When did HN get so anti-consumer, anti-hacker, anti-freedom, pro-proprietary?
Them taking the fight with Apple should be applauded. A walled down proprietary message platform only a few can use is stupid to fight in favor of.
Them taking the fight with Apple should be applauded. A walled down proprietary message platform only a few can use is stupid to fight in favor of.
The original kid who reversed: Great hacking, I think we can all applaud. This is a for-profit (VC funded?) company charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for (and using apple binary blobs?).
If they used the protocol they reverse engineered on their own servers that’d be completely different. But that wouldn’t be profitable for them.
Apple is free to charge for them. In fact, I think it would be the best outcome and a mitigation to the upcoming spam onslaught now that the protocol has been documented.
> But that wouldn’t be profitable for them.
Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create (since Apple is more than capable of building an Android iMessage client)? Isn't that the whole point of a competitive market?
But I don’t think anyone disagrees that Apple is (currently) free _not_ to charge for them.
> Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create
I’d say ethically no - not a problem - up _until_ the point where they are actively, continuously using resources of that manufacturer. Legally? If you or your customers have agreed to a TOS then that’s probably bad either way.
Nobody would care about (or be interested in) beeper if they were running their own servers.
It was really cool news when they reverse engineered the API. It was less cool when they sold paid access to this unofficial API. Beeper is barely pro-consumer because again, they’re charging for something open sourced by a 16yo kid which has no official support.
The green bubble blue bubble story is really tired. Yea it’s real, but it’s not a technical problem it’s a social problem. Haven’t we learned that you can’t out-hacker a social problem?
It's both. For example, Apple degrades the experience for "green bubbles" even though it doesn't need to. That's not, strictly speaking, a social problem.
E.g. MMS messages generally have to fit within 300-600KB so they are horribly, horribly compressed. https://m.gsmarena.com/glossary.php3?term=mms
As for beeper cloud, I’m a paying customer to Apple and I just want to use my damn chat app on desktop that I pay for.
Put a tiny flat rate on the app for the work that they crated and call it a day.
>> "only a few can use"
There are about 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world.
As far as proprietary services, the world is full of them. Google, Meta, X, Instagram, .... Apple built a service to provide advanced messaging services to their many customers. It comes with the phone. Should Apple be required to freely give iPhone cameras to people who don't buy their phone? How about the Touch ID module?
There are plenty of cross platform messaging apps available on iOS. The only thing that could be considered anti-competitive is the inability to change the default messaging app on iOS. Apple has fixed this for some of the other built-in apps, but not messaging yet. I would agree that that should be fixed. However, Beeper is not offering an alternative messaging platform, they are selling access to Apple's platform.
In what world is Apple obligated to keep a service running which allows unauthorized security related behavior? Such a hole in a service is usually called a security vulnerability and is patched away asap.
The inherent problem right now is that they want to create a commercial product using another company's servers/APIs without that company's permission, ultimately leaving Apple picking up the bill (inc. additional support ticket volume, like when iMessage gets locked on a given AppleId).
Is iMessage part of Apple's moat? Absolutely. Is it good for consumers for iMessage to have a hardware lock? No. But even if that is true, this seems like something regulators should be involved in solving.
Plus there is nothing anti-proprietary or pro-freedom that Beeper Mini is doing.
It never has and never will be a ‘free spirited hacker place’ despite the name.