Apple Confirms It Shut Down iMessage for Android App Beeper Mini

Apple at present confirmed that it took steps to shut down the performance of Beeper Mini, an app that enabled Android customers to ship and obtain iMessages.

Apple emphasised its dedication to person privateness and safety, explaining that the transfer was necessitated by the potential dangers Beeper Mini’s methods posed, together with metadata publicity and susceptibility to spam and phishing assaults. Apple’s full assertion shared with The Verge and different information websites is as follows:

At Apple, we construct our services and products with industry-leading privateness and safety applied sciences designed to provide customers management of their knowledge and maintain private data secure. We took steps to guard our customers by blocking methods that exploit faux credentials with the intention to acquire entry to iMessage. These methods posed important dangers to person safety and privateness, together with the potential for metadata publicity and enabling undesirable messages, spam, and phishing assaults. We’ll proceed to make updates sooner or later to guard our customers.

Beeper Mini operated by intercepting the iMessage protocol utilizing Apple’s personal push notification service, convincing Apple’s servers it was an genuine Apple system. This methodology, in response to Apple, concerned using “faux credentials,” which posed important safety and privateness dangers to customers. Beeper claims that its course of labored with no compromises to encryption or privateness, and the corporate’s documentation says that no person can learn the content material of despatched messages apart from the sender and its recipient, however Apple was unable to confirm this and says it posed dangers to customers.

Following Apple’s assertion, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky expressed his willingness to cooperate with Apple for a safety assessment of Beeper’s code to The Verge. He emphasised the significance of safe communication channels between iPhone and Android customers, difficult Apple’s choice by highlighting the inadequacies of unencrypted SMS for cross-platform messaging. Regardless of Apple’s agency stance, Migicovsky stays dedicated to exploring options that would allow the return of Beeper Mini or comparable companies.