Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
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androidauthority.com
Looking at Beeper’s website, I can see
> We currently offer a 7 day free trial, afterwards there is a $1.99 per month subscription.
I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it, without at least paying for the infrastructure they’re using. Why is Apple expected to accept it?
Isn’t the reverse-engineering against Apple ToS anyway? As far as I know, it’s a pretty standard clause in basically every company’s ToS. How is Beeper supposed to "win" here, short of that sort of ToS clause being declared unenforceable?
But we shouldn't have to get to such specific examples to discuss the issue at play here—Apple is fighting against adversarial interoperability. I'm amazed to see people arguing in their favor on Hacker News.
Does that mean they are therefore not competing with Apple? And if their users are using Beeper Mini to access iMessage, are they not implicitly accepting the ToS?
Courts generally do not find that ToS can be accepted implicitly, even in situations where they are actually shown to the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browsewrap#Case_law
Very cut and dry CFAA case, I'm guessing Beeper saw how well it went for Epic Games when they leveraged the useful idiots to sway public opinion, so they are doing the same for a quick buck and hoping it gets political enough to avoid getting fined.
See Reddit clients vs charging for API debate
If apple wants to shut down beeper, there is a very very very easy way. Release iMessage for android. And suddenly beeper is dead overnight. All they have to do is build the product people want.
Beeper's problem isn't implementing the iMessage API but providing access to Apple's infrastructure without authorization.
The answer seems to be Apple wants to force families to purchase an iPhone for every family member, or download and agree to the terms of a third-party app in order to securely communicate.
The difference is that Apple's business model is built around preventing you from communicating with iMessage while Amazon is happy to let you copy things from anywhere into or out of your Amazon S3 bucket (for a price.)
You mean if a monopoly is created, it should be regulated like a utility. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, not sure what's invalid about this way of thinking.
The market in question is chat apps for the iMessage network, like Trillium was (is?) for many networks, not just "messaging".
Reverse engineering is not a problem.
Shutting down a competitor business draws scrutiny. Beeper’s strategy is not clean, but apple’s behavior in this space could be framed as anti competitive to begin with. They’re probably hoping so for some kind of concession that will force apple to open and provide a way for beeper to operate that is more above the table.
Your premise of wife beating is unfounded and closer to what you’re accusing ironically imo.
Ah, guilty before being charged. Cool! If that's your approach, why even have the investigation? Why not just stick with the accusation if its sufficient to reflect Apple's culpability?
>Your premise of wife beating is unfounded and closer to what you’re accusing ironically imo.
I didn't accuse you of anything. You seem a bit confused so try to follow here: I'm literally just explaining to you that when someone goes and uses another other person's property without permission, its prima facie trespass. You can make a defense that it was "just", but that's an affirmative defense.
There’s no ambiguity over what Apple did. The question is whether it violates the law. Acknowledging that there is legal theory to suggest it’s illegal has nothing to do with “guilty before proven innocent” and it is a complete straw man to suggest that anyone is discussing throwing out the need for trials altogether
And note that they are not even discouraging third-party chat apps, on the contrary, they actively promote the likes of whatsapp, signal, telegram etc.
People are free to pay Beeper for a service and Apple isn't stopping that. Apple is stopping unauthorized access a private network they run.
In order to prevent competition, Apple does not provide services like Beeper an authorized way to pay for access to their messaging protocol.
To make a bad analogy, it is like Jack's Auto Repair selling a service that enables Honda owners to use BMW service centers. And then Accord owners expecting to go to their nearby BMW dealer and get warranty repairs to their Honda.
Apple has a simple solution here. Identify how many unique users are coming to the iMessasge service via Beeper's app and send Beeper a bill for one iPhone 15 Max Pro for each user.
If they weren’t concerned about competition, we would have seen iMessage on Android a decade ago.
If they wanted to provide iPhone users a default secure way of messaging competitor hardware, they would have pursued an open alternative to SMS before they faced antitrust investigations.
Right now a Verizon iPhone customer can't securely send a message to a Verizon Android customer without forcing their customer to download a third-party app and agree to its terms, and the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers.
Vaguely reminds me a little bit of the web browser antitrust days. Regulators will catch up soon. At least Apple is planning to adopt RCS finally, even though they missed their chance to be part of the formation of the standard.
Edit: Or Apple could release iMessage for Android and for web.
And thank goodness... I can only imagine the resulting flood:
(1) ads in your messaging app; and
(2) messages being scanned for targeted advertising (by the "less scrupulous", of course).
They can just not sell those devices? I find this argument pretty twisted. It’s also based on a false premise. Verizon is also free to implement whatever they want on top of their @vtext.com endpoint.
How is the @vtext.com endpoint any more secure than MMS? Default, secure transfer using your carrier phone number through the built-in messaging app on Verizon iOS devices is restricted only to Apple's servers, and the recipients MUST be Apple users.
Especially if your thing is the "everything" thing.
There’s nothing anticompetitive or even out of the ordinary going on here. You can install competitive services on an iPhone at any time.
There's not really much other system integration with iMessage either, other than some Siri stuff I doubt sees much use. It's surprisingly disconnected from the rest of the operating system.
Edit: Vote me down, but that's a fact.
If you're a grocery store, it's anti-competitive to try and shut down the store down the street.
It's not anti-competitive to arrest the shoplifter who's selling their spoils in your parking lot.
