Apple blocked Beeper Mini’s iMessage Android app, but Beeper will keep pushing

Enlarge / Beeper Mini’s promises of “Blue bubbles” on Android have been halted, at least temporarily, by Apple’s countermeasures. (credit: Beeper)

Beeper Mini, the Android app born from a reverse-engineering of Apple’s iMessage service, is currently broken, after Apple took measures to block it.

Beeper desktop users received a message from co-founder Eric Migicovsky late on Friday afternoon, noting an “iMessage outage” and that “messages are failing to send and receive.” Reports had started piling up on Reddit around 2:30 pm Eastern. As of 5:30 pm, both Beeper Cloud on desktop and the Beeper Mini app were reporting errors in sending and receiving messages, with “Failed to lookup on sever: lookup request timed out.”

Migicovsky suggested to The Verge and TechCrunch Friday that Beeper’s data indicated action on Apple’s side to block the service. Late on Saturday, Apple offered a statement to The Verge stating that it had indeed done so. Apple “took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” the statement read. Citing “metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks,” Apple stated it would “continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.” (Ars has reached out to Apple for comment on the specifics of this message and will update this post with new information).