So Beeper is piggybacking off Apple’s servers that facilitate iMessages and is charging $1.99 per month to users and they thought Apple would be okay with this?
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.
Edit: grammar.
If you have a Mac sitting around, airmessage.org has made this work cross platform for a while now.
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.