Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android

1521 points

2 years ago

Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works.

Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple servers to send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages. Encryption keys never leave your device. No Apple ID is required. Beeper does not have access to your Apple account.

With Beeper Mini, your Android phone number is registered on iMessage. You show up as a ‘blue bubble’ when iPhone friends text you, and can join real iMessage group chats. All chat features like typing status, read receipts, full resolution images/video, emoji reactions, voice notes, editing/unsending, stickers etc are supported.

This is all unprecedented, so I imagine you may have a lot of questions. We’ve written a detailed technical blog post about how Beeper Mini works: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. A team member has published an open source Python iMessage protocol PoC on Github: https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush. You can try it yourself on any Mac/Windows/Linux computer and see how iMessage works. My cofounder and I are also here to answer questions in the comments.

Our long term vision is to build a universal chat app (https://blog.beeper.com/p/were-building-the-best-chat-app-on). Over the next few months, we will be adding support for SMS/RCS, WhatsApp, Signal and 12 other chat networks into Beeper Mini. At that point, we’ll drop the `Mini` postfix. We’re also rebuilding our Beeper Desktop and iOS apps to support our new ‘client-side bridge’ architecture that preserves full end-to-end encryption. We’re also renaming our first gen apps to ‘Beeper Cloud’ to more clearly differentiate them from Beeper Mini.

Side note: many people always ask ‘what do you think Apple is going to do about this?’ To be honest, I am shocked that everyone is so shocked by the sheer existence of a 3rd party iMessage client. The internet has always had 3rd party clients! It’s almost like people have forgotten that iChat (the app that iMessage grew out of) was itself a multi-protocol chat app! It supported AIM, Jabber and Google talk. Here’s a blast from the past: https://i.imgur.com/k6rmOgq.png.

874 comments