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Beeper Mini

Jailbreaking an iPhone

Let’s get the hard part out of the way

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. 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 Do not use a video guide for jailbreaking, they are probably outdated!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).

Before you get started with the jailbreak

It is recommended to wipe your phone before you begin
Disable your lock screen, there should be no PIN or fingerprint required to unlock the phone
Many have noticed that one of the major selling points of Beeper Mini is broken following the battle against Apple: using iMessage with only your phone number, without an AppleID. This may or may not be the case for you but in any event we are going to preemptively use a hack to work around it.
1. Create a burner AppleID on your iPhone, and remain signed into it
2. The phone number used for the account doesn’t matter, it may be the same as your main AppleID/your real phone number you use for messaging
3. If you don’t already have an AppleID before this guide, attempt to create another one on https://appleid.apple.com/, this will be your “Main AppleID”
4. Note: the email for your Main AppleID will constantly be notified that a device named “Beeper Mini” is using iMessage, make a filter to delete or archive them if this bothers you

Do your jailbreak

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

Setting up Beepserv-rewrite by thatmarcel

Go to Settings → Messages → and make sure “iMessage” is toggled off
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)
Open the file with Safari and select Sileo in the share menu to install it, follow through the prompts
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.

Go to https://appleid.apple.com/ and sign in
Go to Sign-In and Security → App Specific Password → Click the “+” → Give it a name
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

Download the APK from https://www.beeper.com/download, 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
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)
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.

We 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:

Buy an old Mac Mini/Macbook/Macbook Air or any Mac device, ideally it should be able to run at least macOS Ventura
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:

Download a MacOS Ventura .iso Download OR create your own https://youtu.be/JFMvUpdCMwo
Download KVM OpenCore bootloader Download
Extract the downloaded KVM OpenCore bootloader .gz file
Upload the Ventura and KVM OpenCore .iso files to the Proxmox ISO library
Log into the ProxMox web UI
Right click the ProxMox node name > Create VM
Type MacOSVentura in the name field, set the VM ID to 1300 (unless 1300 is in use) > Next
On the OS tab, set the Type field to Other and select the KVM OpenCore .iso in the ISO Image field > Next
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
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
On the CPU tab, set Cores field to 4, Type field to host > Next
On the Memory tab, set the Memory to 4096 > Next
On the Network tab, set the Model field to VMware vmxnet3 > Next
Verify the summary and click Finish
Click the MacOSVentura VM > Select Hardware from the left sub-navigation menu
Click Add > CD/DVD Drive
Select the MacOS Ventura .iso downloaded earlier > Click Create
Select the MacOSVentura VM > Options > Boot Order
Set the KVM OpenCore disk as the first boot option > Click OK
Right click the ProxMox node name > Console
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

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

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

Press CTRL+W and search for ,media=cdrom
Delete the ,media=cdrom from the two attached .iso files (KVM OpenCore and Ventura) and add cache=unsafe
Press CTRL+O, Enter, CTRL+X to write the changes to the conf file
Back in the Proxmox web UI, right click the MacOSVentura VM in the left navigation pane > Start
Click console in the left sub-navigation menu
At the OpenCore menu, select UEFI Shell > Press Enter
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

After a long initialization sequence the MAC OS Setup should start
Select Disk Utility
Select the VIRTIO Block Media > Click Erase
Name the drive MacOS > Set the Format to APFS > Click Erase
Click Done > Close Disk Utility
Click Install macOS Ventura
Click Continue > Click Agree > Click Agree again
Select the MacOS disk > Click Install
Wait while Mac OS installs files, the VM will reboot several times
Select your Country > Click Continue
Confirm your languages and keyboard layout > Click Continue
Click Not Now on the Accessibility screen
Click Continue on the Data & Privacy screen
Select Not Now on the Migration Assistant screen
Select Set Up Later and then Skip on the Apple ID screen
Click Agree > Agree again
Enter a name, user name, password > Click Continue
Click Continue > Select Use or Don't Use for Location Services
Pick a timezone > Click Continue
Uncheck Share Mac Analytics with Apple > Click Continue
Click Set Up Later on the Screen Time screen
Uncheck the Enable Ask Siri box > Click Continue
Pick a theme > Click Continue
Welcome to MacOS 13 Ventura

You good? Great, let’s lie to Apple

Activating iMessage on macOS

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
Sign in with your Main AppleID
Sign into Messages with your Main AppleID

Setting up BlueBubbles

You can also follow their instructions here and here as well

Download the latest release at https://github.com/BlueBubblesApp/bluebubbles-server/releases
Open it and follow it’s instructions
Make sure you turn on the Private API, “Keep macOS Awake”, and “Startup with macOS”
Download the BlueBubbles app for Android
Go through the setup and connection to your server
It is recommended to turn off your notification on Android except for errors, this way you are only notified of deregisters
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!)
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

Download the latest Beeper Bridge Manager here, put it into a folder somewhere, run chmod +x bbctl-macos-amd64 in a terminal
Edit your paths with sudo nano /etc/paths and add the path to the folder with bbctl
Run bbctl-macos-amd64 login <your-email-with-Beeper-Cloud>
In your home directory, git clone https://github.com/mautrix/imessage.git
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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