Beeper – Moving Forward
blog.beeper.com
blog.beeper.com
This was my feeling from the first time I saw it on HN. I am in the Apple ecosystem, so I had no need for it anyways, but I didn’t expect a product to last when it relies on Apple not restricting something they clearly want to restrict.
It clearly got them a lot of press, attention, and recognition. But also indicated, to me, that they are just not reliable.
The team seems very intelligent and capable. I truly hope they find something to do next that doesn’t rely on such a fragile bridge.
They (founders/team) will be fine. Young, ambitious, and now well-known.
What's next, are we going to call OSX the dominant OS platform lol
First of all, it's simply completely unaffordable in developing countries so you can't realistically consider them part of the market. In rural India, an iPhone 15 pro Max or whatever is more than a year of income for many.
Coming to countries like the us, studies show that among younger folks, apple's market share is close to 90% [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-rules-gen-z-nearly-90-...
The legal jargon surrounding what dominance is remains completely irrelevant, just like the legal system itself -- the punishments are pocket money for these companies, so it's mostly ceremony to keep lawyers employed.
But from a logical standpoint, they most certainly already are in many segments, and are coming to be in other segments.
I'm not sure this is the win you think it is ?
Androids 70% marketshare has been extremely stable over the past decade. That is the dominant platform, no qualifiers.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/why-teens-hate-androi...
We were using whatsapp before iPhone even came to my home country, and living in Ireland now, everyone seems to be using it here as well. In fact, I'll venture as far as saying /not/ having WhatsApp is considered weird and you will no doubt exclude yourself from a lot of spcial circles.
iMessage is an ecosystem perk for buying Apple hardware - it has no intrinsic revenue (and as shown in every one of these discussions, in many parts of the world is largely unused by iPhone buying customers).
Interoperability is a good thing. Apple has committed to supporting RCS and doing what Google never did, and bringing E2EE to the standard rather than bolting their own shit on, and limiting who can use that.
2. Apple has made it clear that they want iMessage to be an exclusive app and it works as intended; people are literally buying iPhones to use it.
A vast majority of WhatsApp users joined long after those two years
The only positive outcome from this endeavor is recognition, which they achieved.
People keep repeating this line .... but would Apple have allowed them to pay f or iMessage ? How much ? Would then Google be able to pay to access iMessage ?
I see no price or condition where Apple would have let anyone touch their walled garden. Free or not has never been an element of the conversation.
I'd say yes, even if Apple can't separate them from the other problematic accesses.
This is ridiculous. It's like comcast restricting or charging people for emailing customers with a comcast address.
Remember apple's cutomers might WANT to receive the messages others are sending.
I would like apple to allow chats to be exported. They kind of let you export photos and videos, but not chats, which also include photos and videos.
I know people who have chats with their (dead) loved ones who have lost everything when they lost or broke their phone.
photos and videos and notes you can bulk download from https://privacy.apple.com/ - like google takeout, takes several days before they mail you a link to the zip.
https://github.com/beeper/imessage/blob/2c45fc5619cbc33f2441...
Since there are many projects apparently using this name, for anybody else like me wanting to search it up, it's the proof of work one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Why is this something we should want? And what gives Samsung and/or Google any sort of high ground position against Apple?
Everywhere else you'll have people on Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram and FB Messenger. I don't have a single friend in the UK or Europe that uses SMS or iPhone messages.
The default message app is basically just a spam bucket for automated texts and 2FA codes.
You can make of that what you will based on your world view. In my opinion, it is absolutely a slight negative to overcome. Tall +10 points. Fun cool car +5 points. Android -3 points.
The truth is, once the newness wears off, even when you're tall, the android will be used against you eventually by most women.
I’m 2 years older than you, and it is frankly astounding and depressing that in your description of how women “view you”, it’s all superficial and materialistic factors.
Maybe if you dated women who care more about your personality and less about what brand phone you use, you’d have more fulfilling relationships?
The whole point of having reactions as a separate thing from messages is that they don't distract from the conversation. Sending "X Liked: 'Y'" to every Android user for every iMessage user who likes something makes the iPeople look like a bunch of buffoons who don't know how to read the room and want everybody to know that they have an iPhone, when actually they're just trying to communicate.
Apple is savvy enough to have avoided that situation if they wanted to, so you gotta conclude that it's part of the plan.
For instance, tapbacks (from Android users even) come through as foo liked bar on Google Voice. You gotta conclude that it's part of the plan.
Superficial/materialistic people existed before smart phones existed. Then, just as now, the key is to avoid dating people who care more about what you have than who you are.
To be honest, you sound a lot like the retired old white boys who move to Thailand, use their relative wealth to attract a young woman, and then spend the next 30 years complaining to anyone who will listen how "Thai women are only interested in your wallet".
Edit: to clarify a point I think maybe you misunderstood in my original comment:
When I said it's astounding and depressing, I was referring to the idea that someone essentially my own age hasn't yet learnt/accepted that there are people in the world who will like you for you, regardless of what you have, be it money, a car, or a particular brand of phone.
You're saying materialistic women always existed. Sure. And I'm arguing the women raised under social media are even more materialistic about visible things than women 20-30 years ago. If you don't think that a girls entire lifelong social circle being able to see glimpses into her and her bfs financial expenditures (cars, restaurant quality, vacations, clothes) and their quality and frequency of purchase makes women more image conscious, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I think women care more about indicators of casual spending ability than they ever did, and the wrong color texting dot is an easy constant reminder of "this guy is a bit cheap" to them.
I do just fine playing the cheap guy. Thank God I'm tall and ok looking. I drive a 2001 Silverado 4x4 Single Cab short bed on dates, and a Chevy volt day to day. They love the truck. They don't love the android. My Google pixel 4xl cost about half of what an iPhone did. My truck now costs $7k maybe since it's nice still. A new bmw costs $45-60k. So it's not just pure money.
I think in their mind using an android is like driving an old BORING car. It's not the cheapness or age, it's mostly the boring. They're probably wondering why I don't want to just fit in and have something nicer since it only costs $500 extra vs an android (even if that's not true always).
And I'm trying to tell you that it's because you're a late-30s man dating twenty-something year old girls you can "impress" with a car.
You're self-selecting for the type of personality you're "not complaining" about.
And yeah I've done the dating app thing and have friends in their 20s. One even whipped out her iPhone and promptly asked if I used Signal.
There have been studies that showed that women appreciation of men change when getting clues about the men wealth. That small, going bald 45y old guy will be considered unattractive without any clue. Mentionning he is a reputable dentist living in a fancy area he becomes charming or even cute. The younger and more athletic guy who was topping the chart will go down severly we it is mentionned he work as a car mechanic.
And it is the same with men with other factors. Men will have a hard time engaging with women that can present too smart and will often "target" women that act in a way that make you think their intellectual capabilities are lower.
And both men and women play with those when interacting with strangers of the opposite gender.
It is only with time spent with people that we overcome some of these basic signals and preconceptions about people, reason why we very often end up having long relationship with people we don't meet randomly in a dancefloor, dating app but rather colleagues/ex-colleagues, business partners, friends of relatives with which we interact a number of times before actually start dating.
Very true. Who can forget that groundbreaking study[1] conducted by Kanye West nearly two decades ago?
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Digger_(Kanye_West_song...
Hello from GrapheneOS, where I can run any Linux tool I like via nix-on-droid and where google services have to ask for my permission before they so much as sneeze.
Apple would never tolerate such a thing in iOS.
Google is evil in their own way, but not in this way.
GrapheneOS is very cool, but it’s a significant tradeoff for people (having the sufficient knowhow, also I prefer the iphone’s better hardware capabilities).
So by default, an iphone will be the most secure and privacy-friendly solution for the vast majority of the population, not violating their users’ data at every stop (as is done by google/huawei on the other side).
Regardless, I have seen the majority of iPhone users use apps such as Instagram, so I don't think privacy plays a big part in their decision when buying a device.
Also, don't equate Google and Huawei together, one collects data to sell you ads, whereas the other is a state sponsored spy organisation.
