Texting between iPhones and Android is broken as Apple devices use the company’s dedicated iMessage message service which is not available to Google users. So while Android users can send messages to iPhone owners, the experience is not seamless and with Apple’s refusal to embrace RCS
on Google’s insistence, things are unlikely to get better anytime soon. That’s where a new messaging app called
Beeper comes in.
Most of us have multiple messaging apps on our phones, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and at times, it can get tedious to keep up with all of them. Beeper aims to be a universal chat app that puts chats from different apps in one app.
It supports 15 networks at the moment, including iMessage, Google Chat, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Slack, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and Telegram. All messages are encrypted and messages from other chat networks that support encryption are re-encrypted.
It’s available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, iOS, and Android and is invite-only at the moment but
Gizmodo got early access to it. You’ll have to set up a new account and connect your messaging apps to it.
The experience doesn’t exactly sound smooth. For starters, for iMessages, Beeper uses the Apple ID information to sign in as you on a Mac mini which is used as a server for relaying messages to and from your inbox. This could lead to you receiving a few messages about someone else using your account.
Other than that, not all functions are available and occasionally, you might need to go back to original apps for some advanced features.
Since Beeper includes support for iMessage, it should technically let Android users use iMessage, as
BGR points out. They will still need to create an Apple ID and borrow someone’s iPhone or iPad to set it up to work with the Apple ID email address.
Since Apple knows that
iMessage is one of the things that keep users from defecting to Android, the company may ask Beeper to remove iMessage. But for now, this is a smart way for Android users to text friends who use an iPhone without having to worry about green bubbles, pixelated media, missing read receipts, and no messaging over Wi-Fi.
