Apple admits that it shut down Beeper Mini to protect the privacy of iPhone users،
The statement said: “At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to put users in control of their data and protect their personal information. We have taken steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit false credentials. to access iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling spam, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users. “
Previous attempts to run iMessage on an Android device required you to use an Apple ID to sign in to a remote Mac. With Beeper Mini, you connect directly to the Apple service. There are no middlemen and no third-party servers involved. Beeper Mini works by sending your messages directly through Apple, to the recipient and vice versa as if your Android phone were an
iPhone. No passthrough is required and there is no need to sign in to a Mac using an Apple ID.
When Apple talks about “blocking techniques that exploit false credentials in order to access iMessage,” it's talking about how Beeper Mini connects to iMessage using Apple's push notification service. Beeper Mini intercepts this push notification and sends it to your device. Apple's servers need to trust that they are pinging an Apple device's notifications. Perhaps a Jedi mental trick is being used. (“These aren't the Droid devices pretending to be iOS you're looking for.”)
Beeper says no one can read messages sent to you while maintaining your privacy, although this cannot be verified by Apple and the company is concerned about your privacy and that of those you chat with. When Beeper and others like Sunbird send your iMessages through the aforementioned Mac, there is no security protecting your messages. But with the notification protocols used, Apple felt it necessary to remove Beeper Mini.
Since Apple removed Beeper Mini, it has been working hard to try to get the service back up and running. Beeper Mini founder Eric Migicovsky (yes, the same guy behind the successful Pebble smartwatches) wonders why Apple would prefer its users to send unencrypted SMS messages to Android users. Migicovsky says: “If Apple really cares about the privacy and security of its own iPhone users, why would they shut down a service that allows their own users to now send encrypted messages to Android users, instead than using insecure SMS?
But just because something makes sense to Migicovsky doesn't mean it makes sense to Apple. “What we've built is good for the world. It's something we almost all agree should exist.” But Apple doesn't see it that way and the tech giant will continue to do everything in its power to keep iMessage under its own control.
Even though Apple has announced that it will support RCS next year, the first rumor is that the green bubbles will still exist, meaning that Android users will still be identified as such by iPhone owners, although that the differences between iMessage and RCS are relatively small. allowing Android users to join a group chat without having to deal with the insults and attacks that iPhone users currently throw at those who own an Android device.
