It has been fairly the week for Beeper Mini, the brand new Android app that guarantees to convey full iMessage performance to Android. Having launched a couple of days in the past, with the hope of FaceTime calls sooner or later, it is now been blocked by Apple – although the Beeper Mini staff is promising to revive performance.

Beeper Mini does one thing that hasn’t been executed earlier than: it truly reverse engineers Apple’s iMessage protocols to correctly interface with the chat service. In different phrases, it makes your Android telephone seem like an iPhone to iMessage.

Though Beeper Mini guarantees end-to-end encryption assist, it nonetheless poses “vital dangers to person safety and privateness” in response to Apple, which is why Apple has now blocked Beeper Mini entry. On the time of writing, these blocks are nonetheless in place.

“We’ll hold it working,” Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky posted, after Apple took motion. You possibly can nonetheless use the cloud Beeper service to entry iMessage from non-Apple gadgets – however, like Sunbird and Nothing Chats – this makes use of a much less safe methodology, deploying Mac computer systems as intermediaries to idiot the iMessage service.

The inexperienced bubbles are staying

Within the US, the place iPhones dominate, a lot is made from Android customers displaying up as inexperienced bubbles in conversations, with out assist for superior iMessage options like reactions and message modifying. In different international locations, many customers have switched to different apps corresponding to WhatsApp or Fb Messenger, which work the identical on any smartphone.

Whereas Apple has now stated it’s going to assist RCS in 2024 – that is the upgraded model of SMS, with extras like learn receipts and high-resolution picture assist – Android customers will nonetheless present up as inexperienced bubbles. These colours appear to be massively vital to some folks, despite the fact that Android customers are getting nearer to characteristic parity beneath the hood.

The issue for anybody attempting to recreate iMessage on Android is that Apple does not enable any third-party entry to the service. Until Apple truly decides to launch iMessage for Android, the rest goes to be a workaround – and irrespective of how intelligent that workaround is (Beeper Mini is the cleverest but), Apple can theoretically shut it out.

From Apple’s perspective, it needs to maintain iMessage safe and personal for its customers, however we additionally understand it needs to maintain folks locked into utilizing iPhones. Regardless of stress from Google and the EU, inexperienced bubbles are staying round for the foreseeable future.

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