Beeper's esoteric fix for iMessage access suggests why it's pushing politically
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There are a zillion messaging clients... Signal, Slack, Discord (all of them work on iPhone)... Sms is a protocol, iMessage works with that (it is connected to the network)...
As an aside, the old ATT phones were nearly indestructible. Everything that came after was a race to the bottom.
- Hush-a-Phone Corp v., United States[0], in which the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that AT&T could not prohibit the mechanical attachment of a device to its phones as long as the device did not damage AT&T's phone or its network
- The Carterfone decision[1], where the FCC allowed third-party devices to be electrically connected to AT&T's network as long as they did not damage the network
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...
+ This is NOT hardware attestation. It's simply using a combination of things such as serial number and other device identifiers to prove to Apple you own the device
+ Because it is not hardware attestation, in the future this process might be improved, if someone reverses/emulates the (purely software) algorithm "proving" you have that device. Then it would only be a matter of asking the user to input a serial number, once.
+ Hardware attestation is implemented in the protocol. However, the 2019 iMac does not have a T2, so this cannot be enforced for a while yet.
+ Beeper Mini still implements the rest of the iMessage stack on-device
But not as vanishingly small as the number of Android users who have a Mac user friend who will send them registration data every week.
I wish the iPhones weren't so crippled, but I guess that's what most users love about them? Shrug.
raises hand
Four of the six laptops I've carried in my adult life have been Apple products, from my college TiBook through my current work Macbook Air, and haven't carried an iPhone since the 3G.
I haven't felt the need to root my Android phones in a few years but I still sideload a few apps so as long as Apple restricts that iOS is in a disadvantaged position. I also have a lot of Bluetooth devices that use the standard serial port profile, which Apple restricts for some unknown reason, so all of those would have to be replaced by more complicated WiFi-based devices that speak proprietary protocols to their specific apps instead of widely supported standard protocols.
If I were starting fresh right now with no smartphone history I'd probably pick Apple but at this point the inertia is too strong.
Tablets on the other hand, Google half-ass pays attention every few years where Apple actually cares. I just use my tablet as a consumption appliance so the iPad is perfect.
Simple, they tell apple: Open up.
They don't have to care about any of the technical details. That's politics for you.
The iMessage service.
> If they write a rule that doesn’t specify technical details, it seems like the already existing functionality to send and receive SMS messages from the iMessage app would be sufficient.
The app is Messages.
And practically speaking, it’s a very small inconvenience to have to switch app when chatting to some friends. It even has some benefits, each of the apps will have fewer conversations to keep track of.
This really does make it sound like their initial block was literally hitting an anti-spam filter.
This also makes it sound even more like “we reverse engineered the netflix API, registered one netflix account and are selling access to it, plz help us politicians”
Right-o.
It sounds to me like Apple could break out Messages from SMS and then Messages would just be another competitor on the market like FB Messenger, whatever the fuck Google is running now, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.
FWIW Beeper's 'esoteric' fix is a gaping security hole. Their product relies on MITM and they're obviously not going to profit off of a minimal subscription fee if they're buying Apple hardware to make it happen.
XMPP still exists. Matrix exists now and is similarly an open protocol.
They've all silo'd up.
Element has government agencies as customers and lots of open source projects have Matrix rooms. Webex seems to still support XMPP federation. (No, I don't particularly like Webex either.) Are these the market leaders in chat? No, of course not. Do they get some use? They sure do.
Webex is a Cisco chat product that I think is mostly used by bigcorps. (Supposedly they have upwards of 10,000 employees on it, which feels crazy to me.)
Small players use open protocols and even sometimes federate because they're small, and that sort of thing can be seen as a feature that people might care about. Large players don't have to care. They already have enough users that they don't need to play nice with others. And that's where only legislation can change things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#St...
Why would people who don't pay Apple a dime have some right to look at public pictures hosted on iCloud Photos?
Perhaps Apple will find a way to charge for all three.
Please provision access ASAP, thank you.
But mining Bitcoin is quite different from routing messages anyway. That's a strained example. SMTP is a lot closer. And Apple will accept emails from Android, Linux or Windows systems just fine. HTTP is not as close, but still more so than Bitcoin.
I don't know why people try to make an argument that even Apple, as far as I can tell, is not making. They stick to their usual "protecting the user" line.
No they won’t, not unless the emails are addressed to an active iCloud user. That has paid them.
And you’re not sending it - you’re asking Apple to send it for you, and using their resources in the process. And, as you haven’t paid them a dime, they can rightly say no.
