They're doing more than riding on apples services for free. They had to build and run a notification relay server to make this work.

Same thing that's been in the news about Apple sharing info with police. The content of the messages are ETE encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not

I'm happy to pay to support them.

If you'd rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.

The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can't just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.

The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.

I'm just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users' data.

Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.

You should look at american legal precedent surrounding reverse engineering. Legally speaking, it's quite hopeful.

If the open source community could provide such a thing for free I think they would have done it already?

But presumably they lack the ability, the motivation or both.

I wouldn't mind paying $2 a month for Beeper. I've been using it for months to consolidate all of my messaging apps. It's worth $2 a month for me. Beeper Mini is just iMessage, so I don't know if it's worth it for me. They said they'll eventually move all of the other chat services over to Beeper Mini, at which point it will just be Beeper.

The only way Beeper can make this work is to make it literally indistinguishable from a real Apple device, one that’s recent enough that Apple can’t simply drop it out of support. Seems unlikely but I’ve got popcorn so I hope they keep at it.

Just quit?

What kind of nonsense is that.

I find that, generally, reading is conducive to absorbing information I want to have.

I agree with the other commenter in general but I'll give you the bullet points.

Old news:

• iMessage is a proprietary chat protocol that only works on Apple devices. Apple has indicated multiple times they have zero intention of porting this to other platforms
• Apple users texting each other default to iMessage
• iMessage has a lot of useful features over SMS texting that are highly desirable and convenient
• On iPhones, when iMessages are being successfully sent in a text, the chat bubbles are blue. If they are SMS, they are green
• The US additionally has a weird culture of some iPhone users shaming Android users because of the inability to communicate via iMessage, often referred to by the green/blue bubble appearance
• There have been a few attempts to circumvent this, mostly by having a Mac somewhere with software installed to it that forwards iMessages to your Android device, though this is extremely cumbersome as it requires having an entire computer on 24/7 to make sure you receive these messages

New news:

• Beeper Mini was released earlier this week, which actually runs a reverse-engineered iMessage client that tricks Apple servers into treating it like an Apple device
• It was fully functional for about one day with almost all iMessage features working
• Apple made some variety of change on their end that broke Beeper Mini functionality

And that's about it. For those of us that would like to have easy communication with our iPhone-using friends and family, yet don't want to change phone ecosystems to do so, this is a problem that would be awesome to see solved.

There are folks that, either because of ignorance or pigheadedness, like to chime in on these threads that they don't care about having blue bubbles. That is the least important aspect of this to most people following this, for the reasons I mentioned above.