Now Beeper says you need an iPhone in order to get the iPhone’s iMessage app
Beeper Mini’s continued attempts to bring iMessage to Android have taken a peculiar and possibly final turn as the firm recommends getting an old iPhone and jailbreaking it.
Throughout December, the Beeper company has been announcing various hacks to get iMessage’s blue text bubbles onto Android. The hacks then fail, Beeper brings out a new one, it claims to consider suing Apple for thwarting it, and the story seemed to go on and on.
However, the company has taken this idea to a stage that presumably makes sense to a very focused user with time and money to spare, but not to anyone else.
For having most recently told Android users they need to get a Mac in order to have this iMessage hack work, now the company has announced that you can do it with an iPhone.
To get iPhone style iMessages on an Android device without buying an iPhone, Beeper is recommending that you buy an older iPhone.
AppleInsider recommends that too, but where we say just buy an iPhone if you want blue bubbles that much, Beeper says buy an iPhone — and jailbreak it.
“Follow our instructions (takes only 10-15 minutes) to jailbreak your iPhone, install a Beeper tool to generate iMessage registration code, then update to the latest Beeper Mini app and enter your code,” says the company in a blog post.
If anyone is thinking of borrowing a friend’s iPhone to do this setup, they need to remember that when Beeper recommended using a Mac, they meant using it weekly or monthly.
With the iPhone, Beeper says you must do more with an iPhone. “Leave the iPhone plugged into power, at home, connected to wifi.”
Beeper has a separate blog post attempting to justify its hacks, but even it says that the short version is, “long story short — after today’s release, we will not be continuing to fight a cat-and-mouse game.”
So to get iPhone-style iMessage on Android, you have to buy an iPhone and hope that Beeper will keep supporting its hacks even as Apple keeps defeating it.
Or just use that iPhone as an iPhone, at least until Apple comes good on its promise to support RCS in 2024.