And they write: > Going forward, Cerulean Studios is committed to maintaining interoperability across all major IM networks. We will continue to work hard and pursue the necessary avenues to keep this a reality. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to all of you out there supporting us!
We’ve allowed third-party ecosystems to develop elsewhere before. And it’s been said before that the cost to Apple is minimal if you exclude the lock-in effect. Amortized across a global base, running a chat network is barely $1/year/user for the average case is what I’ve seen before on HN.
I’m not saying using a third-party client needs to be completely free - paying Apple in either attention or money makes some sense. But considering that many folks with Android phones might also have Mac laptops or subscribe to Apple Music, it doesn’t seem impossible that Apple could allow for interoperability across devices and clients and that lawmakers could encourage this.
If Apple wants to strike a business deal with Beeper, that's Apple's call. If they don't, they don't.
Imagine a music festival. The only way to get tickets is to buy direct from the venue. For years, people have been cutting holes in the fence and allowing people through. While the venue would do their best to close the bigger holes, they’d leave smaller gaps and turn a blind eye. One year, someone starts to advertise the hole they’ve made and suggest a fee for the hole. The venue now cracks down on all holes. The hole-maker complains about this, publicly, and urges government to step in. This is, in my opinion, analogous to the Beeper situation. They know what they are doing is wrong, but are playing dumb.
Trillian, Pidgin et al. really came about after AIM opened up. Apple actually signed a deal with AOL to allow them to include AIM with iChat.
When someone exchanges phone numbers with a friend, you might not even know what kind of phone they have. Apple phones will send E2E iMessages by default to other Apple phones, and insecure SMS to non-Apple phones, and just shows this to you as "messages." This service only indicates this difference in connection status through a color change
This is a confusing choice, and most users don't even know the technical details, but the end result of it is that they might have extremely mixed information about how secure their text messages are, especially if they don't know in advance what kind of phone the other person has
I think we've seen about 15 years of tech companies trying to assert various kinds of control up to and including ownership over people's social graphs in order to lock them in to various services, and that it's clear some regulation is necessary to prevent this kind of play. Your analogy doesn't make sense because what Apple is trying to put a fence around is not something that it should be legal for them to in the first place
Happy to accept that criticism, it's fair. I'm sorry for pilling on more poor analogies...
> Apple is trying to put a fence around is not something that it should be legal for them to in the first place
Why?
When iMessage was released, it was done so as covenience feature for Apple users on iOS (so iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) to communicate with other Apple users. iMessage on OS X came later.
From the press release (https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/10/04Apple-Launches-iPho... WWDC announcement https://youtu.be/MvYEc8bFK-o?t=1709)
iPhone 4S comes with iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, which includes over 200 new features including Notification Center, an innovative way to easily view and manage notifications in one place without interruption and iMessage™, a new messaging service that lets you easily send text messages, photos and videos between all iOS 5 users. iOS 5 will also be available as a free software update for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS customers allowing them to experience these amazing new features.
Some have used the emails from the Epic trial discovery to illustrate that Apple whant to keep iMessage as "lock-in" for iPhone. I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice. Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps. Preventing moving numbers and and therefore blocking the ability to change messaging providers is wrong, and Apple were rightly called out on this and have fixed that.
Should a user be able to choose the default messaging app? Yes. I see no rational argument against, except perhaps for security, but that can be dealt with and limiting liability through sensible terms is always an option.
I'm on the fence as to whether they should open it up to Android users and provide a client. I certainly don't think they should be forced or coerced, especially given that the market is so competative oustide of the US (the 3rd largest market globally, but dwarfed by the first two [CN, APAC] and only marginably larger than the next two (West Europe, Latin America), RCS fallback will solve most of the issues mentioned elsewhere. The color of bubble is not one, and nor should it be. It's an American cultural phenomena. There absolutely should be an easy way to defferentiate which service a message originates from. Note: green has never ment Android.
Irrelevant. Apple and iMessage today are not what Apple and iMessage were when iMessage was released. When a company gets large enough, they are held to a different standard. And for good reason. Waiting for Apple to become a monopoly before enforcing competition and consumer protection laws is, for lack of a better word, stupid. Apple is at risk of becoming a monopoly in this space and it needs to be dealt with before it's too late.
> I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice.
Market competition isn’t the only issue here. Consumer protection is as well. Apple is doing something called “tying”. iPhones and Macs are the tied product and iMessage is the tying product (iMessage being free is irrelevant, it is nonetheless a product and it is a product that can operate independently from the tied product as has been established by Beeper). Tying needn’t affect all consumers, it just needs to be shown that there is a demand for the tying product sans the tied product. It also doesn’t need to be shown that Apple has the majority of the market. There are examples of illegal tying where the company doing it has a lower, but not insignificant, market share.
Beeper shows that there is a demand for iMessage independent of an iPhone. iMessage is now (what it was is irrelevant) a tying product. There is demand for communicating between users utilizing the iMessage platform without having to use an iPhone or another of Apple's tied products (that some Apple users want iMessage exclusivity is irrelevant).
> Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps.
It’s also disingenuous to try to differentiate the market while simultaneously suggesting alternatives that supposedly replace the tying product. Either iMessage is in its own market or it's not. But even that doesn't matter, because it is actually up to the consumer to decide what the market is. The truth is that iMessage is in the same market as other messaging apps, but is being unfairly used as a tying product.
