Beeper Mini Is Back, But With Phone Number Registration
As hinted by their team over the weekend, Beeper is going to play the cat-and-mouse game with Apple. From cofounders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray on the Beeper blog:
Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now
sign in with an Apple ID. Messages will be sent and received via
your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently
working on a fix for this.
In other word, what’s broken is the implicit creation of an iMessage account based on the cellular phone number of your device. I described this process in broad terms in a footnote on my column yesterday. It’s a “magic” process that’s been part of iMessage since it first debuted as an iOS-only feature in iOS 5. (It’s worth rewatching Scott Forstall’s introduction at WWDC 2011. I know Apple is not going back, but man, I do miss live on-stage demos.)
The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for a new account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password for Beeper.)
I can confirm that today’s update to Beeper Mini in the Play Store restores the ability to use iMessage, if you’re signed into an Apple ID.
We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and
we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as
things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on
subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free
to leave the subscription on 🙂.
Good on them. Like I wrote, it was irresponsible to charge a subscription fee for a service they can’t guarantee access to.
Beeper Mini launched on Tuesday and rocketed to top 20 of Play
Store charts. It was an instant hit. From what we can tell, Beeper
Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in
history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than
100,000 people.
Making it free (instead of a $2/month subscription with 7-day free trial) should only help its popularity, but I think it’s an open question how much demand there is for this. iMessage users might wish their Android-owning friends installed it, but are typical Android users interested?
Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac
relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar
method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.
That’s news to me. Beeper Cloud was relying on Mac relay servers prior to October. And I think regardless of whether the relay servers are Macs or Linux boxes, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a sketchy idea to entrust a relay server with your Apple ID credentials. But I think this recent change to Beeper Cloud means that you can use an app-specific password with that, too, just like with Beeper Mini — you never need to share your actual Apple ID password.
★
As hinted by their team over the weekend, Beeper is going to play the cat-and-mouse game with Apple. From cofounders Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray on the Beeper blog:
Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now
sign in with an Apple ID. Messages will be sent and received via
your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently
working on a fix for this.
In other word, what’s broken is the implicit creation of an iMessage account based on the cellular phone number of your device. I described this process in broad terms in a footnote on my column yesterday. It’s a “magic” process that’s been part of iMessage since it first debuted as an iOS-only feature in iOS 5. (It’s worth rewatching Scott Forstall’s introduction at WWDC 2011. I know Apple is not going back, but man, I do miss live on-stage demos.)
The “magic” is that you don’t have to sign up for a new account, or create a new username or account identifier. You just send a message from your phone number to another phone number, and if both numbers are registered for iMessage, the message goes over iMessage instead of SMS, even if you don’t have an Apple ID. Beeper had that working last week. Now, Beeper users need to have an Apple ID, and sign into that Apple ID within Beeper. (Beeper should actively encourage users to create and use an app-specific Apple ID password for Beeper.)
I can confirm that today’s update to Beeper Mini in the Play Store restores the ability to use iMessage, if you’re signed into an Apple ID.
We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and
we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as
things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on
subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free
to leave the subscription on 🙂.
Good on them. Like I wrote, it was irresponsible to charge a subscription fee for a service they can’t guarantee access to.
Beeper Mini launched on Tuesday and rocketed to top 20 of Play
Store charts. It was an instant hit. From what we can tell, Beeper
Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in
history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than
100,000 people.
Making it free (instead of a $2/month subscription with 7-day free trial) should only help its popularity, but I think it’s an open question how much demand there is for this. iMessage users might wish their Android-owning friends installed it, but are typical Android users interested?
Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac
relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar
method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.
That’s news to me. Beeper Cloud was relying on Mac relay servers prior to October. And I think regardless of whether the relay servers are Macs or Linux boxes, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a sketchy idea to entrust a relay server with your Apple ID credentials. But I think this recent change to Beeper Cloud means that you can use an app-specific password with that, too, just like with Beeper Mini — you never need to share your actual Apple ID password.