With Apple adopting RCS messaging to replace SMS/MMS exchanges between iPhone and Android owners, the texting format wars will essentially come to an end next year.
However, while Android owners will get read reports, live typing indicators and high-resolution media exchanges, those dreaded green bubbles will still signify the platform disparity between iPhone and Android owners.
A new Android app called Beeper Mini is promising to eradicate the disparity completely and put everyone on a blue bubble pedestal with full end-to-end encryption.
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There’ll also be editing, unsending, voice messages and emoji reactions just like iMessage. Essentially, it completes the full suite of features
We’ve seen a few efforts to bring iMessage to Android (Nothing’s attention-seeking effort would have been laughable, but for the inherent privacy flaws), but it seems Beeper Mini may have actually cracked it.
The app’s developers claim the app is grounded in the reverse engineering of Apple’s iMessage, which hasn’t been achieved before. And, it’ll work with a standard phone number rather than having to add an email address, and you don’t need an Apple ID.
What’s the catch, you ask? Well, it’s the cost. Beeper Mini is free for 7 days, but it’ll cost $1.99 a month thereafter.
“Now you can send and receive blue bubble texts from your phone number. As soon as you install Beeper Mini, your Android phone number will be blue instead of green when your iPhone friends text you,” the maker says in a blog post.
“It’s easy to join iPhone-only group chats, since people can add your phone number instead of your email address. All chat features like typing status, read receipts, full resolution images/video, emoji reactions, voice messages, editing, un-sending, and more are supported.”
Whether this is entirely necessary remains to be seen. Apple’s changes will give Android users most what they want when texting iPhone owners in terms of safety, knowing the messages have been sent, and higher-quality images. Google recently made changes to Messages that’ll allow bubbles to be whatever the user chooses too.
Considering Beeper Mini is based on technology that reverse engineers Apple’s proprietary iMessage app, it’s unclear whether there’s legal recourse for the company to challenge the app’s existence if it feels compelled.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
