Beeper brought back phone number registration for its iMessage on Android solution that involves having a jailbroken iPhone or access to a Mac. This workaround might be the last for Beeper Mini and Cloud, with the situation ultimately described as “unsustainable.”

In a separate “Moving Forward” blog post today, Beeper says it believes that this latest workaround of basically crowdsourcing what is needed to fool iMessage with your own devices is “something that Apple can tolerate existing.” That is hard to believe, given Apple’s stance that it would continue to make updates to secure iMessage.

Beeper acknowledged today that it “can’t win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth,” and called the situation “unsustainable.”

Each time that Beeper Mini goes ‘down’ or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper’s credibility takes a hit.

To that end, Beeper does “not have any current plans to respond if this solution is knocked offline,” and that it’s “shifting focus back to our long-term goal of building the best chat app on earth “in 2024:

The iMessage connection software that powers Beeper Mini and Beeper Cloud is now 100% open source (github.com/beeper/imessage). Anyone who wants can use it or continue development.

Meanwhile, Beeper responded to various arguments against its product, including how it is “enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.” The full response is below:

Uh, isn’t that what SMS is for? 😂 With iMessage, Apple even has the ability to block spammers and scammers at the network layer. It’s much easier for them to block iMessage spam than SMS spam, which can only be blocked client-side. We don’t really understand this argument at all.

Beeper also seems to imply that it doesn’t believe Apple will release RCS support, and even if it does, it wants to offer its solution immediately rather than waiting for that future iOS update. 

Beeper also says it would be willing to “reimburse [Apple] for the (minuscule) infrastructure costs of enabling paying iPhone customers to text Android users.”

Updating…