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The Ultimate Beeper-iMessage Guide: 2024

The One Guide to Rule Them All (for at least 2024)

Finally at long last, the one guide to iMessage on Android to rule them all, using Beeper Mini, the new Beeper beta app for Android, BlueBubbles, virtual machines, and much more. This guide will take you from the beginning and give you a fully working setup with iMessage with all your other chats in Beeper. This was made in collaboration with the amazing people on Matrix chat rooms (#beepserv:beeper.com and #imessage:maunium.net) that have not only contributed to these open source projects but also made guides that have been synthesized, updated, and simplified here for you.

UPDATE 5/4/2024

Previous instructions in this guide surrounding AppleIDs have been revised. I’ve personally found 100% stability in having no AppleID on the iPhone running beeperserv-rewrite/the new sideloaded IPA. The previous versions of this page had a work around that is no longer needed, in having a serperate ID for the iPhone and your main one for Beeper Mini. It is now recommened to sign out of your AppleID on the iPhone or factory resetting and go through setup with no ID.

Beeper Mini (Phone Number Registration)

You may be fine only wanting to use Beeper Mini for iMessage chats and using your other apps for their respective DMs, so we’ll start with that first. There are now two ways of using Beeper Mini: beepserv-rewrite (Jailbreak required) or the new app that can be sideloaded (No Jailbreak!). Beeper no longer provides support for Beeper Mini/Beepserv in general. The new app that can be sideloaded on iPhones is made by jjtech and no support will be given to users. Ever since Apple’s crackdown on Beeper, don’t expect any real support as eveything is community maintained.

Before you get started either option

  1. It is recommended to wipe your phone before you begin either option
  2. DO NOT SIGN INTO ANY APPLEID IN SETUP – signing in can cause instability in phone number registration. When setting up your iPhone after wiping, select “I don’t have an AppleID” or any equivalent wording to make sure the iPhone has no AppleID after setup.
  3. Disable your lock screen, there should be no PIN or fingerprint required to unlock the phone

Option 1: ValidationRelay by jjtech

The setup requires another computer, either macOS or Windows, to get working initially. You can use any software that’ll use the developer settings on your iPhone to sidelaod an app. Some are AltStore, Sideloadly, and Sideloader (Works on Linux!). For this guide we’ll use AltStore.

  1. Follow the appropiate guide here for either macOS or Windows
  2. On your iPhone, download this installer and share it to AltStore or open AltStore –> My Apps –> and the “+” icon (note that the installer link is pointing this website, the file was originally posted by Eric Migicovsky in the Beeperserv chatroom and built with this repo)
  3. Open “Installer” on your homescreen and hit the Install button
  4. There should then be a new app on your homescreen called “Relay” open it and get your Beeper Mini code!

Note: The Relay app uses location permissions always and in the background as a way of always having the registraton relay open, it does not use this location data for anything and can be verified by looking through the code on the ValidationRelay repo. Also, the relay will persist and keep working even if the Installer app or AltStore sideloads expire after 7 days.

Option 2: Beepserv-rewrite by thatmarcel (Jailbreak Method)

Let’s get the hard part out of the way

It is recommended that you follow a guide that matches your iPhone or iOS version at https://ios.cfw.guide/get-started/, they maintain updated guides for jailbreaking as projects come and go. Do not use a video guide for jailbreaking, they are probably outdated! Make sure you know the name of the Apple Silicon chip your iPhone has, as the guides will refer to it often (search your phone model on Wikipedia).

Do your jailbreak

You’re done? Good, let’s get Beepserv running.

  1. Go to Settings → Messages → and make sure “iMessage” is toggled off (If it asks to login then ignore this step and back out of the menu)
  2. Go to https://github.com/thatmarcel/beepserv-rewrite/releases and download the latest release deb file on your iPhone. Choose the respective file if you are rootless or rootful (this may have come up during your jailbreak guide, check your guide and come back, it is always recommended to do a rootless jailbreak and is probably what you did)
  3. Open the file with Safari and select Sileo in the share menu to install it, follow through the prompts
  4. Open beepserv on your homescreen, that’s your Beeper Mini code! Save it somewhere to copy and paste later

It is recommended at this point to prevent your phone from sleeping/the screen from turning off and leave it charging in some corner permanently. This will hopefully prevent any crashes that could occur from the instability caused by the jailbreak and prevent the need to re-jailbreak because of an unexpected reboot. If this does happen, your messages will break.

Create an App Password for Your “Main AppleID”

If you had tried to login with your AppleID in the past, you would have noticed that often Beeper Mini would require you to sign into your account again after only 30 minutes. This is not ideal and seems to be caused by 2FA on AppleIDs and Beeper Mini not handling it well. Luckily, Apple provides App Passwords for logins, so that 2FA isn’t needed and it would go into the regular password field for sign in. Beeper Mini offered this but If you had attempted to create an App Password inside of Beeper Mini when confirming 2FA, the issue would still occur. The solution is to create an App Password manually in iCloud.

