Beeper is working with iMessage yet again, though Apple is likely to fight it
Enlarge / Beeper Mini's promises of "Blue bubbles" on Android have been halted, at least temporarily, by Apple's countermeasures. (credit: Beeper)
Beeper Mini, the Android app born from a reverse-engineering of Apple's iMessage service, is purportedly working again as of Monday afternoon after a launch last week that drew more than 100,000 users, followed by a weekend outage forced by Apple.
An update to Beeper Mini in the Google Play Store restores the ability to send and receive text messages through iMessage, the encrypted service typically restricted to Apple devices. "It's working exactly as it did before Friday," Beeper's co-founders write in a blog post. Beeper Cloud, the desktop multi-chat client that utilizes similar methods for iMessage service, had been working since Sunday.
Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky suggested to The Verge and TechCrunch that an outage starting Friday afternoon was due to Apple's efforts to block the service. Late on Saturday, Apple offered a statement to The Verge late Saturday stating that it had indeed done so. Apple "took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage," the statement read. Citing "metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks," Apple stated it would "continue to make updates in the future to protect our users." (Ars has reached out to Apple for comment on the specifics of this message and will update this post with new information.)