Bug fixes and other improvements

We’ve created an updated version of Beeper Mini that fixes an issue that caused messages not to be sent or received.

You can get the update directly from beeper.com/update on your phone. We are still doing some final testing before submitting the update to the Google Play Store for distribution to all users. If you encounter any issues, you may need to uninstall and reinstall the app.

Update: The update is now live on Google Play.

We even added in a few new feature improvements: chats now open at the last unread message, and we polished the video player a bit!

Four other things to note:

• The security and privacy of Beeper Mini is unchanged. It is still local, end-to-end encrypted on your device, as we described in our post.

• Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this.

• We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free to leave the subscription on 🙂.

• Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday. Leaving us a nice review there would help tremendously.

It’s been an extremely busy, tiring, exciting, and eventful week. Props to the entire Beeper team for working basically 24/7 to get Beeper Mini working again. Huge thanks to you, the Beeper and broader community, for supporting us.

What happened

Beeper Mini launched on Tuesday and rocketed to top 20 of Play Store charts. It was an instant hit. From what we can tell, Beeper Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than 100,000 people.

The reason for its success is clear: Android and iPhone customers desperately want to be able to chat together with high quality images/video, encryption, emojis, typing status, read receipts, and all modern chat features. We all want a fun, easy and secure way to chat. For a glorious 3 days last week, Beeper Mini made this possible.

On Friday, we started getting reports that Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini users could not send or receive messages. We investigated the issue and started working on a fix.

Within 24 hours, we fixed the issue for Beeper Cloud and published an update. Beeper Cloud users can now send and receive messages. It’s working exactly as it did before Friday.

Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.

At the same time, we took steps to deregister all phone numbers associated with Beeper Mini, and we sent push notifications to all users updating them on the situation. In hindsight, our timing was a mistake: we should have communicated to our users sooner. We’re extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused by the outage.

Today, less than 3 days later, we are publishing an update to fix Beeper Mini. Users can now sign in, send and receive messages. Beeper Mini is back.

Despite reaching out, we still have not heard anything directly from Apple.

Apple’s statement

I got a call from David Pierce over at The Verge on Saturday. Apple had sent them a statement:

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.

We—of course—expected a response. What we didn’t expect was 1984-esque doublespeak. The statement is complete FUD. Beeper Mini made communication between Android and iPhone users more secure. That is a fact.

Make no mistake, the changes Apple made on Friday were designed to protect the lock-in effect of iMessage. The end result is that iPhone customers have less security and privacy than before.

Before Beeper Mini, Messages app (the default chat app on iPhone) forced all iPhone customers to send unencrypted, unsecure green bubble SMS messages to Android friends, family and colleagues. Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. This immediately made communication between iPhone customers in the group chat less secure.

Beeper Mini fixed this problem (and many others), and made it possible for Android and iPhone customers to enjoy a secure, easy and high quality chat experience. We are working to make chat more secure, and enable consumer choice.

Many people have asked, ‘why don’t people just use Signal or WhatsApp?’. The answer is that Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button.

We deeply object to the allegation that Beeper Mini ‘poses significant risks to user security and privacy’. This is completely untrue. As we explained above, the opposite is actually true. Beeper Mini increases the security and privacy of both Android and iPhone customers. To prove this, we published a detailed blog post about how the app keeps data secure and private. Beeper Mini is end-to-end encrypted. The underlying connection method is open source, for anyone to review.

Today, we’re taking that dedication to security and privacy even further.

1. If Apple doubts the security and privacy of our app, we’re willing to share the entire Beeper Mini codebase with a mutually agreed upon 3rd party security research firm.

2. If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji 📟️ to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.

At the end of the day, we are committed to building the best chat app on earth. We will continue working on that.

Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray
Beeper cofounders