It took less than a week for Beeper Mini to run into a wall.
  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.caEnglish
    575·
    2 years ago

    The fact that people care about whether their messages are blue or green is so absolutely ridiculous.

    I’ve known people who literally refuse to message anyone who doesn’t use iMessage (and by extension has an iPhone).

    Every one of them turned out to be a twat in every other facet of their personality as well.

    • excitingburp@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      Apparently it breaks group chats, notwithstanding that it’s an Apple problem, Signal exists and doesn’t feature any of this nonsense.

    • CrowAirbrush@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      This reminds me of the blackberry ping days, everyone and their mom acting like a diva for having a sidekick blackberry just to use ping.

      Those were better days financially.

      • WashedOver@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        BBM was the jam back in the days before iPhone. If you wanted to be in on the group chats you needed a blackberry. In the last little bit they opened it up to more devices but the gig was up.

        I still miss their icons.

        • TheFerrango@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          They were never popular over here outside of business users, I always liked the tiny red LED. Sure, I can make the flag on my iPhone blink on new messages, but it’s not the same

          • WashedOver@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Yes the light was the best. Some of the early android devices tried to carry on with this practice but screen time attention I suspect won the day

    • WashedOver@lemmy.caEnglish
      51·
      2 years ago

      Yes had a business owner come in and demand all employee phones be iPhone or get out. Jobs was his personal hero and thought Apple could do no wrong. The issue was the company he bought was run on software made for Windows. A lot of extra effort went into making it work on macbooks he insisted we all use.

      In the end his he believed he was as great as Jobs. Not sure that’s a great role model across the board for those that know more than just the apple procducts. The family values and toxic with practices were not for everyone.

      I was glad to get out of that company and back to my android phone and now Linux computing.

      I will say the 3 good things about my iPhone was the camera, the full resolution media sharing with other iPhone users via iMessage, and the gallery uploading to other iOS devices.

      The latter two are still a weakness with Google. At least they are addressing it with RCS but its still going to take time. Google photos has cloud back up but I’ve not really looked into how seamless the media backup to all android devices has been.

      • Tech With Jake@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        Google photos is just cloud back up like iCloud backup for iOS devices.

        Google photos is also on iOS devices, so you could have your photos on any of your devices.

    • fubarx@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Welcome to Middle School. Blue bubble and ‘Find My’ support are feature drivers. You’re either in or out.

      Ironically, Spotify and x-platform playlist sharing (aka mixtapes) drive counter-adoption.

      Go figure.

    • Pseudonaut@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Beeper is more than that. Beeper MINI is about that. But I’ve been using Beeper on my PC for the past year because I am so tired of picking up my phone a million times a day just to send someone a message. I’d say probably 90% of the people I know use iPhone/iMessage so having the ability to message them on desktop was a lifesaver for me. Really bummed it’s not working anymore.

      • Tech With Jake@lemm.eeEnglish
        81·
        2 years ago

        It’s definitely the blue vs green bubbles. Your average user doesn’t even know iMessage is E2EE. They also don’t care.

    • kowcop@aussie.zoneEnglish
      26·
      2 years ago

      I don’t know what may have changed as I am an iPhone user, but about 10 years ago I worked in a small security role for a fairly large company, and the communications company we were using was more than happy to hand over sms logs as plain text. I would personally never send messages to anyone I was sure wasn’t encrypted and I can tell that by the blue bubble. I just don’t know when it is green.

      I don’t know what has changed as I don’t keep up with it, but I am still dubious about messaging outside the Apple ecosystem, which is ok for me as I live in a country where most people use iOS

      • Natanael@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        RCS on Android defaults to E2E encryption now since some year back, and Signal has been around for a long time now

  • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
    28·
    2 years ago

    “Oh, what’s this unauthorized bullshit on our servers?”

    [block]

    I’m just surprised that it took this long

    • wrath_of_grunge@kbin.social
      14·
      2 years ago

      same. there seems to be a lot of people that don’t realize some things don’t get done, not because they’re impossible, but because as soon as they do it a company will put a stop to it.

      it’s like cracking a Xbox or something. the very next patch will render the method obsolete and nonviable. when i heard this workaround was coming for Android, my immediate reaction was how long it would last before Apple just changed something so that it doesn’t work.

