Why Beeper Mini’s iMessage-on-Android conquest is doomed

Too good to be true? Perhaps. After just having Beeper Mini installed, up and running on my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, I saw news last night that things were going south quickly and woke up this morning to notifications on my phone that my phone number had be de-registered and that there was an “outage” with Beeper Mini. Having read the news on X late last night, this wasn’t a surprise, but seeing newer posts this morningn from the Beeper team that there was possibly a fix made me take another look.

And…we might have spoken a bit too soon. It's not working for all accounts yet. More work to do, we're going to sleep now but back at it tomorrow.

— Beeper (@onbeeper) December 9, 2023

For a brief moment, I was impressed and thought they’d solved whatever the issue was and we were ready to roll again. But the very next post clearly undoes that optimism, and for a myriad of reasons, even if they do get a patch up and running again, I have little reason to believe they’ll be able to sustain it.

Why Beeper Mini won’t work long-term

First, I’ll gladly eat crow if I’m wrong, here, but after months and months of Apple allowing the high-barrier-to-entry method Beeper previously used to employ for this sort of service (basically having all users log into a server farm of Mac Minis to connect iMessage), Apple seemed to have no real beef with Beeper. Maybe that’s because they couldn’t do anything about that sort of workaround from a legal standpoint, or maybe it was because the potential threat posed by such a convoluted messaging setup wasn’t a concern.

Beeper Mini is different, though. It is a reverse-engineered connection to iMessage that connects your phone number right to Apple’s servers and the setup process for it was dead-simple. Beeper Mini was/is an app and service that could have wild upside and massive adoptability potential. Simply put, it solved the iMessage vs. Android issues in a cleaner, simpler way than anything has before and the potential for Android users to start utilizing it across the board is massive.

And you see how quick Apple was to shut it down. We’re no big Apple fans here at Chrome Unboxed, but let’s not pretend that they don’t have elite developers and engineers working for them. If Apple has so aggressively defended iMessage in the past (Blue Bubbles, anyone?), do you really think they are going to sit back and let a small company like Beeper come in and just undo all that work they’ve put it to maintain the separation all these years? No way.

Even if mitigations are put in place to make Beeper Mini work again, there’s no reality where Apple doesn’t bend over backwards to break it over and over again until they give up. Something as simple as Beeper Mini poses an actual threat to their business, and Apple is nothing if not a calculated ecosystem vortex. Any app, device or service that poses a threat to Apple’s cash piles won’t be met with friendly competition. Apple will do whatever is necessary to cut it off at the source.

And that’s why Beeper Mini is doomed. Kudos to the team for building such an app, but it’s an uphill battle that could get really dirty if it continues. With RCS coming to iMessage at some point in 2024, I can guarantee you there’s no way Apple would also be OK with losing control over iMessage and the stranglehold it has on US-based iPhone customers. I’m sure they aren’t exactly happy about having to add RCS in the first place, but it is at least factor they can control. Beeper Mini isn’t, and that unfortunately means they’ll do all they can to squash it.