I do think it's good that at least some of us are more worried about protecting users from vendors instead of about who the vendors are allegedly protecting users from.
Playtime is over, beeper was always gonna get squashed and apple played it incredibly well without turning it into more of a legal fight than they needed to.
There are zero (0) services that are going to tolerate a third-party commercial service spoofing device credentials to get into a service that is very obviously not offered in the form they are offering. Discord will ban you for using Revanced too, even more aggressively than apple.
Just imagine being some YC startup and some other service thinks they can use your email servers for spam and sues when you close an accidentally open relay lmao. It’s a facially absurd case when you remove it from the “apple bad” fervor surrounding every single apple article. Nobody is going to tolerate commercial third party operators using their infra for revenue operations.
“Well they should have to too and —“ let me stop you there - no. Do you want open spam relays? That’s how you get open spam relays. Even with beeper it’s always been about the wave of spam that is going to be unleashed for the other legitimate users of the service. Spam as a service on other people’s infra is bad actually.
It is, again, exactly that simple. It would be an absurd case if it were anyone besides apple but the unthinking hatred of android users is just that intense. All you can see is the carrot, and you really don’t care about the consequences or the precedent, this is an absurdly bad idea/argument. But that’s how android users react on every apple topic. It gets old. Open spam relays are not a good thing even if it means you stick it to apple.
Imagine saying google has to run an open smtp relay just because they’re a gatekeeper. If somehow you managed to spoof googles server into thinking you were a google relay and started selling access to this as a commercial product they’d ban your ass too, in a literal heartbeat, but because of the constant unthinking bleating of the android fanboys it’s somehow an issue that needs to be discussed. No, you can’t do that and it it wouldn’t be a good thing if you could. Why is that even a question? Literally I am asking, why is that a legitimate thing anyone would ever argue other than blinding levels of fanboydom?
It’s so noxious, it’s every damn apple thread. The value of green bubbles as a social filter has become very apparent to me after a number of these apple threads. I didn’t think that way before but I do now, there is another reason y’all ain’t getting invited to those chats.
(Oops, naughty naughty, only green bubbles get to make sly little digs about the other sort.)
But also, it's rather ironic that you brought up email, given that this is a widely successful open protocol where random third parties connect to the server (thereby consuming resources by their email provider, the horror!) to deliver an email to the user. I'm really glad that fundamental protocols like these were developed before this kind of thinking became widespread; at least now we get to enjoy having somewhat open Internet for a little while longer.
Companies generally are against this, but if a company picked up beeper code to profit off of "imessage support on android"... The yardstick would be closer to open standards.
If you're against walled gardens you also have to be against all the obstacles Google and Samsung have planted. Why shouldn't Apple users make free use of Google maps without paying Google (in privacy)? Why can't every person access the advertising data collected by these companies?
If the answer is "companies invest a lot of money to make these products possible" why is iMessage different?
Okay, let's be against those too.
Apple doesn’t charge for iMessage. It is a service offered strictly to users of Apple devices.
The Apple model where you buy expensive hardware and get exclusive software in the package?
The Microsoft model where you buy software and are still treated like a freeloading advertisement consumer?
Or the Google/Facebook model where you're not paying anything and the companies try to digest your entire life for the support of marketing departments?
How about the Signal model, where you get a free messaging app with published source code that runs on multiple platforms without trying to lock you into any of them, and its modest operating expenses are paid from donations to a nonprofit?
Or the Linux model, where a minority of users with the resources or technical capacity to make improvements are given the opportunity to do so, resulting in free software that anyone else can use too, and anyone could fork if the existing maintainers became abusive?
Or the Substack model, where you pay money for a service with no ads on it?
Huge dominant conglomerates being abusive is not unexpected. But why do we need huge dominant conglomerates? Let them cease to be.
https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush
They modified it with their own touch.
not to the priesthood of course
As a corollary, the Unreal engine source is on GitHub, but that doesn't make it open source.
It's strictly disingenuous to call SSPL open source (I personally believe it's disingenuous to call AGPL open source but I digress)
You can't build a business on a hacky work around. And being centralized gives apple an edge in responding.
Some businesses were built on hacks. Airbnb is the prime example where a huge percentage of listings out in the open were illegal, but the adversary there was government so slow to respond. And I think Plaid basically scraped data using user credentials which was obv insecure and against terms of use. But again, banks aren't super agile and the UI isn't exactly a huge value add. Regardless, not a great business model
YouTube doesn't control anything about the endpoint which it is streaming video to, it just has control over how their servers respond to different requests
But Apple does control both ends.
you can argue antitrust statute should be expanded or changed, but there's no reasonable case as things stand.
Here's a case from 1962: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/. Note in particular the basis under which it was determined that the company in question is in a market-dominant position.
To some extent all of this Beeper Mini stuff seems to be almost an elaborate marketing stunt. I don't say that to diminish the impressive work of the team of anything like that, but it seems self-evident that Apple would hate this and I've been a bit surprised by the tone of the company throughout the past few weeks. The tone feels a bit like they've been surprised by Apple's response?
With all of that said, I'm kind of selfishly happy they seem to be returning their focus to Beeper Cloud. I've been a very happy user of it for a while now and I don't particularly care about the iMessage functionality.
I'm very impressed with what they've been able to achieve and overcome when taking on Apple here, and I'm really interested in where they'll go next.
So I'll say that I get where you're coming from, but also, I believe him and Brad!
Everything else came out of their pockets or from the super early customers who paid before launch, before they started offering their service for free.
In case you're unaware, these folks made Pebble. Their finances are probably fine.
Some people said it was 4D chess, a brilliant marketing ploy, but after 3-4 iterations I think we can all agree that was not the case. They genuinely believed that Beeper Mini would fly.
There is nothing sinister about being deluded, as a startup founder you might say it's a prerequisite. But nonetheless, they are.
I agree that they believed in Beeper Mini being a reasonable strategy, I'm not contesting that. It definitely wasn't just marketing, they really wanted to bring iMessage to everyone.
But I don't see how Beeper (or the other parts of Beeper Mini) are a delusion. Having a close-enough interface to all of the relevant chat networks is great. It works well and is relatively sustainable, especially if you're targeting the least common denominator of features plus a couple additional things.
iMessage isn't the reason I use Beeper. It's a very cool feature, but I paid for Beeper before I figured out how to register my phone number with iMessage, and I'd still have done so even if I never used iMessage at all.
A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan discusses this a bit, not Musk and Bezos, but the cost of exploring space and his hope that space exploration was finally what would bring various nation states and humanity together. The irony is not lost on me that instead of bringing humanity and democracy to space, we instead brought back kings.
There’s less people in poverty than there ever has been in human history. Even with ongoing global conflicts, the world is still existing in one of the most peaceful times in human history. Could we do better? Of course. Are some people left out? Definitely. Humans as a whole are relatively young however, and we’re still figuring things out.
> Space represents new territory to conquer.
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”
~ Carl Sagan
What is there to conquer in infinity..? The idea that space is new territory to conquer is more of a reflection of the state of humanity than actual reality.
> Smartphones aren't being used as the windows into global enlightenment, but more so as a means to spread hate and misinformation in manners that benefit the powers that be.
This is true, that said, smartphones have also empowered people to learn new languages, collaborate on Wikipedia, and share lives across space and time. It’s easy to get lost in the noise of everything humanity does wrong. That’s only because no one is talking about what humanity does right.
> Any of these things are relatively agnostic and still hold promise for the optimistic, but humanity needs a lot of growth for those dreams to be realized.
It is my hope that humanity never stops growing and learning how to better itself.
~ William Gibson (The Economist, December 4, 2003)
I don't think their expressed surprise is legitimate, but is instead a rhetorical choice to make Apple seem unreasonable.
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/beeper-mini-brings-imessage...
[2]: https://www.threads.net/@jolingkent/post/C0-zKSPrizx
[3]: https://www.droid-life.com/2023/12/18/lawmakers-suggest-doj-...
Beeper put them between a rock and a hard place, where any action other than accepting Beeper would solicit regulatory action. This in fact ended up happening.
