Apple partly halts Beeper’s iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

Enlarge / The dream of everybody having blue bubbles, and epic photos of perfectly digestible meals, as proffered by Beeper. (credit: Beeper)

A friend of mine had been using Beeper's iMessage-for-Android app, Beeper Mini to keep up on group chats where she was the only Android user. It worked great until last Friday, when it didn't work at all.

What stung her wasn't the return to being the Android interloper in the chats again. It wasn't the resulting lower-quality images, loss of encryption, and strange "Emphasized your message" reaction texts. It was losing messages during the outage and never being entirely certain they had been sent or received. There was a gathering on Saturday, and she had to double-check with a couple people about the details after showing up inadvertently early at the wrong spot.

That kind of grievance is why, after Apple on Wednesday appeared to have blocked what Beeper described as "~5% of Beeper Mini users" from accessing iMessages, both co-founder Eric Migicovksy and the app told users they understood if people wanted out. The app had already suspended its plans to charge customers $1.99 per month, following the first major outage. But this was something more about "how ridiculously annoying this uncertainty is for our users," Migicovsky posted.