    • Toes♀@ani.socialEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Probably had to be extra careful to test. MDM software software might get glitched out.

  • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
    164·
    2 years ago

    I think it’s a bit crazy to create a paid service on top of a reverse engineered product that isn’t static. Indivious, NewPipe and other youtube frontends aren’t going to create a paid youtube frontend, because they know Google could kill that at any point. Google could dedicate a full team to making youtube frontends non-functional.

    Apple has a much bigger incentive to derail iMessage alternatives because they know that dumb parents have taught their kids how to live in a closed ecosystem and be slaves to Apple. 87% of USAian teenagers use Apple, which means it’s only a matter of time before Apple becomes the dominant player on the market. If you want to keep making fat stacks of cash, the best thing you can do is control the market, which means killing of competition.

    The only reason Apple would ever stop killing competitors is if it became legally and financially detrimental to do so. They’d have to reach Microsoft levels of antitrust and bad press before even considering backpedaling.

    Everyone buying their products is helping Apple along to their goal of market dominance.

    • Kazumara@feddit.deEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      87% of teenagers use Apple

      Do you mean US American teenagers, or North American teenagers, or who exactly? Surely that can’t be global?

    • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      2 years ago

      Yeah if Apple is willing to invest tons of money to keep using literal slaves (or at least to be intentionally ignorant about slavery in their supply chain) they aren’t going to be chivalrous about someone circumventing their intentional attempts to amp up class based marketing pressure for their apps.

    • Eggyhead@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      USAian

      If you really want to go down that road, use something like “United Statesman” or something that actually fits the language. “Americanian” is absurd and people will take you less seriously for it.

      • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        USAian reads better than USAn 🤷 And I’m not going to type out “United Statesman” every time I want to refer to something USAian like a car. “United Statesman car”.

        • Eggyhead@kbin.social
          0·
          2 years ago

          “USAian” doesn’t read better than anything when it’s a made up word that looks ridiculous. Just say “a US car” or “American”.

                • Eggyhead@kbin.social
                  0·
                  2 years ago

                  No, my dude. You just seemed like a non-native speaker of English and I was trying to help you out. It’s what I do for a living. I’ll be happy to teach “USAian” to my students if it ever becomes commonplace vernacular that they would likely hear on the streets. Unfortunately since it’s kind of grammatically nonsensical and weirder to both say and understand, that might take a whole lot more effort to accomplish than you seem to think it will. Good luck though. I find linguistic evolution interesting, so I won’t stop you.

          • Chobbes@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Signal push notifications don’t contain any useful plain text data (no content, no information about who sent you a message). AFAIK the only thing you would be leaking is that you received a message on signal, and frankly that metadata is probably going to be leaked to the US government regardless of your use of push notifications.

      • nixcamic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Honestly for most people this is a crazy level of paranoia. The US government can know the metadata of my friends birthday party organization group.

    • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
      English
      1·
      2 years ago

      It is a great app, but you cannot fit everyone into a single app.

      Examples why I personally sometimes don’t want to use Signal:

      • no native desktop app, just a half-baked Electron based thing
      • no versions for systems other than Android and iOS
      • requires phone number (common argument)
      • hard to integrate bots, notifications and automatic services for the future use
      • when Signal foundation do something stupid, it would mean me having to migrate all friends yet another time

      Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Meanwhile, Whatsapp continues to be the most used messaging app in the world, with no sms or any other sort of fallback if you don’t have an internet connection.

  • Eggyhead@kbin.social
    31·
    2 years ago

    At the very least, hopefully Apple will notice that there is enough of an appetite for iMessage on Android that people are getting innovative about it.

  • Avitld@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    32·
    2 years ago

    What’s the point of even using iMessage when there’s so many better options for messaging.

    • modcolocko@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      “It’s installed by default and all my friends are on it” - 50% of Americans

      They don’t need to worry about the fact that the other half of Americans are not able to comfortably message them, or participate in group chats, because those are people poorer than them that they might not even want to interact with anyways. Some of them might even be not white.