Of course Apple doesn't want iMessage to be cross-platform, but consumers don't want to be forced to choose what they see as an inferior tied product (regardless of Apple fans' beliefs about Apple's superiority, Apple fans don't represent all consumers, only some of them). To keep the market fair for consumers, Apple has to be held to a higher standard, which means unbundling iMessage and making it available on non-Apple devices or opening the protocol to third parties.
Although not mentioned, I believe that you're alluding to the Microsoft and Internet Explorer case in 2001, which does raise an intriguing point. Although there are parallels, the situations are not exactly the same. Microsoft's strategy involved using its Windows licenses to influence the web browser market, notably by limiting Netscape Navigator's presence. In contrast, Apple does not appear to be exerting similar market force in the instant messaging sector. They haven't restricted alternative messaging platforms. For instance, in the US, there are approximately 135 million iPhone users and about 187 million Facebook Messenger users. This, along with the 40 million WhatsApp users, suggests that Meta might be more dominant in instant messaging to the point of having a Monopoly.
While the Microsoft Corp. v. United States case in 2001 significantly altered the legal landscape, the legality of tying arrangements in the US is still based on several factors, such as market power, coercion, competition in the tied product market, and overall impact on interstate commerce. The evaluation of these factors has evolved from a strict illegal standard to a more nuanced "rule of reason" analysis.
Considering these factors, it's challenging to view Apple's approach to iMessage as harmful to non-Apple customers. The absence of coercion, the presence of healthy competition, and adherence to existing standards are notable. Declaring iMessage as a tying product is, at this stage, more of an opinion than a confirmed fact.
Your argument hinges on the assumption that iMessage is a dominant tying service. However, statistical evidence suggests a competitive instant messaging market exists on iOS and more broadly. To establish iMessage as a dominant force, it would need to be demonstrated that there is a lack of competition in instant messaging, which current evidence does not support.
Our default position on businesses, especially large ones, should not be that any agreement or restriction they want to hold their customers to is legal, but even setting that aside, this is deceptive advertising that harms their own customers
2. Even if Apple made this clear, it still creates a pretty insecure environment in practice. If you don't know ahead of time what phone someone you're talking to has, you must receive a message from someone before you can know whether messages you have sent them are secure, in the same chat application you use to send secure messages
It's important here because iPhones are the dominant device by market share in the US. Their share is something like 57%.
>I believe that you're alluding to the Microsoft and Internet Explorer case in 2001
I'm talking about the strategy of tying in general. The tying Apple is doing with iMessage is not the same as Microsoft III.
>In contrast, Apple does not appear to be exerting similar market force in the instant messaging sector. They haven't restricted alternative messaging platforms.
Again, iMessage is the tying product, iPhones are the tied product. Apple is using iMessage to maintain its dominance in the smartphone market. They are restricting the smartphone market by coercing consumers with the threat of hindering communication (i.e. making the experience worse for both parties) within their social network by cutting off access to iMessage. In other words, if I switch back to Android, I lose access to the group chats (through exclusion) and can no longer share or receive media in high resolution. I am then forced into trying to convince a large social network (some of whom I am only acquainted with) to use some other messaging platform.
>For instance, in the US, there are approximately 135 million iPhone users and about 187 million Facebook Messenger users. This, along with the 40 million WhatsApp users, suggests that Meta might be more dominant in instant messaging to the point of having a Monopoly.
Just one point, because I've already addressed this, but "you can use Messenger/WhatsApp/etc" is the equivalent of "a gay man can get married here, he just needs to marry a woman!" Getting significantly everyone in an iMessage-dominant social network to switch to a cross-platform messaging application is very difficult, if not impossible, which is why this is an issue at all.
>Your argument hinges on the assumption that iMessage is a dominant tying service.
No, my argument relies on the fact that iPhones are a dominant tied good through which one is coerced into buying to be able to access iMessage the tying good. No assumptions are needed, the market data reflect this. This isn't about iMessage dominance, this is about iPhone dominance.
Let's say I own a lemon orchid and it's known around the area people are welcome to come pick a few as they want, but we primarily sell wholesale. One day, John down the road (who doesn't own an orchid$ decides he wants to sell lemons wholesale too. He proceeds to recruit pickers and they start combing through my open orchid stripping trees to sell.
As a reaction to this behaviour - which I clearly didn't intend for, but did technically allow - am I being anti-competitive? Would you classify this as "shutting down a competitors business"?
It's possible that Apple feels this way - that people wouldn't buy iPhones if they could just use Android phones to iMessage their friends.
It's threatened because the product is being stolen
And both Apple’s OS licenses and Apple’s MediaToS, both of which require agreement before being able to reach the parts that were reverse engineered, explicitly prohibit reverse engineering.
But the civil liability isn’t the most interesting part of this story.
The interesting part is that this referral to the DOJ can blow up in Beeper’s face in a violent way.
While there’s nothing the antitrust division of the DOJ can do here no matter how badly the congressional critters misrepresent the situation in the letter, CCIPS can definitely pursue computer trespass charges as defined in the CFAA due to Beeper’s unauthorized access of Apple’s servers.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
I am curious what a judge or legislators will decide on this, can a company force you to use their client to connect to their service? Then Google can force us to use Google approved and signed apps to access youtube and google apps, even if they can't block alternatives they can bully the alternatives with the justice system.
It would be also interesting to know if using this app instead of the fallback it is actually using maybe less resources and it would be a benefit for the world for Apple to open the protocol.
> The user will create an account so IMO if I have an Apple account (I own an old Apple laptop) then WTF would Apple care I send the bytes from a differrent application.