Furthermore, I bet Beeper was outright hoping for a lawsuit from Apple, which would put up a well-publicized fight over adversarial interoperability that could yield to a disastrous legal precedent not just for Apple but other companies.
Apple knows this and that's why they haven't sued them (or DMCA'd any repos).
Doubtful. Beeper has several legitimate causes of action to bring their own suit, if they really expect that outcome (and more importantly, if they have the financial resources to litigate)
However, the regular pattern we've seen is that companies use copyright and/or ToS as basis for C&D'ing (with threat of litigation) developers that produce adversarily-interoperable solutions.
If Apple did so (and Apple would've absolutely done it if Beeper wasn't a reasonably well-funded adversary), Beeper would suddenly have an argument, as well as the support of the media ("Apple sues small company for opening up iMessage to Android") and the potential to establish a legal precedent that would threaten not just Apple but the tech industry at large.
However, it's a common pattern that large companies can shut down adversarially-interoperable projects by threatening litigation against the developers. The lawsuit might be baseless but would still require upfront resources to defend; this is what these companies rely on, so they get their way without the argument ever getting into a courtroom.
If Apple brought forward such a lawsuit and Beeper actually litigated it to the end (and actually got it into a courtroom), it would risk creating a legal precedent that would enshrine adversarial interoperability as legal and make such future bullshit legal threats ineffective. That is a major risk not just for Apple but the tech industry at large.
However, it seems that Beeper effectively got what they wanted (bipartisan calls for regulatory action against Apple, and lots of media coverage over the issue) without any lawyers being involved.
Media attention, yes. Policy support, no.
Beeper could definitely be prosecuted by the Feds.
Aaron Swartz is probably the most famous example of someone being prosecuted using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was merely accessing a web server without permission and wasn't even trying to turn a profit.
There are many instances of "adversarial interoperability" (somebody else already mentioned screen scraping of online banking for budget management tools already in a different thread), and I haven't seen the CFAA being thrown at the responsible parties all that often.
I'd be quite curious to see precedent being set here, but I doubt it'll happen. Apple has much more to lose than to gain from that:
They can play cat and mouse on the tech side as long as they want, but with all the attention and scrutiny of a lawsuit, I could see a small chance of Apple ending up having to open up their service for interoperability.
If they're willing to prosecute some kid who wasn't even trying to make a profit off of his access to a web server, why wouldn't they prosecute a company for trying to sell hacked access to someone else's servers?
Also, there have been many prosecutions under this law. Aaron's case is just the most infamous example.
Beeper is trying to use an api to send message to users. They are not getting nor trying to get shell access to apple servers.
Beeper intent is to serve both Apple customers and non Apple customers to exchange messages securely. Its goal is interoperability, not stealing, or blindly using resources it doesn't own.
The intent is to sell hacked access to somebody else's servers.
If I sell hacked access to Microsoft's Office 365 servers, I can claim to have any motivations I like. It's still a crime.
"Should we allow a third party we have no control over to man-in-the-middle our end-to-end encrypted messaging service or not? This is a tough one!"
You also don't have to trust Beeper because you are not obliged to use it. You are welcome to not use it (and buy an Apple device) or even fall back to SMS.
The recipient can themselves decide what level of security they want and whether they trust Beeper (but they don't need Beeper to compromise their security - they can just as well post screenshots of your E2E-encrypted messages with them, make a backup on a compromised computer or leak their Apple/iCloud credentials).
Do you actually believe these things you're claiming, or are you arguing for the sake of contrarianism?
E-mail can be end-to-end encrypted; you can use PGP (of which there are multiple implementations, all compatible) or some other custom cryptographic protocol. Having multiple compatible implementations does in no way prevent it from being secure.
> FTP and SSH are client-server protocols whereas iMessage is client-server(s)-client.
I don't understand how iMessage and FTP are different? Both have a server which mediates communication between different clients. The FTP server accepts & persists files which other clients then see and can download. The iMessage server does something similar but with messages.
> Do you actually believe these things you're claiming
Yes? I believe every person should have the right to choose which software they use to interact with services, whether it's first-party, third-party, or their own creation. I don't know nor care which browser you're using to read & reply to my comments and shouldn't have a say it in in any case - whatever happens on your machine is your own business only.
I don't understand what is so extreme about my position? It's like arguing that being able to open & create Microsoft Office files in anything but a Microsoft-approved version is heresy.
SMS can be end-to-end encrypted; you can use PGP.
>I don't understand how iMessage and FTP are different?
If I get a new iPhone and set it up without restoring it from a backup and I have NOT opted into "Messages in iCloud" (I personally have not), then my entire iMessage history is unavailable to me on my new iPhone.
>I believe every person should have the right to choose which software they use to interact with services
Then you also believe that forgoing E2E encryption is an acceptable tradeoff for exercising that freedom.
>I don't understand what is so extreme about my position?
It's not that your position is extreme, it's that you don't seem to understand the consequences of that position.
Ok, the difference between an FTP server and the iMessage server is that iMessage only buffers the messages for a few hours (until delivered) where as FTP server would persist it for longer. That's completely irrelevant in this case though - both operate as a temporary storage space to which multiple clients owned by different parties connect to, and I still don't understand why it should be acceptable to connect a third-party client to one but not the other?
> Then you also believe that forgoing E2E encryption is an acceptable tradeoff for exercising that freedom.
If there was some technical reason why E2E wasn't possible then sure, but there's none - as both GnuPG, browsers, SSH clients, XMPP, and Beeper all demonstrate, a third-party client can just as well implement an E2E protocol, and the only reason we can't have that with iMessage is because it would compromise Apple's vendor lock-in.
> it's that you don't seem to understand the consequences of that position
Which are? I still don't understand how Beeper being out there affects me negatively as an Apple user? Even if we assume Beeper actually had some security vulnerabilities and was literally sending message contents in plain unencrypted form over an untrusted network, it still wouldn't be any worse than texting those people via SMS, which is unencrypted by design?
> Plenty of places will suspend your account if discovered you have done this.
Plenty of services base their business on restricted interoperability and suspend your account not because of security but because they'd miss out on all the "engagement" they get from the official client. This has nothing to do with security.
This isn't rocket science.
And yet that's not the route Apple chose to take.
Someone recently really tried to get me to use Chime. As soon as the "must use Plaid" part came up in their onboarding, I stopped immediately. It's just a shame that I had already provided Chime so much of my information just to stop there.
That's absolutely not what's happening, and I think Beeper's response here was totally correct.
There is no encryption, at all, between iOS and Android clients if the iOS user is using iMessage. And, furthermore, my understanding is that the presence of a single Android user in a group chat means nobody gets an encrypted messaging experience.
In the past, Apple's response to this has literally been "Buy your grandmother an iPhone". How can anyone not call incredible amounts of bullshit when their response to a company that actually let, for the first time, an Android user have an encrypted conversation with an iOS user as "This is unacceptable, we can't allow this" and claim it's because Apple cares about user security???
Not enough BS chutzpah in the universe for that one.
One of the primary benefits of end to end encryption is that it can protect messages from an untrusted carrier. In other words, a proper encrypted messaging setup is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks
> Using native chat apps independently may be more secure than connecting to other encrypted chat networks with Beeper Cloud.
https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...
Please tell me more about how Beeper can't be used as a MiTM for E2E encrypted networks like Signal.
I appreciate you pointing out specifically what the problem was rather than just repeating that it was insecure, rather than how, and admit what I said was, as far as I now know, wrong
That said, what are the odds that Apple would accept a solution that was encrypted on-device? If this were feasible, would Apple still block the interoperation with their network, and do we agree on whether they'd be wrong to?
I think the main issue I see with iMessage that this highlights is that it's presented in a way that's deceptive to its users, and thus might give them a false sense of security in their messaging. An interoperating client on android is a band-aid for this problem at best, but it's a weird move to block it. I guess for now there's the plausible deniability of what appears to be a real issue though. The way Apple's messaging has addressed it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because they do not make clear that what you point out is the issue
We probably agree that the odds hover just above 0%
>would Apple still block the interoperation with their network, and do we agree on whether they'd be wrong to?
