Beeper is done with iMessage on Android.
In a blog post written by Canadian CEO Eric Migicovsky, the company revealed it won’t keep trying to make Beeper Mini work if Apple continues breaking it.
“Each time that Beeper Mini goes ‘down’ or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper’s credibility takes a hit. It’s unsustainable,” Migicovsky wrote. “As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we can’t win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth.”
Beeper believes that its latest fix for Beeper Mini is “something that Apple can tolerate existing” but acknowledges it no plans to respond if Apple does break it. The company also made the iMessage connection software behind Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud open-source so that anyone can continue developing it if they want.
“In the new year, we’re shifting focus back to our long-term goal of building the best chat app on earth,” Migicovsky wrote. The rest of the blog post is a series of responses to various claims about Beeper Mini that the company calls “flawed.”
The announcement comes after the company’s repeated and increasingly complex attempts to workaround Apple’s interference, including asking people to use a Mac or even rent a jailbroken iPhone to get iMessage working via Beeper Mini. The Beeper Mini app allowed people to use iMessage on their Android phones with just their phone number before Apple stepped in to break the service.
Beeper Mini’s brief but bright flame even sparked responses from U.S. senators, but I have doubts we’ll see any meaningful change pushed on Apple’s iMessage kingdom. There likely wasn’t any other way that this saga was going to end.
I’ve written it a few times now, and this likely won’t be the last time, but for the iPhone users out there who want to have a better experience messaging their Android-using friends and family, you’ve got a few options.
You could wait for Apple’s RCS implementation. It’ll be an improvement over the current SMS-based green bubbles, but the jury’s still out on how much better it will be since Apple has only said it will adopt the RCS Universal Profile, which doesn’t include some of the improvements Google has built on RCS.
Or you can go download any number of free chat apps, many of which offer a similar or better experience to iMessage. Then you can have high-quality messaging with all your friends again, regardless of what device they use.
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