Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Beeper is a really cool idea by some cool people (people behind the Pebble smartwatch) but I've resisted using it for fear of bans. I don't want my Slack/Discord/Instagram/AppleId/etc to get banned for using something not allowed under the terms of service. How are people who use Beeper dealing with this? Are you just using dummy/test accounts that you don't care about or are you just rolling the dice.

I would like to live in a world where I could use Beeper without worry but I don't feel like we currently live in that world. Am I wrong?

View on HN

I’ve been using Beeper as my main chat client for multiple years and haven’t had any issues with account blocks or bans on any of their supported platforms. I have Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and LinkedIn connected. There are technical issues at times but they are well communicated and usually resolved pretty quickly.

I've used Beeper for about a year with Facebook, Signal, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and iMessage. Instagram signs me out once a month or so for security suspicions, but I just reconfirm my account with 2FA. Other than that, no issues.

> I would like to live in a world where I could use Beeper without worry but I don't feel like we currently live in that world. Am I wrong?

I've been using Beeper for close to six months, and it's been a dream.

Since they've been on waitlist-mode for several years, it's not currently easy to try out in any case.

They’ve opened invites from existing users

Invite: https://refer.beeper.com/7Wh0gt

Says invalid - maybe used already ?

Beeper mini does not require an apple account so there's not much harm Apple can do

If you have an Apple account, why are you even using Beeper? I guess it might have some advantages for convenience (multiplexing chat apps), but is that the main selling point right now? I'd imagine the target market is Android users who want to talk to people on Apple Messages. So they can just create a new Apple account, right? (Isn't that kinda hard anyway, though? You need to tie it to billing, etc.) And if that gets banned, who cares? It's not like they were using it for anything else anyway.

I'm more interested in the multiplexing aspect, yes I'm iOS/macOS so I don't care about the iMessage aspect alone though I'd love to pull all my chats into 1 extendable app.

I sit in front of my work laptop which is signed into my work apple account. My iPhone is signed into my personal Apple account. I cannot iMessage from the keyboard because they won't play together. I've been using Cloud Beeper since early summer, and it makes the two apple systems play nice together. I also have a Windows machine signed in to it, but that's a nice to have.

Wait, how does this work? Is it using Handoff and sending from your phone, or Beeper is just a GUI and you've extracted a token from your personal phone to use with Beeper on your work device?

Btw, this is mostly unrelated, but do you work for a large company? I'd assume most security teams would have a problem with a setup like this.

Neither. Their cloud server is a farm of Mac Minis or similar. Then Beeper Cloud is basically a proxy from the app to that data center.

Ah I see. I thought I remembered reading about that on Twitter (in the context of people criticizing it as false advertising). So basically this Beeper mini is the "proper" implementation of full e2e encryption, while the cloud service was the bridge to get them here?

That's my understanding, yeah. I don't love my apple ID being signed into a box I can't access, so would love to see THIS service go cross platform.

An Apple account isn't particularly useful for messaging without an Apple device to message people with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com