We could agree in principle that they would be wrong to, _if_ there were a clear path to continuously verifying that a third party client is behaving above board. Unfortunately that's just not the case. AFAIUI, this is still an intractable issue with encrypted communications. Is it an impossible problem? Probably not, but the amount of sustained effort this would require from Apple (and the 3rd parties) seems unworkable. So given that reality (I think), I don't think Apple are wrong to disallow third party clients for their E2E encrypted service.
>The way Apple's messaging has addressed it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because they do not make clear that what you point out is the issue
Yeah, I don't disagree here. I can only say that this is par for the course when it comes to Apple's PR. They would basically never explicitly state that their E2E encrypted service is at risk of a MiTM attack due to third party clients. Instead we will get very generic language and be left to fill in the blanks ourselves.
Beeper Mini was a completely self-contained app that implemented the iMessage protocol on-device and did not use bridges. Its only optional cloud component was a push notification bridge that wasn't actually given the E2E keys (the cloud proxy would receive your messages but not be able to decrypt them, instead it just sends a push to wake up your device which will fetch and decrypt them).
That is unless we’re talking about Beeper being the defendant.
They have incurred criminal liability by violating the CFAA and committing computer trespass and civil liability by violating the the OS license agreement and ToS that both prohibit reverse engineering (yes that supersedes DMCA exception) not to mention the general copyright violations of reselling Apple’s IP for $2/mo (pypush isn’t without proprietary Apple code).
CCIPS would have a field day with this and if by some weird “blow up in your face fashion” they get their hands on the referral after the antitrust division of the DOJ is done shrugging at it, Beeper might get more than they bargained for.
The only thing that could actually affect Apple in this, is if legislators pass new bills. The problem however is that this would have cascading effects across the industry, if not the economy as a whole, because there’s no way to legislate this in such a way that it would only affect Apple and Apple alone.
Anything short of that makes for a fun fantasy that I’m sure some people will get off on, but a fantasy nonetheless.
Beeper has managed to get enough media coverage on this issue that any litigants will need to consider before bringing any suits, including attention from legislators themselves who are calling for antitrust investigation. That's no small feat and suggests Apple may not be on as solid footing as you think.
And I’m not very impressed by US legislators in any context, they’re politicians first and foremost, ones that are always 2-4 years away from elections.
Maybe, if LE is unable to connect the dots, explain how it was done so the prosecution can explain it well.
But it’s significantly less intrusive than a civil case where a lot of discovery is involved.
a) How Beeper thought they had a business model here
b) How so many HN readers can justify flagrant misuse of private API's and servers as some sort of liberatory move
Apple's iMessage service is a privately owned, privately hosted, closed source protocol and always has been. You are not allowed to use it without an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac and you never have been allowed to use it otherwise. That's just... what it is. You can dislike that, you can think it's anti-competitive and you might even have a case for it, I guess we'll see, but insofar as I can see it:
iMessage is a closed source, walled garden, private protocol Apple uses to permit a higher tier of text messaging for owners of iDevices. There is no reason at all to think you're entitled to access that service without using the aforementioned devices, and there's even less reason to be surprised in the slightest that, when a company was offering services to bypass those requirements and use the API without meeting Apple's requirements, that Apple would shut that shit right down.
What about for those who do own an Apple device and thus paid the "tax" to use iMessage, but want/need to use it on unapproved devices out of convenience? The argument would be very different if Apple merely restricted the service to Apple IDs associated to a valid Apple device purchase, but that's not what they're doing. They're clearly not making the cost/resource usage argument otherwise it would be trivial for them to implement such a restriction.
> There is no reason at all to think you're entitled to access that service without using the aforementioned devices
Would you also apply that argument to Microsoft Office files? Microsoft would sure love it if it would be forbidden to create/edit such files in anything but Microsoft software. Would you also want LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Apple's very own Pages/Numbers/Keynote to not be able to read such files?
You'd probably be told no, that you can only access it via Apple's devices. Your options there are to access it via approved devices or use a different service. You cannot arbitrarily bypass requirements to use it how you want to use it and expect Apple to just organizationally shrug their shoulders.
> The argument would be very different if Apple merely restricted the service to Apple IDs associated to a valid Apple device purchase, but that's not what they're doing.
That's correct. They only want their hardware and software on all ends of this traffic. That is not inherently unreasonable or anti-competitive and is likely spelled out in the terms of service.
> Would you also apply that argument to Microsoft Office files? Microsoft would sure love it if it would be forbidden to create/edit such files in anything but Microsoft software. Would you also want LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Apple's very own Pages/Numbers/Keynote to not be able to read such files?
I think it would be a bad decision on the part of Microsoft to attempt that, as the file formats are already supported by other software and artificially restricting them to only Microsoft apps would only serve to drive users to Libre/Open office, but ultimately having proprietary file formats that are crypto-graphically secured is also not without precedence and also not inherently anti-competitive. At my current employer we sell specialized software for maintaining machinery, and our files are locked right down because that's how we make our money: the ability to open, save, and utilize our files is our entire business model so you're damn right it's secured. That's not anti-competitive either: if you don't like how we do our business, you are free to use a competitor's product. What you're not free to do is crack open our software and use it anyway.
Edit: I'm being rate limited:
> This is closer to a Telcom/Basic Utility law issue
No, it isn't, because iMessage is not the only way to text on an iPhone. It degrades gracefully into full compliance with SMS/MMS protocols to allow it to text Androids, Blackberries, or flip phones.
> and is the default way to text message on this "basic utility" platform
No it is not, SMS/MMS is. If your iPhone is in a particularly bad data area, it will also SMS other iPhones absent it's ability to contact the iMessage service.
> Interoperability should be a given
IT IS.
Is it really used by more than half in Europe? Obviously anecdotal, but I have never encountered it. Almost everyone is on WhatsApp/Telegram/FB messenger or some other non-SMS based app.
Corporate policies aren't absolute. It doesn't matter if a provider dislikes the manner in which it's services are used if that use is found to be protected by law, which is obviously what Beeper is hoping for.
Obviously the formats have already been reverse-engineered long ago. But the world you describe and wish for, such reverse-engineering would be illegal, thus those formats would never have been reversed & implemented in third-party software.
> our files are locked right down because that's how we make our money
If your client software is able to open the files then it means the key must be on the user's computer (in your application binary?) or fetched at runtime over the internet and a user can technically make their own software to obtain this key and decrypt the file.
> What you're not free to do is crack open our software and use it anyway.
What if the user pays for your software (and its implicit access to any online key server that serves the cryptographic keys) but instead uses their own replica that mimics this software? That's what's happening when an Apple device owner (having paid for access to iMessage) decides to use Beeper. Both you and Apple still make money in this case. Should this still be illegal?
> you are free to use a competitor's product
I'm not sure what the nature of your product is, but this gets murky if your product relies on proprietary file formats or centralized services like iMessage. In this case, using a competitor would be inconvenient or might be outright impossible if everyone else is using this software and expects you to be able to open their files or interoperate with them.
Why should we allow arbitrary roadblocks to interoperability that don't accomplish anything beyond strengthening monopolies and restricting end-user choice and convenience? It would be fair if Apple argued for a reasonable fee to allow iMessage access to non-Apple-device owners but they've never made such argument.
Again, you and most critics are keeping your examples and your metaphors solely isolated to your phone, your device, your computer and this is not the case. iMessage chats are not peer-to-peer, they reside on a platform which Apple pays to host and operate. You are not just using your device, you are using their devices too via the API.
No examples put forth in your comment or other comments are grappling with this reality. The iMessage API doesn't call other Apple devices, it calls Apple's servers, and Apple owns those servers and is within their rights to dictate how they are used. Every photo sent, every live photo, video, voice message, all are hosted and archived forever until the user deletes them on Apple's servers. That in and of itself is, in my mind, justification to restrict the service's use to their own devices.
We'll assume it's still a single person using it, thus whether they use it on Apple or Android, the amount of messages sent shouldn't increase (they'd just be spread across the two devices) and server load should thus remain constant.
Would it be a problem? You're coming back to the idea of cost but not only are those costs negligible but Apple has never made any argument about it even though Beeper was open to paying a reasonable fee.
