iMessage on Android news has been all the rage over the last month and a half due to the saga of Beeper Mini. Almost as quickly as it showed up on the Google Play Store,it’s been taken down. Beeper Mini basically turned Androids into iPhones by virtue of text messages, utilizing an open-source method to access Apple iMessage natively. It was too good to be true, even ifwe were super excited about its prospectsin December. Another twist in the saga has emerged, however: Users who have been using Beeper Cloud well into the new year are reporting that Apple has blocked iMessage on their Macs entirely.
Beeper Cloud does its best to bring together every messaging service you might want to use into one app, making it simple to respond to as many people as possible without closing and opening multiple messaging apps constantly. After Beeper Mini was shut down, Beeper moved its last-ditch cloud-based solution for accessing iMessage into the “Labs” section of Beeper Cloud. This solution involved connecting to Apple’s servers via Macs, then relaying messages over a secure connection to an Android device.
There’s a massive problem though: It looks like Apple is banning users that utilized Beeper Cloud’s workaround Macs (via9to5Google). There are numerous reports of users that are unable to access iMessage as a whole anymore on their Mac when using it natively, post-Beeper Cloud integration.People have theorizedthatApple is bringing down the banhammeron users’ iMessage functionality on Macs. It doesn’t seem like iPhones have been affected.
The quick rise and fall of Beeper Mini was not foreseen by its creators, but we originally expressed doubt in its longevity.Until RCS on iMessagebrings more togetherness between iOS and Android users, however, it seems like we’ll be out of luck on the ease of cross-OS text messaging for the time being. you may chalk it up as another one of the awesome third-party creations that were beneficial to its users but easily and quickly squashed by companies who stood to get hurt by them (anyone remember MoviePass?).
There’s pretty much only two methods standing at this point that will enable iMessage on non-Apple devices, but they’re annoyingly inconvenient and frustrating to deal with. But, if you’re looking for something that will eventually get the job down, there’s AirMessage.You need your own Mac that acts as a serverto look for new iMessages constantly to use it. Alternatively, you can use BlueBubbles, which involves creating a Google Firebase Console project and again uses another Mac. If only Beeper Mini wasn’t broken by Apple…