  1. Go to https://appleid.apple.com/ and sign in
  2. Go to Sign-In and Security → App Specific Password → Click the “+” → Give it a name
  3. Put it in your password manager or note app in case your sign-in breaks, this rarely happens though using this method

Using Beeper Mini

  1. Download the APK at https://mini.beeper.com/Beeper_Mini_v1.2.58.apk, latest version at the time of this post is 1.2.58
    1. This version is important because it adds the ability to force re-register your phone number. If your phone number deregisters from iMessage, you won’t be able to receive iMessage texts and they will instead go to SMS. Using an App Password this will rarely break and will break less often over time as you re-register.
    2. Later in this guide we’ll set up BlueBubbles which will notify you when your phone number deregisters
  2. Enter your Beepserv code. If it fails to register your phone number, try again (Beepserv can fail to hook the right functions, doing it again forces it to use the fallback)
  3. If you are asked to sign into Apple, use your Main AppleID and the App Password you created

Congrats! You have the ability to send iMessage texts on Android. If you want to continue with BlueBubbles and integration into the greater Beeper app, continue on.

You’ll Need macOS…

BlueBubbles is a client-server combo that also provides iMessage texts for any platform. They hook into the Messages app on macOS to provide this functionality. In doing so, their mobile app provides notifications for when an iMessage “alias” is deregistered, for example your phone number from Beeper Mini. With mautrix/imessage, we can have our iMessage chats in Beeper Cloud and even the new Beeper beta app for Android.

There are two options to do this:

  1. Buy an old Mac Mini/Macbook/Macbook Air or any Mac device, ideally it should be able to run at least macOS Ventura
  2. Run a virtual machine

This guide will continue with option 2, being free if you have an old computer lying around.

Note: Ventura is not required to use BlueBubbles but is required if you want to be able to receive and send edits as well as unsend messages.

BlueBubbles

Installing Proxmox and Running macOS Ventura

“Why use Proxmox?” We don’t actually need to, anything x86 with Linux should be fine but this makes VM creation more streamlined and if you want the PC to do anything else, and have the cores and memory to do it, you can just spin up another VM. i12bretro has easy to follow guides as checklists that I recommend you follow. I’m copying his Ventura one here for your convenience and since Sonoma requires the AVX2 instruction set in order to boot. If you would like to use a different macOS version, you can find it on his website here.

First install Proxmox Virtual Environment here (you don’t need to pay, you can use the free version and ignore the prompts). Make a bootable USB and install the OS, you can then manage it headlessly with the web portal at https://<IP-of-Proxmox-server>:8006 Then follow these steps:

  1. Download a MacOS Ventura .iso Download OR create your own https://youtu.be/JFMvUpdCMwo
  2. Download KVM OpenCore bootloader Download
  3. Extract the downloaded KVM OpenCore bootloader .gz file
  4. Upload the Ventura and KVM OpenCore .iso files to the Proxmox ISO library
  5. Log into the ProxMox web UI
  6. Right click the ProxMox node name > Create VM
  7. Type MacOSVentura in the name field, set the VM ID to 1300 (unless 1300 is in use) > Next
  8. On the OS tab, set the Type field to Other and select the KVM OpenCore .iso in the ISO Image field > Next
  9. On the System tab, set the Graphic card field to VMware compatible, BIOS field to OVMF (UEFI), Uncheck the Pre-Enroll Keys checkbox, Check the Add EFI Disk checkbox, Machine field to q35 and the SCSI Controller to VirtIO SCSI > Next
  10. On the Hard Disk tab, set the Bus/Device field to VirtIO Block, Disk size field to 64, Cache field to Write back (unsafe) > Next
  11. On the CPU tab, set Cores field to 4, Type field to host > Next
  12. On the Memory tab, set the Memory to 4096 > Next
  13. On the Network tab, set the Model field to VMware vmxnet3 > Next
  14. Verify the summary and click Finish
  15. Click the MacOSVentura VM > Select Hardware from the left sub-navigation menu
  16. Click Add > CD/DVD Drive
  17. Select the MacOS Ventura .iso downloaded earlier > Click Create
  18. Select the MacOSVentura VM > Options > Boot Order
  19. Set the KVM OpenCore disk as the first boot option > Click OK
  20. Right click the ProxMox node name > Console
  21. Run the following commands in the terminal
\# edit the VM conf file, change 1300 to the VM ID for the MacOSVentura VM  