> it calls Apple's servers, and Apple owns those servers and is within their rights to dictate how they are used
Should websites then also be allowed to dictate that your browser should not run an ad-blocker, should accept (and persist!) cookies and not run a VPN? I'm sure websites would indeed love that but I think we'd both agree this would be a very sad day for the internet if this became law?
I think the control stops at the protocol. Apple is welcome to change their proprietary, undocumented protocol as they see fit, but people should also be free to reverse-engineer and implement clients for it. As long as the client perfectly mimics the official one (including proving any eventual purchase, using an Apple ID associated with an Apple purchase or the serial number of an Apple device the user purchased) there should be no legal/moral reason it should be rejected.
If explicitly forbidden in the terms of service? Yes. The ToS act as your contract with Apple to make use of the service. Violation of the terms of service terminates your access to the service. If you want to stand up your own mimic'd Apple servers then you're free to do that, but you are not free, again, to change the rules set forth by Apple to use Apple's services. I don't understand why you keep returning to this question.
> Should websites then also be allowed to dictate that your browser should not run an ad-blocker, should accept (and persist!) cookies and not run a VPN?
All sorts of websites have all sorts of requirements to use them off certain VPNs, without ad-blockers, and with cookies. Tons of websites simply stop functioning if some or any of those conditions are true for your browser.
> I'm sure websites would indeed love that
They do.
> but I think we'd both agree this would be a very sad day for the internet if this became law?
What do you mean become law? The ability for an online service to not provide functionality if you do not concede to their requirements is so benign as to be barely worthy of note. Apple included! Apple has been "excluding" Android from iMessage since 2011!
> I think the control stops at the protocol. Apple is welcome to change their proprietary, undocumented protocol as they see fit, but people should also be free to reverse-engineer and implement clients for it.
I mean, you are! They did! And then Apple found them, and made changes to their protocol that bricked what they made. That is the most likely outcome for this and any subsequent adventures along the same path.
> As long as the client perfectly mimics the official one (including proving any eventual purchase, using an Apple ID associated with an Apple purchase or the serial number of an Apple device the user purchased) there should be no legal/moral reason it should be rejected.
Because it's their platform and their right to reject it and I'm not going to rehash this point again.
From what I got from this news cycle, if this was the case and beeper mini just made you use your apple device's "hardware token" this would never have been an issue and apple would not have locked down their use.
The thing Apple blocked was hundreds to thousands of users using the same "hardware token" which means beeper mini, probably rightfully for UX reasons, didn't want Apple customers doing this but it would also gate a feature to only Apple device owners.
So if beeper mini had actually just used your Apple device's "hardware token" and only offered the feature to Apple device owners then likely all this never happens and Apple devices owners would in fact have the benefit.
It’s the only way to get an encrypted message into a user’s iMessage inbox, and iMessage is, unchangeably, the only possible default messaging app on an iPhone—the only one you can use from Contacts and so on.
IMO if you could completely substitute WhatsApp (or whatever) for iMessage on iPhones to the point of being able to delete iMessage completely, I actually bet a lot of the handwringing over iMessage being closed would go away. It also feels to me (IANAL) like that’s part of the anticompetitiveness. Apple uses its dominance in phones to establish dominance in messaging apps. Beeper is trying to force the messaging app (iMessage) itself open, but a world where everyone is just deleting iMessage and replacing it with Beeper, as Apple is required to allow them to do, would probably be fine with them too.
True.
> and iMessage is, unchangeably, the only possible default messaging app on an iPhone—the only one you can use from Contacts and so on.
You kind of lost me here.
The Messages app is the default app on iPhone that handles both SMS/MMS and the iMessage protocol. So it goes without saying that it’s the only way to get get an encrypted message into a user’s “iMessage” inbox.
But it’s not the only one you can use from the Contacts app, nor is the only one you can use with Siri or the only one that pops up in the share sheet or the only one that you can use with CarPlay or the only one that you can receive notifications from or the only one that can ring your phone (if you want to count FaceTime as part of iMessage), etc, etc.
The Messages app, which supports iMessage, is the only app that can receive SMS/MMS via the cellular network. That’s pretty much the only limitation.
Other than that, there’s pretty much complete feature parity with iMessage in terms of native access, available should the third party messaging service want to implement it (and many do).
Take WhatsApp for example. WhatsApp will show up as an option in under contacts[0], WhatsApp message notifications will be read by Siri if you wear AirPods, use Siri to send messages and even set which default messaging app to use[1], have WhatsApp pop up as a suggestion in share sheets[2], and so on.
0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46422640/how-iphone-cont... this was 6 years ago, it’s now much more sleeker and you can set a default messaging service, but I couldn’t be bothered to upload a screenshot
1: https://i0.wp.com/9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/202...
2: https://wabetainfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WA13_Share...
For contrast, Android lets users use third party texting apps, remove the default messaging app, have all “message”-oriented actions open the app of your choice, etc. Apple, I claim, does not support this because it means that every iPhone user is also an iMessage user. But iMessage is a social network (a la WhatsApp), and a separate product.
So that I better understand your position, would you feel differently if Beeper Mini was just a GitHub repo hosting the code to an unofficial 3rd party iMessage client? Why or why not?
HN as a community is made up of quite a few people who care about interoperability, the right to use our computers as we see fit, the joy of building solutions to solve problems that other people won’t solve, etc.
What is surprising to me is the growing number of comments that are defending Apple and framing the creation of an unofficial 3rd party client using terms like “flagrant misuse”.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect Apple not to fight this, but I think we need to walk back the hyperbole a bit and consider how utterly normal it is for developers to try to build their own clients when the official options either suck or are too restrictive.
I do think that trying to charge for the service was a questionable decision.
I mean, I think using that code would be a risky proposition at best that might earn you as a user the ire of Apple, and I wouldn't personally do it, but ultimately, showing people how to do a thing, or even providing the executable I don't think itself is a crime.
That said, I would also not be remotely surprised if Apple figured out how to block it's access to it's API's too. And, if there is money involved or if the breach is egregious enough in some other way, I don't think it would be altogether unexpected for the authors to find themselves in some legal hot water too, and/or for Github to receive a takedown notice.
> HN as a community is made up of quite a few people who care about interoperability, the right to use our computers as we see fit, the joy of building solutions to solve problems that other people won’t solve, etc.
Which I respect on the whole, but the key difference here is you are not just using your computer/smartphone, you are using Apple's computers too. That's where I find the disconnect. Each time Beeper Mini connects to those servers it is using compute resources, however infinitesimal, to perform it's functionality: functionality that is not supported, that fundamentally, Apple is now paying for. And you can justify that any way you want, but at the end of the day, that's stealing. And Apple is perfectly within their rights, IMO, to block it and if they feel they have a case, to pursue it legally afterwards.
> Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect Apple not to fight this, but I think we need to walk back the hyperbole a bit and consider how utterly normal it is for developers to try to build their own clients when the official options either suck or are too restrictive.
And if you're talking about open protocols or API's, you have my support 100%! I've done some of that kind of work. But you can't just use API's that are publicly available but otherwise closed to you just because you want to. That's textbook misuse.
I think that boiling this down to something like "stealing" oversimplifies something that can't be reduced to a singular notion as such. I think there's a case to be made that it's not approved use of the various API endpoints, but there's more nuance than just theft of CPU cycles or services. For sake of argument, I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem. I have a half dozen devices that are all capable of communicating via iMessage. If I want to bring an Android device into my personal ecosystem, it doesn't seem clear ethically or morally that there is some theft occurring. I realize there are other scenarios where someone has no Apple devices, never intends to, and would be in a weaker position, having never "bought in".
How do you feel about web scrapers mining the open web and profiting from the results? Or browser automation tech that logs into websites as if there's a user at the keyboard for the purpose of building automated interactions with services that do not provide public APIs, e.g. Quicken banking connections? I'm bringing this up primarily because there is a whole ecosystem of products that exist based on brute force workarounds to a lack of public APIs. The existence of this kind of tech would equate to similar kinds of "misuse" if only judged based on whether or not the service provider intended for this use case and whether or not the client was using some publicly blessed integration channel.
