Beeper Mini is back up, but not without some changes

Just last week, there appeared to be a significant outage to the iMessage for Android app known as Beeper Mini. It was later discovered that Apple was behind the outage, blocking the app for security reasons. But it appears Beeper Mini is working again, but not without some unfortunate changes.

In a blog post, the Beeper team announced its service is back up and running. However, if you’re a user of the Beeper Mini app, it will work a little differently than you remember.

To get the app working again, it seems the Beeper team had to implement a workaround. According to the post, users will have to sign in with an Apple ID because phone number registration isn’t working yet. As a result, users will have to send and receive messages through their email addresses until a fix is made.

If this sounds inconvenient, the Beeper team appears to think the same as it is now offering the service for free. “Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this,” Beeper says. “As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again.” Prior to this incident, Beeper Mini charged $2 per month for its service.

In response to Apple’s accusations that the app is a security and privacy concern, the company claims its service made communication between Android and iPhone more secure. It also added that it’s willing to “share the entire Beeper Mini codebase with a mutually agreed upon 3rd party security research firm.”