Hacker News Reader

Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

This conversation has been had at length at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38576857

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.

View on HN

> The hacker spirit is about personal use. It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business

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.

> 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.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies

What hacking benefits are brought by the top 5 companies in this list?

> 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.

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".

Yeah honestly normally I’d probably support something like beeper, but they just give me bad vibes. They’re being painted as a scrappy startup but to me they seem like another bunch of get-rich-quick, move fast and break things “disruptor” types. Which, ironically, is what the hacker in hacker news has largely come to symbolize in my opinion. Apple has an established culture and history of not operating that way, to make matters worse. It’s “growth hacking” versus the only company that still understands polish, however monopolistic they may be.

Beeper has been around since 2020 and its primary product (now called beeper cloud) is an all-in-one chat application which supports many protocols from the same client, not just imessage. Even if imessage/beeper mini is the product generating discussion right now, beeper cloud has been the primary focus of their company since the start and beeper mini is just a recent tangent. They use matrix bridges as the backend and some of the devs now working for beeper were already working on the open source bridges which beeper now uses even before beeper the company existed. Beeper was the first organization (and one of the few it seems) to become a corporate sponsor of the matrix foundation, and they also routinely sponsor developers to work on the open source bridges that make up much of their infrastructure, even beyond the ones they hired on as staff.

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.

> interoperability is not impossibly hard

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

https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android

> Who ever argued it was?

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).

Hey if Beeper successfully parlays this into regulators forcing Apple to open up iMessage then I'll pay them on principle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com