Just as you did when I asked to use your computer for crypto mining.
Feel free to say yes to that, but understand that while you say no you’re also understanding why apple says no.
I'm sorry, but why did any one waste any effort on this. If you know the tech, or the law, or a bit of both you would understand why this "letter" is a waste. SMS works, you have choice (Signal, not happy with them for cutting off sms). Apple seems to be locking beeper out of its servers, and that is their right.
Apple purposefully degrades major features of their chat app when SMS users are onboard. They will be adopting RCS, which will address a lot of this and probably take a lot of pressure off them.
When you have that much of a market, it becomes way more complicated than "their servers, their devices, their rules"
It's neither up to Google, nor should be left to them, to 'solve' this. We the people should be perfectly capable of telling Apple to do better without needing Google in our corner.
Either force all the companies to work together on a standard or stay hands off!
...Because I like their competitors, and not them? I don't really have any obligation to be even-handed.
In that case, why should Apple listen to you? You're not their customer. You've admitted that you don't like them as a company, so you'd never buy their products. They have no reason to listen to anything you say. Likewise for anyone who agrees with you (other people who don't like Apple or their products).
If you're hoping to get people who do like Apple products on your side, well, good luck with that. These people tend to be quite happy with their purchases, and happy with iMessage in general. I have no problems messaging Android users on my phone. It makes no difference whatsoever to me whether Apple releases iMessage for Android or not, so why should I put pressure on Apple to do that? I'd rather they put the effort into improving the products I use.
If apple were blocking Signal, or if apple screwed up SMS this might be a comparison.
> Apple purposefully degrades major features of their chat app when SMS users are onboard.
Does sms work? The iMessage features, and more so the ones that use their infra are their walled garden.... just because they are in the same app as SMS doesn't grant some magical right for any one to use them...
>>> When you have that much of a market, it becomes way more complicated than "their servers, their devices, their rules"
57 percent US 30 globally is not a moat, its first mover advantage, and its on a premium product. And if apple had 90%, and still allowed for Signal, and complied with SMS you would be hard pressed to get iMessage access to raise to the levels of the DOJ and anti trust measures.
> 57 percent US 30 globally is not a moat, its first mover advantage, and its on a premium product. And if apple had 90%, and still allowed for Signal, and complied with SMS you would be hard pressed to get iMessage access to raise to the levels of the DOJ and anti trust measures.
Those are still huge numbers and way more people using their product than microsoft had in the 90s.
I don't even think Apple needs to open iMessage, they just need to support RCS (which the EU is forcing them to do), and most complaints will go away.
Google and the carriers could have worked together to produce a non-terrible iMessage-style protocol, and could have released an iOS app that supported it. They chose not to do either of those things, and now they’re whining about the outcome.
You realize that limits on MMS attachments are handed down and enforced by the carriers and not Apple, right?
https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-14641/
https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018832773-Tw...
At any time in the past decade carriers could've solved pretty much everything RCS claims (and fails) to address with mature, standards based technology. But somehow this is an Apple problem? Give me a break.
I'm not talking about a "singular aspect". MMS supports read receipts, modern video codecs, proper group messaging, and reasonably sized attachments. These are all features that carriers decided not to implement. Your interoperability problems are an MMS implementation issue, nothing more.
Meanwhile RCS, which exists solely to monetize users, largely suffers the same fate as MMS even with the so-called Universal Profile. The solution for carriers in North America at least has been to buy into the Google stack.
Ergo your complaints can be summed up as: Apple sucks because telcos did a shit job with MMS because they haven't implemented Google's RCS.
From my perspective, Beeper's iMessage efforts feel wasted. It looks like Apple will roll out RCS next year. Yes, it won't be E2E encrypted initially, but if I'm trusting a third party app I'm kinda loosing that E2E anyway. I trust Beeper, but their app (or an update to it) could start reading the messages on my device and transmit them back to Beeper (or transmit back some profile built from the messages). It also seems likely that the GSM Association will work with Apple on encryption that isn't Google-based for RCS. It might take a couple years, but it seems likely that will happen.
I wish Beeper would focus its efforts where it feels like the big payoff would be. Instead, everyone is obsessed with blue bubbles like they're some sort of status symbol. Beeper has been wonderful for other services and it would be great to see them improve those capabilities even further. Instead, they seem to have pivoted to "omg, blue bubbles!" It's always possible that other services could similarly try and ban them, but Beeper hasn't seemed to have much trouble with the other services.
I don’t entirely disagree with your perspective, just want to point out that it’s not just about blue bubbles as a status symbol.