November 21, 2024

Beeper Mini Brings iMessage to Android Using Reversed Engineered Protocol

Posted December 5, 2023 at 4:47pm by iClarified · 3760 views
Beeper Mini is a new app that purportedly brings native iMessage functionality to Android.

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. 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.

According to the company, the app implements Apple's end-to-end encryption protocol natively within the Android app itself. All messages are end-to-end encrypted before they are transmitted directly from your device to Apple servers.

"This is now possible because the iMessage protocol and encryption have been reverse engineered by jjtech, a security researcher. Leveraging this research, Beeper Mini implements the iMessage protocol locally within the app. All messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple's servers. The encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone."



Beeper says that no one but the intended recipient can read your messages or attachments. It also emphasizes that it does not have access to your Apple credentials.

To make the app possible, Beeper analyzed the traffic sent between the native iMessage app and Apple's servers. It then built an app to send the same requests and understand the same responses.

You can learn more by reading jjtech's blog post, iMessage Explained, and his proof-of-concept Python implementation on Github. Anyone can download this code, run it on any computer that supports Python, login to their iMessage account, and send and receive iMessage protocol messages. No Apple hardware required.

Pricing and Availability


Beeper Mini is free to try for 7 days. After that, the app is $1.99 per month. You can download the app from the Google Play store at the link below...

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