> But you can't just use API's that are publicly available but otherwise closed to you just because you want to. That's textbook misuse.
I think it's reasonable to say that in some scenarios, such use could be classified as misuse. But I don't agree with a blanket statement that "using undocumented APIs is misuse".
When the subject is creating a client for the purpose of interoperability, and when the client implementation is using the underlying APIs/services for their intended use case (i.e. to provide feature parity with the 1st party client e.g. calling the API that sends a message does so for the purpose fulfilling the feature-equivalent send message functionality in the 3rd party client), it seems like this is all a lot greyer than "textbook misuse". Textbook misuse would be building an iMessage spammer bot.
CPU time, network bandwidth, storage space, the infrastructure to drive the rest, the fat, fat internet pipes to handle half of the United States' text messaging demands...
> For sake of argument, I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem. I have a half dozen devices that are all capable of communicating via iMessage. If I want to bring an Android device into my personal ecosystem, it doesn't seem clear ethically or morally that there is some theft occurring. I realize there are other scenarios where someone has no Apple devices, never intends to, and would be in a weaker position, having never "bought in".
The ethics aren't the issue. The stealing isn't a problem because it's morally wrong; it's stealing because it's against the terms of use. It doesn't matter if you own 150 iPhones and 1 Android: the iPhones meet the requirements, the Android does not. And Apple has no legal, ethical, or market obligation to allow it in, they just don't. You can text the Android from the iPhone and vice versa and it will function completely correctly in both directions, with full support for the open protocols.
> I'm bringing this up primarily because there is a whole ecosystem of products that exist based on brute force workarounds to a lack of public APIs. The existence of this kind of tech would equate to similar kinds of "misuse" if only judged based on whether or not the service provider intended for this use case and whether or not the client was using some publicly blessed integration channel.
I think you're free to do it and the provider of the service is in turn, free to make your workdays a living hell in a never ending escalating pattern of back-and-forth modifications, or free to ignore you if they don't care. Quicken apparently doesn't care, Apple does. Those are respectively their responses and both are right depending on the organization's priorities.
Most web-scraping I see is pretty gray on ethics too though, things like the stack overflow clones that piss all over the information with ads and try and SEO themselves in front of the posts they're ripping off. Personally I think all those web operators can locate a fire to die in.
> I think it's reasonable to say that in some scenarios, such use could be classified as misuse. But I don't agree with a blanket statement that "using undocumented APIs is misuse".
This is not undocumented, it is documented and said documentation is kept private because it is not meant for anyone's use outside of the organization.
> Textbook misuse would be building an iMessage spammer bot.
And it could be easily made the case that this is exactly the reason why Apple demands you own Apple devices to use the iMessage service: Because it can't be automated on their own hardware, and because it can't be used by other devices/endpoints, it is much, much, much harder to spam via iMessage. In fact I'd say it's bordering on impossible unless you buy an iDevice and do it by hand, at which point, Apple can see your suspicious traffic and disconnect you from the network, possibly without you even knowing you've been.
That's not to say they couldn't secure it in a way to combat abuse, but again, why? What does Apple gain here apart from a happy nod from a userbase that is wanting to use an Android phone and an iPad? iMessage is a free service that Apple fans enjoy using. They gain nothing by making it open to people who don't use Apple devices, and that freedom for you comes at a security cost to the platform as a whole and the users in it. Apple is very clear that their priority (apart from profits) is their users, and this gains their users incredibly little while opening the platform to much wider instances of abuse that are already incredibly common.
And even aside of my views and understanding of systems integrity and API use/misuse, frankly, even just the anti-spam excuse would be enough for me to support them in this unilaterally, because as a service, iMessage is the only platform I make regular use of that I don't end up getting calls about my cars extended warranty, or messages from hot russian women who want to bang me, or people asking to buy my stupid house, or assholes telling me they've hacked my PC and are going to send videos of me jerking off to my family, or whatever the hell. And if the closed ecosystem is the only way to do that, which it kind of seems to be, then close the ecosystems I say.
I think you're missing the point GP is making, and I think it's an interesting one: There's lots of precedent for offering products and services interoperating with an "uncooperative" third party (in this case, Quicken scraping banks' websites to import their customers' transactions).
Sometimes such “forced” interoperability is illegal, sometimes it's the opposite and the a regulator or legislator recognizes it as an important public good, and very often (such as here) there is no precedent and we know absolutely nothing about the legality. We can have our educated guesses, but that's it.
I'd personally be very curious in seeing a lawsuit; it seems like important precedent to have with all the FUD going around, here and elsewhere.
You say this as if all these cases have the same fact pattern and it’s just a roll of the dice. But that’s not true and in fact there is very clear precedent that matches the facts of the case at hand.
Quicken and other scrapers are generally allowed, especially, but exclusively, when it pertains publicly accessible data.
Those kinds of cases have been tried with the main argument being the exceeding of authorization under the CFAA and copyright violations.
Courts have consistently decided that scraping doesn’t rise to the levels of computer trespass in the form of exceeding the authorization given to access the computer system and that it’s not copyright violation primarily because, to put it simply, it doesn’t exceed the authorization enough and because there’s a fair use component to it.
The most recent case law on this, which happens to involve publicly available data so isn’t fully analogue with Quicken, is hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn[0]
However, there’s also case law on clauses in EULAs and ToSs that prohibit reverse engineering (like in the case of Apple’s EULAs and ToS) that says those clauses are not only enforceable but they supersede the DMCA reverse engineering exception.
In fact the case law is even more relevant for this Beeper debacle, because it also happens to pertain to a company that reverse engineered another companies software, repackaged it to then sell it for a price, like Beeper tried to do with Beeper mini for $2/mo. That case law is still good standing case law and is Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, Inc.[1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
1: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
lol dude this wasn’t reverse engineering your lawn sprinklers to work with a raspberry pi. In effect this was always an abuse of services Apple funds and intends to be a value add for only their customers.
(Coming from someone who wishes Apple would just go ahead and release iMessage for android.)
Yes that's the point, Beeper are probably hoping Apple sues them for the reasons you describe.
> criminal liability by violating the CFAA and committing computer trespass
This is pretty tenuous. They do have proper authorization because the keys in question are valid iMessage keys and they are being used by the same individuals those iMessage keys are allocated to. They're not trying to commit any further crime post-access.
> violating the the OS license agreement and ToS [...] (yes that supersedes DMCA exception)
Does it? This seems like a pretty textbook case of reverse engineering for interoperability.
> reselling Apple’s IP for $2/mo
Probably the case they're hoping for a lawsuit on - the degree to which Apple has legitimate claim to control use of the iMessage protocol given their market presence. In the process of the lawsuit, if Apple is found to be leveraging this protocol anti-competitively, they're in trouble.
And beyond that, Apple is a highly litigious company with great lawyers and extremely deep pockets and large incentives to defend their ownership of the messaging market.
That they've been this slow to sue Beeper probably signals enough on its own that there's probably no field day to be had.
That point is moot now.
Not fucking likely
The problem is that everything works through Apples private services, even if there is no DMCA things in the app. On top of that they are making business with that. Quite unfair use.
What if I use Amazon’s private APIs for running my cloud. Even share it to others and charge even money from it?
There's no reasonable case for trespass under the CCFA as proper credentials are being used and there's no intent to use that access to commit further crime.
You can't infringe on intellectual property of a server by making requests to it, that doesn't make sense. Any case there would be access violations under the CCFA which are already covered above.
The only real claim would be the intellectual property of the client app in the way that it forms requests and accepts responses which this system is undoubtedly based on the reverse engineering of. The only problem with that argument is that the DMCA includes a specific exemption for interoperability as fair use.
Note that simply building a new client app doesn't necessarily constitute fair use, but in this case the client app extends to a platform that is otherwise not supported. Seems a pretty obvious case for interoperability in my eyes.
"Fair" or "unfair", what is the crime? Your intuition pump doesn't include enough details to be useful, I don't understand it.