Actually, the initial version of beeper mini did not require an apple ID. And actually this was one feature they seemed to advertised a lot. Only the phone number was used: "No Apple ID is required" [1].
I guess the idea was that they could provide an upgrade to the current, unencrypted communication between iMessage and android (that does not require an apple id either). But I guess the issue here, was that people who used it did not necessarily have an apple ID, and thus not consented to apple's ToS, which as I understand makes it different than pidgin etc. And they actually say that this is a problem they are trying to fix: "Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this." [2]
Unless I misunderstand something, beeper mini stopped working because apple somehow disabled this "feature".
I mean I do not have any invested interest in this, I do not own an iphone and even if I did all people I know use other chatting apps, I do not own apple stocks or anything, I am all for piracy and whatnot, but I would not consider blocking access to their service when there is no ToS agreement "anti-competitive behaviour".
[1] https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works (initial announcement) [2] https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-mini-is-back
From what I understand the problem is Apple refusing to make iOS and Android users communicate smoothly, they downgrade group chats so bad that Android users are bullied and not invited into groups. I am sure those well paid Apple engineers can solve the issue if they care about the customers , at least the ones that maybe have Apple laptops but an Android phone, or an iOS phone but they want to mesage from their Apple laptop running Linux.
Some examples spring to mind: carrier locked cellphones. Game consoles. Reddit.
How is this not a violation of the same Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz for unauthorized access to a web server?
RIP Aaron Swartz
Just because something is accessible does not implicitly grant authorization, there are hundreds of court cases that have set that precedent (this is why you DON'T need an MOTD auth warning anymore). Not only is Beeper doing that, they're also profiting from their abuse. This is more than enough to be a major violation of the CFAA and this is probably what the DOJ is investigating.
To communicate via iMessage you must use Apple's servers. There are no other servers which can accept iMessage messages and forward them back and forth with Apple's server. (Only in a lossy manner, via MMS.) It is not a federated protocol.
Federation promotes competition. Preventing 3rd party access by any mechanism stifles competition.
If iMessage were federated, as in, Beeper could host their own servers which federate with Apple's, I think more of us would side with Apple here.
i.e. If every last Verizon server is shut down then they become small plastic bricks.
It wouldn't matter how many agreements have been signed with AT&T, T-mobile, etc...
You could even start your own carrier just like you could set up your own Mastodon server. Of course there would be far more regulations, but it is technically possible.
And even then the new SIM card still won't allow the phone to connect with any of the proprietary cellular towers and antennas for normal usage, only emergency situations.
This is not federated in any sense.
Setting up an email/mastodon/matrix server requires effort and money. You either need to self host which requires a local internet connection, electricity, and ideally a static IP none of which are guarantee. If you host at a hosting company it costs money.
>(And in some countries there is an ID check or other legal obligations/contracts must be signed.)
Hetzner and other hosting companies require IDs as well. I wouldn't be surprised if in some countries you have to have an ID to get internet.
>And even then the new SIM card still won't allow the phone to connect with any of the proprietary cellular towers and antennas for normal usage, only emergency situations.
A mastodon server won't connect with a proprietary protocol so it seems like it is the same boat? It won't even connect in emergency situations!
>This is not federated in any sense.
Seems exactly the same. There are just far more gatekeepers when it comes to carriers.
According to this logic, everything in human civilization could be considered 'federated', just that many have a very large number of 'gatekeepers'.
- The explicit carve-out of reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in the DMCA
- The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
What's not clear to me is how relevant the DMCA is here, and/or if a ToS can supersede these laws.
> I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it
There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
I'm not arguing that Apple is ok with this, but that as a model, it's not uncommon.
iMessage (and Bing) don't have a large enough user base in the EU to fall under the DMA.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861030/imessage-bing-eur...
> Both Microsoft and Apple have reportedly argued that Bing and iMessage aren’t popular enough in Europe to warrant being covered by the DMA, despite the commission claiming they meet the required thresholds.
> EU tentatively finds it doesn’t warrant being covered by DMA
I'm sure you remember my name, as we were having a discussion on the same topic just a day or two ago. You called me immature, didn't know what I was talking about, claimed I was arguing in bad faith, and that I had a chip on my solider, and then ended by giving yourself a reminder not to reply to me again in the future.
I think we would both prefer it if we avoided each other, so I'm just curious why you would instigate a conversation with me after apparently having such a negative experience and claiming you wouldn't do so in the future.
> A report from Bloomberg on Wednesday suggests that the EU will rule in Apple's favor. Sources familiar with the matter cited by the report claim that officials are "leaning toward the reprieve" for iMessage, given its relative lack of popularity in the EU marketplace.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/imessage-may-not-forced-open-...
Both of which regularly require renewed agreement after updates which would trigger an explicit agreement, but there’s at the very least multiple instances of derived agreement.
1) Beeper runs multiple Mac minis for their Beeper Cloud service, those don’t run without agreeing to the terms. That agreement, which is a license to use macOS, applies to any subsequent uses of macOS on any other device. In fact, all it takes is for a single Apple computer to be used in any capacity within the company, because again, you’re agreeing to a license to use the OS, not to use the device, you own the device outright after all.
2) The EULAs and ToS are self-executing (“By using this software you agree”) in addition to requiring a click, trying to circumvent it by introducing a “second owner” isn’t going to change much
3) Claiming you didn’t agree to the EULA or ToS doesn’t do you any good, because then you’re admitting to using Apple’s software without a license i.e. piracy and the DMCA reverse engineering exception doesn’t magically grant you the right to pirate software (would be fun though, I could download whatever I want under the guise of “reverse engineering”).