      This becomes even more extreme as ages become younger, with around 98% of college age students and younger having iPhones (this is obviously biased to higher income colleges in metropolitian area but the data is still useful). The peer pressure of not having an iPhone is genuinely incredible (trust me, i experience it). I have genuinely had people stop wanting to be friends with me once they learned I had an Android phone.

      Apple has a monopoly so powerful that they influence the social circles of almost every grade schooler and college student in America. This is why they don’t want to give it up.

    • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I have never had an issue with messaging anyone in iMessage, regardless of what platform they are using. Serious question: is there something I am missing out on with iMessage that warrants investigating alternatives?

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        If you don’t have a blue bubble on your friends phones, they will bully you until you take an AR-15 to school and kill everyone.

        Either that, or suicide. Blue bubbles are a leading cause of suicide among tweens and teens in the US.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    It appears that Beeper Mini, an easy iMessage solution for Android, was simply too good to be true — or a short-lived dream, at least.

    On Friday, less than a week after its launch, the app started experiencing technical issues when users were suddenly unable to send and receive blue bubble messages.

    Several people at The Verge were unable to activate their Android phone numbers with Beeper Mini as of Friday afternoon, a clear indication that Apple has plugged up whatever holes allowed the app to operate to begin with.

    The belief — or I suppose the hope — among Beeper’s developers and users was that it would be such an ordeal for Apple to block the Android app that doing so wouldn’t be worth the hassle.

    Previous attempts to get iMessage working on Android — like Beeper’s original app — have involved complex systems with remote Macs logged into a user’s Apple ID.

    Nothing, the startup from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, recently sought to bring iMessage to its latest phone, but that plan was quickly derailed by security and privacy concerns.

    The original article contains 450 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • db2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      25·
      2 years ago

      This is the best summary I could come up with:

      Who fucking cares?

      The original article contains 450 words, the summary contains 3 words. I am not a bot.

    • blicky_blank@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I remember in the ipod days plugging a CD into the aul PC and ripping all the files as aac… A format that would only play in iTunes

      • Meowoem@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        2 years ago

        I had an arcos jukebox before the first iPod came out, every time they’d release a new version it’s big feature would be something my jukebox had always done. Except it didn’t have an awkward spinning selector wheel or celebrity endorsements.

        I could connect it to the cd player and record the whole thing as mp3s, I think it even used to split the tracks automatically but I might be wrong. Plug it into usb and it’s a HDD ready to have anything copied to it without hassle… No need for shitty iTunes, no complaints about wav files and never found an MP3 it couldn’t play.

        I remember thinking that surely people will realize over priced and feature limited products are an insult but no, the kids of the future I had so much hope for turned out to be gen z who care more about brand recognition than anyone ever before. I still think the feature rich generics will have their day, maybe generation alpha…

        • CthuluVoIP@lemmy.worldEnglish
          01·
          2 years ago

          “Awkward spinning selector wheel”

          Say what you want, but the iPod click wheel was anything but awkward. It was the most approachable and efficient interface and hardware on the market by miles and miles. Navigating other similar devices without it is an awful experience of buttons and layered menus that feel clunky and slow.

          I won’t deny that the Arcos and other jukeboxes were incredible devices, but they lacked accessibility and mass appeal. Their size and expense kept most people from even considering getting one. They were absolutely an enthusiast’s device and nothing more.

          The iPod ushered in the boom of portable media players and paved the road for Apple’s performance in the mobile phone space by establishing them as purveyors of a superior form factor and experience when it came to those devices. Apple owes its continued success in its personal computer and tablet product lines to the iPod’s design and their decision to focus on creating a cohesive ecosystem across their products based on those design principles.

  • Crow@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    As someone who doesn’t care about the blue bubble crap once Apple announced RCS the other person using iMessage means nothing to me.

  • 𝐘Ⓞz҉@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    I really don’t understand who the fuck cares about this shit. OMG! Can’t believe the world we’re living in now