• https://substack.com/@beeper

Thanks,

Beeper is a company founded by Eric Migicovsky, who is best known as the founder of the now-defunct Pebble, which made groundbreaking smartwatches a decade ago. Migicovsky founded Beeper to create a meta-platform for disparate messaging apps — a single messaging client that could connect to dozens of different platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter DMs, and more. Until this week, Beeper was best known for an app it has now rebranded as Beeper Cloud. Beeper Cloud works as a single client for a slew of different messaging platforms — including iMessage — by way of relay servers. For each Beeper Cloud user, Beeper runs a virtual server in the cloud, and your local Beeper Cloud app communicates with that relay server. For each messaging service you connect to Beeper Cloud, the relay server needs to store your login credentials. You can also self-host your own server, which they describe as “possible, but not an easy task right now”, as it requires Linux system administration skills.

If you’re thinking that running a server instance for each user sounds like something that would be hard to scale, you’re right. Beeper Cloud launched in January 2021, but there remains a (seemingly long) waitlist to get access today, nearly three years later.

If you’re thinking that giving your iCloud account credentials to a third party so that they can sign you into iMessage on a virtual MacOS machine in the cloud sounds like a sketchy idea, you’re correct. It’s a terrible idea.

If you’re thinking that a scheme like this sounds familiar, you’re right — there are a few other “universal chat” services which have also been in the news recently. The best is Texts, a currently-desktop-only $12.50/month app created by Kishan Bagaria, and recently acquired by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Day One, among numerous other apps and services). Texts directly communicates with the protocols for services like WhatsApp and Twitter DMs, but for iMessage — which of course has no open APIs for third-party clients — communicates via AppleScript and accessibility APIs with Apple’s Messages app running on your own Mac.

what annoys me currently is, that i have no way to use my own matrix account, yes? You can only use the one given to you by beeper?

Also i haven't been able to connect to my cloudron matrix rooms via beeper

You can do this using the desktop app, but I didn't see it on mobile. Try the following:

Settings > Join Matrix Room Then enter #room-name:server-name.tld

Also i haven't been able to connect to my cloudron matrix rooms via beeper

effectively putting an app as a MITM.

Dammit it man. Now you got the tinfoil hat guy in me all worked up.

I liked the idea but in practice turns out I quite like different chats being in different apps

     Q: Though I do have an iPhone, I don't see the Text Message Forwarding option Settings. What should I do?
        A: Make sure that you see your Apple ID email listed under Settings → Messages → Send and Receive. If. you don't see your email, it means that though your phone number is linked to iMessage, you haven't signed in to your Apple ID. You should see the option below the list to sign in.

Source: https://help.beeper.com/text-message-forwarding-iphone

@robi btw, there's a timeout (around 5 mins) on the page where you enter the referral code. You'll need to type your email and then re-enter the login code that gets emailed to you before being able to try new referral codes. IDK if the cron can work around this.