Does anybody outside US care about blue bubbles or even uses sms for communication?

Disclaimer: long time Android user, occasional Apple user

why would they stop a service that enables their own users to now send encrypted messages to Android users, rather than using unsecure SMS? With their announcement of RCS support, it’s clear that Apple knows they have a gaping hole here. Beeper Mini is here today and works great. Why force iPhone users back to sending unencrypted SMS when they chat with friends on Android?

This is pretty disingenuous. Acting like building a hacky solution without first party support from either side of the table is equivalent to first party support of RCS is utter nonsense, and it was inevitably going to break eventually. Beyond that, it’s putting a huge amount of security burden on to a company that haven’t proved their mettle in that area at all. They didn’t even have a backup plan for dealing with Apple’s block, which shows naivety at best and immaturity at worst.

Apple sucks for the way they shortchange iMessage users and respondents, and Google sucks for how their poor handling of RCS rollout, but that doesn’t make Beeper a knight in shining armour.

Appreciate the chutzpah of what they’ve tried to do, but there’s no need to dress it up as some sort of savior technology. It’s cringe worthy.

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!

Just to clarify: this affects Beeper Mini which sends iMessages directly from Android, not the full Beeper app that sends iMessages via a Mac bridge

It was only a matter of time. It was fun while it lasted

I don’t understand what this is all about. Blue bubbles?