I think this would be _fan-tas-tic_. But beeper is not a chat network. It is a company that simply wants to be be the iMessage for Android client, using Apple's network.
Their case would be stronger if they did have their own network and used this reverse engineered iMessage connection to provider interop between the two networks.
They advertise Beeper Mini (the iMessage component) separately from Beeper Cloud at the moment. Probably because of the gray area they're operating in. Completely agree with Beeper's approach though. Defaulting iPhones to SMS whenever an Android device is in the chat makes the network less secure for everyone. I would personally prefer being able to use iMessage with my friends that have Android devices so I wouldn't need a couple of different apps with varying degrees of privacy and security.
Replace "component" with "app" and you got it right.
Explicit prohibitions against reverse engineering in ToS and licenses, as is the case here, supersede the DMCA exception as per Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
> The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
Only for ones that are big enough to meet a threshold, which iMessage does not. If it did it would only be enforceable in the EU, so that wouldn’t affect US users.
> There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
The big difference with your example and this case is that in your example it leads to a new product that is sold, whereas in this case it’s the repackaging of someone else’s product, which is then subsequently sold and relies on someone else’s infrastructure.
Note that Apple hasn’t sued Beeper (yet) for reselling/sub-licensing iMessage, instead they’ve tightened access of their infrastructure.
It goes without saying that even if you’d believe that the DMCA reverse engineering exception allows for repackaging and resale of the reverse engineered product (which it doesn’t), it certainly doesn’t come with entitlement to the resources of owner of the reverse engineered product.
> Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
Ignoring the fact that the adjudication on the legality of this has yet to be resolved for a second, this is still not analogous to the situation at hand.
Consumption of other people’s data to produce, generally, new data in new forms and context is not the same as repackaging and reselling. It’d be different if Beeper used their reverse engineering to setup their own competing chat network, although then you get into the territory of clean rooms etc.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
Has that actually been decided? I know Apple pushed some weird arguments about their size, but AFAIK they're still counted as a gatekeeper.
> If it did it would only be enforceable in the EU
Kinda. The Brussels effect is very real and multiple EU changes got effectively implemented worldwide. For example you can get a full data checkout from lots of online companies, regardless of your EU connection. (Including Apple https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/a... )
Only in a tentative sense[0], but based on the facts it’s inevitable.
What you call “weird arguments”, I call simply the logical conclusion based on facts.
For Apple to be deemed a gatekeeper under the DMA w/r/t iMessage, Apple needs to pass a couple of thresholds. Nobody is arguing the revenue and market cap thresholds, so I’ll skip those.
That leaves either 45m monthly active users or 10k monthly active business users.
Apple’s claim is that they don’t meet those thresholds. Apple could of course lie, but companies of this size typically don’t commit fraud that could easily be disproven by a basic criminal investigation that could be triggered when fraud is suspected.
When you take into account the lower market penetration of iPhones and other Apple devices in the EU and then take into account the abysmal market penetration of iMessage in the EU it’s very plausible that Apple doesn’t have 45m monthly active users.
And frankly nobody is seriously disputing the 45m number. Instead people, including Google et al., were mainly focusing on the 10k monthly active business users, because they hoped that lower threshold was easier to prove.
Not only is the EU’s tentative conclusion that Apple doesn’t even have 10k monthly active business users, but this too is very plausible.
If you look at the US, where iMessage is most successful compared to other countries, you can’t even find 10,000 companies that support iMessage Business Chat. I can tell you from personal experience that in the EU the amount of companies that have adopted it is in the single digits, mainly airlines that have adopted it to serve their international (often American) passengers.
Now one could argue that regular non-Business Chat iMessage should be included in that count, which is a minor debate that part of the greater debate, but even if that premise would be accepted, you’d then circle back to low adoption rates of iMessage amongst EU consumers and the question of how many companies will bother to send iMessages to their customers when SMS provides a near guarantee that the message will be received by the customer.
In my personal experience, I’ve never received an iMessage from a business in all my 30+ years of living in the EU. Businesses big and small will instead insist on sending messages via WhatsApp, if they insist on reaching out by non-traditional means at all (i.e., SMS, email, call).
None of my anecdotes are authoritative of course, purely a speck of data in an already plausible claim that Apple makes about their monthly active users.
As it stands, all signs, including the ones produced by the EU themselves, point to Apple not meeting the thresholds.
> Kinda. The Brussels effect is very real and multiple EU changes got effectively implemented worldwide. For example you can get a full data checkout from lots of online companies, regardless of your EU connection. (Including Apple https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/a... )
That only goes so far. In particular when it comes to pet peeves that Apple has, like iMessage and side-loading. We already know that when it comes to the latter Apple intends to only enable that in the EU, going as far as developing a special “countryd” daemon to ensure that it’ll only be activated in the EU[1].
0: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-imessage-dodge-eu...
1: https://9to5mac.com/2023/04/25/ios-16-restrict-features-base...
Beeper (theoretically) exists to allow Android users to communicate with iPhone users, so one of the two users in the conversation already gave Apple hundreds of dollars. They'll survive.
Beeper exists solely to make Android users feel better about the color of their bubble and their social standing thereof.
They may not be ok with it but they should be forced to allow and not attempt to thwart "adversarial interoperability", on which the computing and the internet were built!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...
