Beeper Mini Turns Android’s Green Bubbles Into Blue Bubbles on iPhones

Earlier this year, Gill became intrigued by how Apple’s push notification service works and how these two-way notifications could offer some clues to opening messages.

First, he had to better understand how Apple ID worked, so he reverse engineered how Apple Music worked on a Windows computer. He watched the traffic and how a non-Apple device registered with Apple’s servers. Next, he watched as a macOS computer logs into iMessage and then inspected that traffic. Then he reproduced the whole thing in Python.

It began building a proof of concept that examined the various transfers between Apple ID, its push notification service, and its messaging technologies.

«In theory, iMessage uses public encryption keys, because that’s how end-to-end encryption works,» says Gill. (Gill is right, about that asymmetric Public key encryption or cryptography is based on a pair of public and private keys; one is used to encrypt a message and the other to decrypt it). «Pypush actually figures out how we can publish those keys to Apple’s key server and how to retrieve keys from Apple’s key server,» says Gill.

«Their proof of concept demonstrates that on any computer running Python, you can log into iMessage and send and receive messages,» Migicovsky says. He was so impressed with Gill that he offered him a contract to work part-time at Beeper. Gill accepted, with parental approval.

Gill’s mother, Erin Gill, says she and her husband were a little worried about Gill’s ability to manage his time as a junior in high school, but he had managed his part-time job at McDonald’s enough. enough to be told to «do your best.» .” Her father is a computer engineer and helped her with the details of the contract. «I’m an artist and I didn’t understand much of what he was telling me other than he was excited,» says Erin Gill.

Migicovsky and the team quickly took Gill’s proof of concept, rewrote it, and added new features: support for photo and video sharing, group chat dynamics, and even someone’s typing status when they’re composing a message. Over the past three months, the team has built all of those features into Beeper. The company’s original app, Beeper Cloud, still uses Mac mini servers, but the new Beeper Mini runs entirely within the app’s client.

color wars

Migicovsky insists that he’s not rushing to release BeeperMini just because other upstarts have recently tried to hack Apple’s Messages, or because Apple recently agreed to a newer messaging standard, backed by Google, that could spark bubble wars. blue and green bubble are less tense.

«We were planning to release this two weeks before Nothing tried it, but we decided to postpone it,» Migicovsky says.