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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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