No, I’m not actually arguing that because that’s not what I said nor is it an accurate rewording of what I said. I didn’t say anything about making anything free; I said “they can even charge for it”.
Perhaps the outcome of challenging Apple's ToS depends on where the case would be filed. For example, 5th Cir would favour Beeper as it follows Vault v Quaid. 1st Cir follows Bowers v Baystate and would favour Apple. 8th Cir has followed Bowers (See Davidson, the Blizzard case).
"[P]rivate parties are free to contractually forego the limited ability to reverse engineer a software product under the exemptions of the Copyright Act[,]" Bowers v. Baystate Techs, Inc., 320 F.3d 1317, 132526 (Fed. Cir. 2003)
But note that in Bowers, Baystate did not actually attempt to plead fair use or copyright misuse. It only focused on preemption. The Bowers case is used to argue against reverse engineering as fair use but Baystate never asserted that defense.
The so-called "tech" companies and their supporters would prefer Bowers to apply everywhere. But it does not apply everywhere.
What is more interesting than the copyright issues, IMHO, is the idea of an antitrust illegality defense to breach of a software license. From 1996,
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v09/09HarvJLTech23...
Samuelson and Scotchmer mentioned it again in 2002.
"While antitrust and competition law may regulate antireverse engineering clauses in an appropriate case or context, no such claim has as yet been brought, let alone sustained."
Which is right, it's only good for consumers if Apple just sucks it up and accepts that they need to support stuff like this.
They're happy enough to use wifi/Bluetooth/other comms specs. Vendor lock in special cult club effect I guess. It's just a phone...
I miss the days of GAIM/Pidgin/Trillium/Adium and hope Beeper prevails here.
Apple's goal is for iMessage to remain an exclusive feature of their hardware. That exclusivity is what Beeper -- or an Apple-vended Android client, or RCS interoperability, or federation generally -- threatens.
And -- it's exactly the proposition of, "to use our popular offering in market X, you must also purchase our offering in market Y" which is anticompetitive.
The issue isn't so much Beeper as it is the open the door to anyone on the Internet. I.e. Apple probably cares little about Beeper itself, and more about the risk of 3rd party software accessing its services/users.
A good number of us have had to combat spam/abuse in our careers, and we're sympathetic to the plight.
(I'd still prefer to see 3rd party clients as I appreciate the integration those can bring. But the hardware lock-in is particularly egregious.)
Creating barrier to entry for spam definitely reduces it but we know for a fact that's not a very effective spam fighting strategy.
I also think modern anti-spam tech is really good. My Samsung phone here is really good at blocking robo calls here in Thailand. In fact I handn't received one since my upgrade to S22. If Samsung can block robo calls and open protocols like federation and email can stop spam through simple tech and volunteer work then multibillion company with some of the best engineers surely can't find this that challenging right? So I find the spam argument for closing off iMessages not very convincing to say the least.
You lost me here. iMessages in particular are not able to be automated because they always require user input before they’re sent.
There are very few OS processes that have an escalated privilege which allows sending iMessage without user input, but given the lack of widespread iMessage spam vs. SMS spam, it seems those processes aren’t actively being exploited.
Even iPhones in general are actually very hard to automate.
So honestly I have no clue what you’re talking about.
I consider it so because of recent reports that 87% of US teens own iPhones, and colloquial knowledge of how "green bubbles" negatively affect teens' social and mental health.
The top reply addresses your points:
> The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use.
> It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business, or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense.
Beeper’s CEO is acting high and mighty, speaking like he’s some kind of ideological liberator, while charging for a service using another’s infrastructure. Had it been free and open-source from the start¹ you’d see a lot more people on their side. As soon as you start charging, you lose a lot of “hacker” sympathy.
It’s possible to disagree with Apple for not providing iMessage on Android while at the same time disagreeing with Beeper’s approach.
¹ And I do mean the whole app, not the proof-of-concept from the teenager.
I'm not sure how all this points to "get-rich-quick" silicon valley startup type to you but the behavior looks pretty different to me. Given their history, my guess is they put beeper mini out there primarily to put pressure on apple. If apple doesn't shut it down, cool, everyone has access to imessage through beeper. If apple does shut it down, at least it leaves little doubt about the situation: interoperability is not impossibly hard, apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do, and at the end of the day imessage is only limited to apple devices because apple is apple. (For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense, kind of similar to nintendo in that way.)
I suppose if all I had seen was the past month of buzz around them then I might perceive them differently.
Who ever argued it was? Apple never claimed they wouldn’t bring iMessage to Android because it was hard. Them making an Android app would be trivial, they simply choose not to. Which I disagree with, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with Beeper’s approach.
> apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do
That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them? Beeper probably isn’t siphoning messages from user’s devices to spy on them but Apple doesn’t know that, none of us do. And if they allow that use, the app that comes next might be nefarious.
> For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense
I think lots of lobbyists were making such arguments about the DMA in Europe.
> That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them?
This has little to do with beeper's client. The point is, apple could easily bring imessage to android and doing so would increase their customers privacy, because now all their android conversations could be e2ee. apple of course chooses not to do this even with how trivial it would be, showing that their privacy focused marketing is really just empty words. Beeper's role here is simply bringing more attention to this two faced apple propaganda.
