In an effort to bring all of your messaging apps together in one place, Beeper does the heavy lifting and may even bring iMessage to Android and Windows.
Created by Pebble smartwatches founder Eric Migicovsky, Beeper costs $ 10 a month and does a job. It acts as a central hub for almost every major messaging application that most people use. This includes Telegram, WhatsApp, SMS, Discord, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Skype, Signal, IRC, Twitter DMs and even Apple iMessage. Each application feeds your messages in one place and you can reply to Beeper’s messages, as well as search in each of your chats.
Beeper works on all major platforms too: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. The messages are connected to the application using Matrix, an “open source federated messaging protocol” that acts as a bridge for each messaging client.
The most interesting thing about Beeper is not that it brings together all these applications, but that it also integrates with Apple’s iMessage, notoriously blocked. Officially, iMessage only works on Apple devices, but Beeper uses “some tricks” to bring that information to Windows and Android devices.
That was hard to find out! Beeper has two ways to allow Android, Windows and Linux users to use iMessage: we send each user an unlocked iPhone with the Beeper app installed that bridges iMessage, or if they have a Mac that is always connected to internet, they can install the Beeper Mac application that acts as a bridge. This is not a joke, it really works!
For users who own a Mac, this means leaving the Mac on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to forward messages through the app. For users with no Apple hardware, Migicovsky said on Twitter that the plan is to update older iPhones that have been unlocked to send to paying customers.
Honestly, it looks pretty good. Having all the important messages in one place on all devices is a dream come true! What’s the catch? Well, there is a big concern.
The Beeper website is completely devoid of any encryption information. iMessage, Telegram and other apps that Beeper integrates with end-to-end encryption, and it looks like this app would throw everything away to take messages to other devices. For some users, this may be a good thing, but for others it would be a privacy nightmare. Even Beeper’s privacy page lacks a single mention of encryption. The only good news? Matrix claims that all of its information is also encrypted from end to end. what we must apply to all of those messages sent by Beeper as well.
At the moment, this app is still in its early days. Access will be granted in a queue as the slots become available.
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