Beeper does not talk only to Apple devices but also to other Beeper clients. There is no authorization by Apple to use their backends, and they are not sharing any revenue from their business, while Apple funds all the million messages.
CCFA covers the value gain, should be less than 5000 in one year, what I doubt is happening here.
I am not even sure if they are authorized in any point, because they violate ToS. Technically they fake authorization by preventing to be something other than they are, and not authorized by the terms and conditions.
A text message is, on the high side, 1000 bytes, so a million messages is <1GB. For reference paying $0.09/GB for bandwidth is considered a high price.
This is not a number which is literally zero, but it's a number which rounds to zero.
Authorization in the legal sense of the CFAA is permission, plain and simple.
The ToS and EULA explicitly only allow using the iMessage service on Apple hardware, so any other form without explicit permission by Apple is unauthorized.
Spoofing device credentials to fool the server and gain an authentication blob definitely doesn’t fall under authorized access.
But even with legitimately attained credentials you can still be in violation. Ex employees of a corporation, finding a device with credentials on it, etc.
Whether they commit any further crime or not is irrelevant for criminal liability.
> Does it? This seems like a pretty textbook case of reverse engineering for interoperability.
The DMCA exception only applies to interoperability for legally acquired (e.g., licensed) software.
But it doesn’t really matter but because ToS and license clauses that explicitly prohibit it overrule it, see Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
> Probably the case they're hoping for a lawsuit on - the degree to which Apple has legitimate claim to control use of the iMessage protocol given their market presence. In the process of the lawsuit, if Apple is found to be leveraging this protocol anti-competitively, they're in trouble. And beyond that, Apple is a highly litigious company with great lawyers and extremely deep pockets and large incentives to defend their ownership of the messaging market. That they've been this slow to sue Beeper probably signals enough on its own that there's probably no field day to be had.
This reads like a Gish gallop with a bunch of weak arguments that border fantasy.
There is no “Apple in trouble” when it comes to iMessage and there are no signals.
I don’t know where you get this from but I suggest seeking better sources on understanding legal standards and ramifications.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
In that case, breaking the ToS superceded the fact they were merely accessing public information.
The other question is whether Beeper is violating terms of service or their users are. I'm guessing Beeper is not and they instead need to be implicated for some kind of tortious interference. I would love if Apple individually started suing their own customers though.
I sure as hell don't know how this will play out, and neither can anyone with any massive degree of certainty. Hacker News opinion-passive-aggressively-stated-as-fact syndrome strikes again.
The facts of that case are not analogous to the matter at hand.
hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn primarily deals with scraping publicly available data and the definition of "exceeds authorized access" in the CFAA. And to a lesser degree selectively banning competitors. ToS violation was a generic argument and not the contentious part.
Meanwhile Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, Inc. is current standing law on reverse engineering clauses in ToS and EULAs, while the matter at hand has nothing to do with publicly accessible data, no exceeding of authorized access and no data scraping.
> The other question is whether Beeper is violating terms of service or their users are.
That would be Beeper, no question about it. They had to agree to the OS license agreement that prohibits reverse engineering and the ToS for Apple Media Services that also prohibit reverse engineering, before they could get to the parts that needed the reverse engineering they did.
The users didn’t do any reverse engineering, although they would be in violation of the terms that state iMessage (and other Apple services and software) is only licensed to be used on Apple devices. But that’s small fry in comparison to reverse engineering, repackaging and reselling Apple’s service without a license to do so.
> I'm guessing Beeper is not and they instead need to be implicated for some kind of tortious interference.
Tortious interference has more to do with affecting a relationship you’re not a party to. This is more of an intentional tort, like conversion, although in this instance that would be more of a “side-dish” claim.
After all why go through that trouble and prove damages when you’ve got more suitable options with statutory damages.
This case involves a company reverse-engineering another company's software in order to make a clone product.
Do you think a case about reverse-engineering for the purpose of interoperability might have a different outcome?
On the other hand though, if Apple's legal right to continue locking them out was as certain as you make it sound, wouldn't it make sense for them to file a lawsuit and set precedent for anybody walking in Beeper's footsteps?
Prefacing this by saying that I’m not privy to what, if anything, Apple is cooking up. But such a case isn’t something you cobble together in an afternoon.
In my experience a lead time for something like this is at least about a month, a week if it’s urgent and less if it’s really urgent and you seek an injunction (and then you try to flesh it out afterwards).
But ideally you want to take your time so you can discuss your strategy both internally with higher ups as well as with outside counsel, collect exhibits and draft up a solid initial filing.
Part of these discussions is also what kind of exposure you’ll have during discovery. Apple for example genuinely believes that Masimo used Apple’s internal confidential documents that Masimo received during discovery in the California trial to create the competing W1 smartwatch.
It could be that they’re weary of having to share more internal information, especially since so much has already come out during the last couple of years full of cases. Or wary that Beeper would learn more about the inner workings of iMessage.
I wouldn’t characterize it as a high priority matter with urgency either because they seem able and effective in blocking Beeper, with little loss in device sales as a result.
A lot of effort is going towards the Apple Watch issue with Masimo that prevents them from selling the newest models.
Lastly, while only of minor importance, it’s slightly more beneficial for Apple if Beeper would sue them while they keep successfully blocking Beeper than Apple suing Beeper.
All in all, it’s a lot of weighing pros and cons, even when you’re in the right. That’s one of the reason why there are so many settlements, because it often is cheaper, faster and easier than a whole trial.
They would have firmly believed that iMessage is their service that no one else has an entitlement to. If they had any involvement, it would be just one email to say to shut it down, and then never thought of it again.
The outcome of this Beeper saga is a bipartisan call for an antitrust investigation, suggesting even politicians are starting to doubt Apple's narrative and intentions.
This is dangerous ground as it could force them to do things they don't want to regardless of how rightful they believe themselves to be.
Calling this anti-consumer is rather subjective.
The fake spam complaint is addressed in the article.
Sure and it is absolutely obvious on my side because these contacts don’t show blue messages. Take that away and the situation turns worse because now I‘d have to guess.
Edit: don’t get me wrong - I don‘t send broken messages, I just contact them on other messengers instead.
Why hyperbolize things and spread outright nonsense? To what possible end?
The size limit destroys decent looking pictures and basically prevents movies from even being an option with how grainy they appear stretched out on our 4k screens.
This is ignoring all the other interactive elements that are just table stakes in any kind of messaging application that make SMS absolutely terrible in comparison.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964171/apple-iphone-rc...
You're framing it in a nefarious way as if Apple is flat out denying it. They didn't. They would have to LOWER security in iPhones by implementing RCS because iMessages have E2EE but RCS doesn't. Which is something all you anti-Apple people seem to conveniently leave out, because you know nobody would take it seriously if you said it.
Google's interop "solution" with the Samsung messages app is by not using encryption. Apple has that same level of support coming to iOS next year, and has also announced plans to work with GSMA on adding standardized encryption to RCS.
Google made a copy of iMessage since it is closed source and can talk to only to the same app. How is that better?
But you know what I mean - E2EE of Google Messages is closed solution.
> If you are texting with somebody who isn’t using Android Messages (say, somebody using Samsung Messages or an iPhone), the fallback to either less-encrypted RCS chat or SMS will still work just fine.
Sounds like Samsung users need to separately download Android Messages to get E2EE.
Quotes from https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... which is cited by Wikpedia on RCS.
google implemented the exact minimum they'd need to give them a foot to cry on in the courts, and no further. and now that there is a mandate to implement RCS, they almost certainly will choose to kill google voice rather than implement it. I am already planning my exit strategy, because otherwise they'll take my phone number with it. and this is not trivial, we are talking about buying another phone (hopefully it will make it until the next-gen iphone with N3E) and paying for two lines for a couple of months. This is a pain in the ass for me.
and google has already embrace-extend-extinguished the standard - their encryption implementation is proprietary and they've refused to let anyone interop, so essentially they have put themselves as imessage 2.0 but with google as the man in the middle this time.
What is good about whataboutism again ?
OP didn't say they tinkered on their phone - actually the total opposite. Read it again.
"I do more than enough tinkering but my phone‘s supposed to just work."