> https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android
It's possible that imessage wasn't brought to android for monetary purposes early on, but at this point it's pretty clear there's a large segment of android users willing to pay a subscription to get imessage and that would be practically free money for apple. I think the main reason they still haven't included android is it goes against their vertical integration philosophy. They want to control everything (they don't control android, or the android app store) and are willing to make sacrifices and gambles in pursuit of that (eg them sinking loads of money to try and engineer their own modems even though it is likely to be worse than qualcomm's for quite some time, and who knows if they'll ever even ship an iphone with an apple modem before they shut the division down).
I reject this idea completely. The "hacker spirit" in no way excludes doing business or making money. Hackers creating businesses to bring the benefits of their hacking to the world are the very foundation of YC who created and operate this site.
> charging for a service using another’s infrastructure
Beeper doesn't get any benefit from using Apple's infrastructure per se. The resource usage is trivial. If there was a way to go around Apple's infrastructure and communicate with Apple's iMessage users directly Beeper would be all over it and more than happy to replace all that "infrastructure" themselves at no cost to Apple.
Apple has inserted themselves between their users and the world, making it impossible for anyone to send proper group or video messages to their unchangeable default messaging app without going through Apple. Beeper is simply doing the only thing that will work to fix Apple's intentional crippling of communication with Android for their own benefit.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
What hacking benefits are brought by the top 5 companies in this list?
I disagree. There is a clear line in many business from "cool hacking shit" to "cool/profitable business", but that hacker spirit is lost every single time.
The "hacking spirit" is never about money either - see any 90s/00s movie about hacking, or any of the 80s/90s manifestos online.
These aren't freedom fighters, trying to fight Goliath and bring messaging to the people. The original project they built on was. Beeper are profiteers, seeking to middle man some money. There nothing wrong with that - good on them - but that's hardly "hacker spirit".
Beeper is requesting money for illegally distributing Apples copyrighted code which they then use in a questionable way. Cry me a river.
Here they simply provide someone else’s library to perform the authentication. That’s just basic copyright infringement, however lofty the goal.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/858511/what-is-com-apple...
https://www.theregister.com/2003/08/11/habeas_cans_spammer/
You can’t write an emulator and sell it including the bios written by Sony. Has been enforced many times. Similarly, you can’t do what Beeper is doing here.
This is exactly the case here. The barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce this obfuscated code which, crucially, serves no other purpose. Even if it would be theoretically possible to achieve interoperability otherwise by heroic reverse engineering of said code, that doesn't matter just as it didn't matter in Sega v. Accolade where that exact argument was made unsuccessfully by Sega.
This is not analogous to reproducing a whole BIOS which is not obfuscated code and is used for miscellaneous purposes having nothing to do with access restriction. This is clearly fair use according to precedent.
Ultimately either Apple will successfully block Beeper permanently or they will DMCA them and the courts will have their say. We’ll see.
Several other comment mention "piggybacking", but there are plenty of services piggybacking on tech giants: SearX, Nitter, Invidious, Teddit, Libreddit. One can even argue that LineageOS and GrapheneOS are piggybacking on Google's efforts.
Sentiment at the time was that we wished AOL would welcome third party clients but it was not their duty or obligation to do so. Likewise most people believed the third party clients were free to adapt to the changes. Both had the right to play cat/mouse as long as they wished.
Beeper is making a very different argument: that the courts and/or law should force anyone exposing an endpoint to the internet to bend over backwards so third parties can use the endpoint too (for free) because that would be convenient for end users. That Beeper can decide, at its own discretion, what is or is not allowable for something that was never intended to allow third party access.
Every company is almost by definition a monopolist with regard to its own products and services because even mostly equivalent things are still different in some way that could matter to a customer. It is all about where you draw the lines.
I thought what Beeper did was fun at first, but now I consider their work dangerous, since it rationalizes a push for remote attestation, which is what Apple has been meaning to do for a long time. Now they have a valid reason to fully utilize it, after which Google may try to follow suit and probably face less backlashes.
No it doesn't. By this logic, Apple should have gone through with plans to implement CSAM scanning on iCloud. Except customers complained and they abandoned it. Then they debuted e2e encrypted iCloud storage 2 years later; completely antithetical to the school of thought used by CSAM scanning advocates.
Then they choked on the cake.
> "If it hadn't been for the Blue Boxes, there would have been no Apple. I'm 100% sure of that." -Steve Jobs
For your Apple collection:
https://www.bonhams.com/auction/24495/lot/109/wozniak-steve-...
Their Blue Box efforts were very cool! So is the coding that let Beeper do this.
But it is mystifying to me that people are arguing it is illegitimate (under our current system) for Apple to try to secure its system.
The primary difference is that in one case it’s a closed proprietary protocol and in the other an open protocol. But who pays for what is not the main concern. Apple would still disagree even if Beeper would be willing to share an appropriate part of their revenue.
Similarly, with plain SMS, the cellular provider owns (some of) the infrastructure, but the user is a customer.
With Beeper, the customer is paying Beeper, but Beeper is using Apple's infrastructure (without paying for it).
No. They don't work the same way. Your email provider has to maintain a mail server to send and receive emails on your behalf. Your email client connects to that email server to do all its work. Beeper Mini directly connects to Apple's Push Notifications servers to do all send/receive.
People arguing for an open iMessage system like email are completely forgetting how much spam and bad actors have ruined the openness of email. It use to be the case that you could run your own email server, but due to spam, many major email providers like Gmail will reject emails from untrusted IP addresses, for example.
SMS and iMessage spam that is handled by the Messages app are considerably less of a problem precisely because they’re less open protocols. They’re not at all comparable; the vast, vast majority of email is spam.
