In an effort to bring all your messaging apps in one place, Beeper makes the effort and can even bring iMessage to Android and Windows.
Created by Pebble Smart Watch founder Eric Migicovsky, Beeper costs $ 10 a month and does one job. It serves as a central hub for almost every major messaging application most people use. These include Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, Discord, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Skype, Signal, IRC, Twitter DMs and even Apple iMessage. Each app enters its messages in a single place and you can respond to Beeper messages as well as search through each one of your chats.
Beeper also works on all major platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. Messaging is connected to the app with Matrix, an open source federated messaging protocol that serves as a bridge for every messaging client.
The most interesting thing about Beeper is not that it brings all these apps together, but that it also integrates with Apple’s infamous iMessage. Officially, iMessage only works on Apple devices, but Beeper uses a bit of trickery to bring the information to Windows and Android devices.
It was hard to figure out! Beeper has two ways to enable Android, Windows, and Linux users to use iMessage: we send each user a Jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed that bridges to iMessage, or if they have a Mac that always connected to the internet, they can install the Beeper Mac app which acts as a bridge. This is not a joke, it really works!
For Mac users, this means you have to leave your Mac running 24/7 to send messages through the app. For users without any Apple hardware, Migicovsky said on Twitter that the plan is to drive older iPhones that have been sent to jail to paying customers.
Honestly, it sounds pretty good. Having every important message somewhere on all devices is a dream come true! What is the catch? Well, there’s a big problem.
Beeper’s website has no coding information. iMessage, Telegram, and other apps that Beeper integrates with end-to-end encryption support, and it looks like this app will actually throw it away to bring the messages to other devices. For some users it may be good, but for others it’s a privacy nightmare. Even Beeper’s privacy page has no mention of encryption. The only good news? Matrix says that all its information is also end-to-end encrypted. That must also applies to all of these messages sent by Beeper.
At the moment, this app is still in its very early days. Access will be granted in a queue as slots are available.
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