I, on the other hand, purged the shit out of all Android in my life because Google gives no fux about privacy. You can kill Apple's calls-to-Mecca and everything still works. You interfere with Google's constant pinging of their own ad servers and the phones become useless.

Which, by the way, is why this is dumb and why Beeper is dumb. Google slow-rolled the shit out of RCS - they first started promising that shit in 2012. Those texts from dead people back in 2019? That was Google fucking around with RCS. Now that they've given up on what, four? five? different messaging services they're finally getting around to "why doesn't everyone use RCS" and the answer is "because it's only been encrypted for like six months.".

There have always been duct-tape-and-chewing-gum approaches to getting apple's original duct-tape-and-chewing-gum protocol iMessage working on Android or Windows. My favorite one was the outfit that had a warehouse full of Mac Minis running text relays. The bottom line, though, is (A) Beeper works by spoofing Apple's proprietary technology (B) iMessage remains compatible with SMS. "shittily compatibile" is a legal fine line that I guarantee Apple has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours researching and maintaining. Beeper may not be working to inject code or scrape passwords but that doesn't prevent Lazarus from trying the exact same thing.