The real situation is that you've granted me SSH access to your server but block anything than the OpenSSH client and I would like to use Go's crypto/ssh.
And it's one thing when they're two OSS implementations but when those alternative clients are your competitors it starts looking anticompetitive.
You're focusing on the mechanism of my example rather than the effect. Apple hasn't given Beeper (or me or you) free access to their infrastructure. Shutting down Beeper using an exploit is well within their rights.
Apple does not offer any sort of public access to iMessage, Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity. Beeper can keep up their cat and mouse game but whining to regulators and pretending they are doing something noble is ridiculous. They're trying to grab headlines to get either bought out or investment dollars.
If they want to reverse engineer iMessage they can take their licks and keep up with Apple's efforts to lock them out.
Kind of, but I can't completely agree to this. There is circumvention work that went into these projects. Youtube has public, but "protected" endpoints, not exactly just open video streams.
> If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.
So your main issue is not Beeper Mini, but the surrounding situation and "activism" they are attempting to do? Based on your SSH comment it seemed like your main issue was unauthorized access.
> Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity.
If this is the main issue, then I think Aurora Store or microG are better exemples of currently existing similar apps. Revanced (and other unofficial yt clients that offer sign-in) I think should also qualify for this, and reddit clients with hacked in private API keys.
If you have a Mac sitting around, airmessage.org has made this work cross platform for a while now.
Edit: grammar.
Apparently AOL eventually "beat" MSN trying to reverse engineer their protocol by exploiting a known buffer overflow in their own implementation, and then MSN fumbled by trying to leak the security issue to put pressure on AOL but being too transparent in their manipulations and losing the PR battle that ensued.
I want a premium messaging experience on my iPhone, regardless of what the other party has. I do not want compressed images and videos, and as an end-user, it's bullisht that I have to figure out how to do that using 3rd party apps.
And as far as I know, you have to use the official WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp, same for Telegram, etc. etc. So apart from iMessage not being a monopoly, they are also not more restrictive than their competition.
So besides not matching with our "open" ideology for communication, what exactly has Apple done wrong here?
I've arrived at this position because I'm not able to use any of those platforms because they don't provide accessibility tools that I need. Beeper does, and most matrix clients do also.
I recognize that the open source "everything should be open" view is not remotely mainstream, but the only way forward is to demand better.
Throwing in my perspective: I largely agree with the DMA and think while iMessage was found not to be popular enough to qualify in Europe we should have something similar in place in the US and it certainly has enough penetration here to qualify under the same wording. I.e. I think we need something between "free rein" and "monopoly" for very large players which has practical effects on how you're required to interop.
Because it's the replacement for SMS for Apple phones and doesn't require an account in the same way those other services do. It just uses the Apple account iPhone owners already need to have.
Really? It's never insisted upon for any core service?
> You can also use SMS without iMessage.
But most people don't because it's the default. MS was found to have a monopoly with IE even though there were alternatives.
Windows also was the dominant operating system with a market share in the 90% or higher. iOS isn't even the market leader in the US let alone the world, so can't really be a monopoly now can it?
How can that not be true if most people in the US use an iPhone as their phone?
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/us-smartphone-...
This does as well:
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-smartphone-market-share
I would’ve been highly surprised if Samsung and Apple were head-to-head in the USA.
Apple has more than double the market share that Samsung does.
The EU considers any party that has more than 40% of market share to be in a dominant market position.
This isn't directly relatable to the USA, of course, but it shows that its far from "clear cut".
Have a great day.
You might need to qualify "core service" here, but no. Calls, SMS, MMS, internet all work fine without an account. You need an account to download apps from the app store, but that's a different argument. If you wanted to, there are various methods to load apps up without an account too (side loading via Xcode, MDM, etc).
Apple: We do not restrict who you can talk to on iPhone
Prosecutor: but the bubble is green and my friends won't talk to me :(
Also, Apple knows this. They know they'd lose that's why they are already ahead of this by announcing adoption of RCS in 2024.
How can anyone presume that Apple would stand some sort of ideological ground here? We literally have emails where Apple c-suits say that iMessages mistreating android benefits them and they don't want to fix this. This is such a clear case I don't understand how anyone can defend this.
Apple should bundle iMessage access for Android into iCloud's subscription and release an official Android app. Maybe some eyes from the DOJ will get that on Apple's roadmap (I can dream, right?).
> If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.
This entire society us upside down! Just because apple is big bad corp doesn't mean any issue against them is right!
Kudos to beeper but don't make this a legal thing against apple.
All I've heard is Apple "shut down" Beeper.
Previously, they did this by effectively having you sign-in to iCloud on a Mac system running in their datacenter. Handing over your iCloud password to a third-party obviously has security implications, even if you trust Beeper wont intentionally abuse it.
Recently, they had a new Beeper-Mini, that instead reversed-engineered the iMessage protocol and spoofed your Android phonenumber as being an Apple device. This allowed you to use iMessage without ever handing over your password to some remote server (although, still handing it over to a third-party application, and trusting it doesn't do something shady).
Beeper, for its part, has claimed this reverse-engineering falls under the protection of allowed exceptions for the purpose of interoperability. Apple has not yet made any legal claim one way or another, and instead just shutdown the method being used to gain access to iMessage from non-Apple devices.
Get the regulators to force Apple to open the front door for them.
I mean, it even makes sense, Youtube is more closer to a monopoly than iMessage is.
:-/