verify its claims. The company says its external audit is still “ongoing,” but it has conducted an internal audit. The company is posting these results on her blog along with a detailed, more technical description of how the Beeper Mini works.
For example, the team explains here how they needed to create a new service, called the Beeper Push Notification Service (BPN), to make the service work:
“A persistent APN connection is required to be notified of new incoming messages in real time. On an iPhone, an APN connection is maintained by the operating system and connected at all times. On Beeper Mini, the connection can only be maintained when the app is running, as Android does not natively support APN.”
To address this limitation, the team built BPN to connect to Apple servers on behalf of the user when the app is not running.
Image Credits: Beeper
In tests, the Beeper Mini worked as described, able to send iMessage texts from an older Android phone on the Google Fi wireless network with its own phone number (not associated with an Apple ID) to an iPhone 15 Pro Max with a different phone number that is associated with an Apple ID. Full resolution photos and other features like tapbacks and typing prompts also worked. When the Android phone’s battery died, however, the messages reverted to green bubbles and didn’t go into Beeper’s app—they went to Google Messages instead.
The company also hopes to gain trust by building on the public, with more than 50 projects published on GitHub with the open source that goes into the app. In addition, the founders themselves are well-known people with a history of building promising technology, including the Pebble smartwatch.
Founded in 2020, Beeper comes from former Y Combinator partner Eric Migicovsky and CTO Brad Murray, formerly of wholesale marketplace startup Faire and Fitbit. The co-founders had met at Pebble, the smartwatch company Migicovsky had founded, creating the hardware brand that was later acquired by Fitbit.
Migicovsky said he was inspired to create Beeper out of personal necessity as a lifelong Android user.
Initially, Beeper had released a multi-network chat app that supported about 15 different networks, including WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, Slack, Instagram, LinkedIn, Discord, Google Chat, Android SMS, iMessage and more.
“Until I started Beeper, I didn’t really understand the whole iMessage thing. I didn’t really understand why people loved it so much,” says Migicovsky. “I think one of the reasons is that it’s so deeply integrated into iOS, it’s second nature to you as an iPhone user. When you want to get in touch with someone, you open the Messages app.”
However, his experience with messaging varied, having lived at times in Europe and Asia, where he gathered friends in a wider network of apps. He didn’t understand the draw that iMessage had in the US, as he was simply left out of friends’ iMessage conversations because he was the friend with a green bubble.
The original Beeper app had 50,000 signups in its first week and now has about 100,000 testers in closed beta. This application, which extends to mobile devices and desktops, supports RCS (via Beeper’s open source bridge). Beeper Mini will soon be able to send and receive SMS and RCS. The older Beeper will now transition and be renamed “Beeper Cloud” as Beeper Mini will be released for iMessage only. Over time, Beeper Mini will add the other networks back to the platform, as well as SMS and RCS, and Beeper Could die out. At that point, Beeper Mini will once again be known as just Beeper.
Beeper Mini is competitively priced at $2.99 per month with a 7-day free trial, compared to $15 per month for the recently acquired competitor Texts.com that Automattic bought. The startup says it is able to keep costs low by targeting a broader market that includes Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows and Linux.
But Beeper also has venture capital to back it up, with $16 million raised to date through its Series A, led by Gary Tan of Initialized Capital, now president and CEO at Y Combinator. Other backers include SV Angel, Samsung Next, Liquid2 Ventures, Niv Dror from Shrug Capital, Kevin Mahaffey and others. Beeper is a distributed team of 25 people, while Migicovsky is based in Palo Alto.
Asked if Samsung’s investment means the company could be interested in a later acquisition, Migicovsky said only “no comment.”
“They have been very supportive,” he added.
Beeper Mini is available to the public today on the Google Play Store.
Additional reporting by Zack Whittaker.
