By Screenshots of Beeper Mini’s contact list, chat interface, and reactions. | Image: Beeper
Earlier this year, a developer slid into Eric Migicovsky’s DMs with a spectacular claim: that he had reverse engineered Apple’s iMessage, allowing any device — Android, Windows, whatever — to send messages as a blue bubble. Migicovsky didn’t believe what he was reading.
“I said, ‘Bullshit, no one has done that. No one on earth has done that,’” said Migicovsky, CEO of the messaging startup Beeper. He’d tried to do it himself, and he’d messaged everyone he could find who’d ever gotten close. “No one had put all the pieces together.”
But now there was this developer in his DMs — a 16-year-old high school student, of all people — linking him to a prototype. And it worked.
That prototype became the basis for a new Android app, called Beeper…