Beeper Mini, with its standout feature allowing Android phones to interact with Apple’s iMessage service, is grappling with connectivity issues within its first week of operation.
Users began reporting on Friday that messages sent or received via Beeper Mini were experiencing disruptions. An official post from the app’s X account acknowledged the problem, stating that the team is actively investigating the reasons behind the breakdown in iMessage integration for sending or receiving texts. During personal testing of the Beeper Mini app on Friday, attempts to send a text resulted in an error message stating “failed to lookup on server: lookup request timed out,” indicating a broader issue.
The outage may also impact Beeper Mini’s feature that allows users to unlink a phone number from Apple’s iMessage network, potentially causing affected customers to miss texts from iPhones attempting to communicate over iMessage. While Apple provides its own deregister tool on its website for Android phone owners to regain access to receiving texts via SMS and MMS, the situation prompts questions about the impact on user privacy and security.
“If it’s Apple, then I think the biggest question is — if Apple truly cares about the privacy and security of their own iPhone users, why would they try to kill a service that enables iPhones to send encrypted chats to Android users?” expressed Migicovsky, highlighting concerns about Apple’s stance on third-party services.
The Beeper Mini app, launched on Tuesday, claimed to have “reverse-engineered” access to the iMessage network without relying on Apple hardware or requiring an Apple ID. Despite offering a workaround, it’s crucial to note that Beeper Mini is not affiliated with Apple. While the service supports many iMessage features at launch, it doesn’t encompass all features available to iPhone, iPad, or Mac users.
Beeper Mini, as part of its future plans, aims to integrate other texting services and sustain its development through a $2-per-month subscription. It’s noteworthy that Beeper’s original app, now known as Beeper Cloud, remains unaffected by the outage, continuing to interconnect with various chat networks using a Mac relay to access iMessage.