 nano /etc/pve/qemu-server/1300.conf
  1. If running on an Intel CPU, add the following line to the bottom of the .conf file:
args: -device isa-applesmc,osk="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc" -smbios type=2 -device usb-kbd,bus=ehci.0,port=2 -global nec-usb-xhci.msi=off -global ICH9-LPC.acpi-pci-hotplug-with-bridge-support=off -cpu host,vendor=GenuineIntel,+invtsc,+hypervisor,kvm=on,vmware-cpuid-freq=on
  1. If running on an AMD CPU, add the following line to the bottom of the .conf file:
args: -device isa-applesmc,osk="ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc" -smbios type=2 -device usb-kbd,bus=ehci.0,port=2 -global nec-usb-xhci.msi=off -global ICH9-LPC.acpi-pci-hotplug-with-bridge-support=off -cpu Haswell-noTSX,vendor=GenuineIntel,+invtsc,+hypervisor,kvm=on,vmware-cpuid-freq=on
  1. Press CTRL+W and search for ,media=cdrom
  2. Delete the ,media=cdrom from the two attached .iso files (KVM OpenCore and Ventura) and add cache=unsafe
  3. Press CTRL+O, Enter, CTRL+X to write the changes to the conf file
  4. Back in the Proxmox web UI, right click the MacOSVentura VM in the left navigation pane > Start
  5. Click console in the left sub-navigation menu
  6. At the OpenCore menu, select UEFI Shell > Press Enter
  7. Type the following in the UEFI shell:
\# change to the Ventura.iso, the disk number may be different for you  

 fs0:\# launch the MacOS installer  

 System\\Library\\CoreServices\\boot.efi
  1. After a long initialization sequence the MAC OS Setup should start
  2. Select Disk Utility
  3. Select the VIRTIO Block Media > Click Erase
  4. Name the drive MacOS > Set the Format to APFS > Click Erase
  5. Click Done > Close Disk Utility
  6. Click Install macOS Ventura
  7. Click Continue > Click Agree > Click Agree again
  8. Select the MacOS disk > Click Install
  9. Wait while Mac OS installs files, the VM will reboot several times
  10. Select your Country > Click Continue
  11. Confirm your languages and keyboard layout > Click Continue
  12. Click Not Now on the Accessibility screen
  13. Click Continue on the Data & Privacy screen
  14. Select Not Now on the Migration Assistant screen
  15. Select Set Up Later and then Skip on the Apple ID screen
  16. Click Agree > Agree again
  17. Enter a name, user name, password > Click Continue
  18. Click Continue > Select Use or Don’t Use for Location Services
  19. Pick a timezone > Click Continue
  20. Uncheck Share Mac Analytics with Apple > Click Continue
  21. Click Set Up Later on the Screen Time screen
  22. Uncheck the Enable Ask Siri box > Click Continue
  23. Pick a theme > Click Continue
  24. Welcome to MacOS 13 Ventura

You good? Great, let’s lie to Apple

Activating iMessage on macOS

  1. Follow this guide
    1. Make sure the ROM in your config.plist is the MAC address of the NIC you have set in Proxmox, you can go to Settings in macOS to see your MAC address of the NIC, this should still be all lowercase with no colons in your config.plist
  2. Sign in with your Main AppleID
  3. Sign into Messages with your Main AppleID

Setting up BlueBubbles

You can also follow their instructions here and here as well

  1. Download the latest release at https://github.com/BlueBubblesApp/bluebubbles-server/releases
  2. Open it and follow it’s instructions
  3. Make sure you turn on the Private API, “Keep macOS Awake”, and “Startup with macOS”
  4. Download the BlueBubbles app for Android
  5. Go through the setup and connection to your server
  6. It is recommended to turn off your notification on Android except for errors, this way you are only notified of deregisters
  7. Make sure the Private API is enabled in the Android app, if you go to the three dots → Settings → Your name under Profile → you should see all the aliases for your iMessage account, including your phone number from before (if not, force re-register!)
  8. In the mobile app’s settings, scroll to the bottom and sync your contacts to the BlueBubbles Server

Self-Hosting the iMessage Bridge for Beeper Cloud

  1. Download the latest Beeper Bridge Manager here, put it into a folder somewhere, run chmod +x bbctl-macos-amd64 in a terminal
  2. Edit your paths with sudo nano /etc/paths and add the path to the folder with bbctl
  3. Run bbctl-macos-amd64 login <your-email-with-Beeper-Cloud>
  4. In your home directory, git clone https://github.com/mautrix/imessage.git
  5. In the imessage directory, bbctl-macos-amd64 run --param 'bluebubbles_url=http://localhost:1234' --param 'bluebubbles_password=<your-BlueBubbles-password>' --param 'imessage_platform=bluebubbles' sh-imessage

And now finally… we’re done.

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