Anyway, you've missed the point that at the end of the day there's real-world benefits to many of the things people complain about. The FindMy lockout prevents phone theft (and has strong reductions in theft rates for these users). Serializing parts prevents thieves from stripping stolen phones and selling for parts. Having only one app store prevents large players with high network effect (tencent, facebook, etc) from demanding you install their app store to bypass the Apple's review/permissions process to spy on you (FB already got caught using dev credentials to do it anyway). Etc.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
I tend to agree, that a phone is not where I care to tinker in my life. Having it be secure and well-integrated is more important to me, I have a PC if I want to tinker. I can sign and sideload apps already if I want to try something (for 7 days), or getting an official dev credential extends this to 30 days. Android phones have a real problem with OS support lifespan and OEM parts availability, and I have no desire to install third-party ROMs and then spoof safetynet so I can run my bank app. Assuming that's even an option at all - Sony for example will wipe the camera's firmware when you unlock the bootloader, so it degrades a premium cameraphone to flip-phone levels.
"Not everyone wants to be stallman trying to figure out how to root their phone and spoof safetynet" is actually a great way to put it.
And nonetheless there's demonstrable harm to the broader industry being caused despite their lack of care about it. Corporate misbehavior you're not consciously aware of can still cause you harm despite not being consciously aware of it.
It doesn't if it can't reliably do basic things like sending e2ee messages to people using smartphones from other brands with its default messaging app.
On the other hand, this doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that it is going to be a polished experience: „Not all RCS functions defined in the standard are offered by every network and every client; only the services that are available to two communication partners are also offered in the client.“ (translated from the German Wikipedia article).
Also, some of my friends and family aren't on those apps and exclusively use SMS/iMessage.
How exactly is Beeper worsening the iPhone experience?
Anyone unsure what this means: it's a popular meme where the future of cloud/online gaming will degrade to cross-sell products maliciously. (Requiring the user to drink a sugary soft drink to continue using the product).
This is the entire fiasco distilled down to what is the root of the issue: to apple, non-apple users are not consumers. Substandard. This is the exact sentiment behind "Buy your mom an iPhone"
Messaging is by definition something that needs interop. This is why Apple (begrudgingly) supports at least SMS and MMS, because obviously you need to interop with "the others." It's also why they're being dragged kicking and screaming into RCS, which in all likelihood, they'll make equally shitty.
The fact that one company can dictate the terms of that interoperability, and make it as excruciating and inferior as possible, tells you all you need to know. But if you're the "in group" you can't even see what the issue even is.
From what I have understood in the first beeper mini anonucement, iMessage spam does already exist.
Also I never received spam on any open source messaging app, even when they were interconnected with gmail and facebook (xmpp). I've never received spam from telegram either, despite clients, protocol and API being open source. I have received less than a handful of spam on Whatsapp in more than 10 years. The only platform where I have received spam in their messaging app was instagram (I left in the meantime). It would be the same for iMessage. As long as spam is bound to a phone number, spammers will be banned the minute they start sending messages to people and will never reach you.
Spam however is a big deal on SMS, which if I understand correctly end up on iMessage on Apple devices.
So basically the Apple way is the worse way to deal with spam as all end up on the same app while on most other smartphone OS spam end up in the dedicated SMS messaging app that you can just totally ignore and disable notifications for. Apple does make it worse for its user in that context.
>This might be true if Apple was a small company. But they aren’t. They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market, and lock customers into using Apple’s official app for texting (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way people communicate). Large companies that dominate their industry must follow a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to innovation. We are not experts in antitrust law, but Apple’s actions have already caught the attention of US Congress and the Department of Justice
This is pretty different to the international dynamic, as MMS often comes at a surcharge in many non-US markets, but here unlimited MMS has been included in most plans for a very long time, so there's not even a "hey, you are costing me money" stigma involved like there was in the bad old days decades ago.
making an antitrust case on the basis of "I don't want to guess" seems weak, but law can always turn out counterintuitive
That... doesn't solve the problem. We don't need fragmented messaging systems, we need the world's largest company to lay down some rules and abide by them. Right now, the existence of iMessage is predicated on the poor performance of traditional SMS messaging. It wouldn't surprise me if the United States (much like Europe's antitrust council) forced Apple to standardize their proprietary alternatives. There's nothing counterintuitive about that to me.
It doesn't matter how many other networks there are when you can't get your group to use those instead.
If you ran a business and provided a service to your paying customers, should you be forced to offer it gratis to anyone who wants to use it? That’s an absurd position.
Yes, it is absurd. It's a great strawman.
A more realistic option would be to say that Apple has to sell access to its infrastructure via the API its own app uses, at a cost allowing some reasonable profit; this would conveniently align with other court decisions regarding anti-competitive practices by incumbent providers with strong market positions.
(disclaimer: Android user, wish users had stopped bothered with iMessage already and switched to something else)
It forces Apple to explicitly do the equivalent of Microsoft making competing word processors malfunction in DOS to pressure people to use Microsoft Word.
> How is it much different from blocking a hacker who's poking around to find holes?
That's the easy one. Interoperability is legitimate, credit card fraud isn't.
They were selling a service for $2/month. Did everyone forget that? For essentially a tosser app that could quickly be a pretty lucrative amount of money.
There is some white knight narrative that has suddenly arisen that isn't based in reality. That these guys are freedom fighters that just wanted to take on Goliath. In reality they're capitalists who saw a way to make money off of a proof of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they could shame the target into not taking obvious actions to squash them.
The "target" here is also literally the largest company in the world, whose executives have been discussing since 2013 about how to lock families into an iPhone monopoly that costs thousands of dollars a year by restricting iMessage [1].
There are no white knights here (it's all a money game), but Beeper's stance isn't as one-sided and ridiculous as you're making it out to be.
----------------------------------------
[1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609/ph...
If it were simple many others would have done this by now.
Would they? Not only was it obviously going to get crushed by Apple (this isn't some 20/20 hindsight -- when they first announced this I stated exactly what they were doing and exactly the reasons why it would be easily squashed), it's actually completely illegal!. Like if Apple were so inclined they could actually demand legal action of the criminal kind. Apple has been incredibly soft-handed about this whole thing.
History isn't rewritten because they lost.
I took your comment to imply that as a result of charging, their goal in fighting Apple was to “get back to charging $2/mo” which is a pretty surface-level statement. Their goal is to get iMessage on Android phones. I honestly doubt they’d care if they were the ones who eventually did it, as the main thing they eventually plan on making money off of is Beeper, not Beeper Mini.
> We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again.
… and based on my reading of their jobs page …
> *How will Beeper make money?* > > We charge our users a $10/monthly paid subscription service. Our pricing model allows Beeper to deliver a great product and service, while eliminating any need to profit by monetizing user data.
… and the affirmation of that on their homepage …
> Our business model is simple - we build a great app and earn money from those who find value in it.
… I’m not sure where the narrative that their goal was anything other than to make money is coming from. They’re a business with a potentially useful product and full-time salaried employees.
They're a smaller business that wants to make money, but Apple doesn't want to play fair. I agree with this part of their blog:
“Apple is within their rights to run iMessage how they see fit”
This might be true if Apple was a small company. But they aren’t. They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market, and lock customers into using Apple’s official app for texting (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way people communicate). Large companies that dominate their industry must follow a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to innovation. We are not experts in antitrust law, but Apple’s actions have already caught the attention of US Congress and the Department of Justice.
I don't care. But I'd rather live in a world where tinkerers can tinker away since I imagine they'll be able to make something I would care about later as a consumer.
Must? You're really going to need to provide some actual citations there. Tortured interpretations of anti-trust laws do not count.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/
Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the
standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS
Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when
compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will
continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.> Just one year ago, Tim Cook had this to say about RCS: "I don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point. […] Buy your mom an iPhone.”
> Long story short, I will believe it when I see it. Apple has a long history of claiming they will support an open standard, then failing to add support. In 2010, Steve Jobs promised that Apple ‘would make FaceTime an open industry standard’. That never happened. More recently, in 2021, Apple promised to open their Find My network to competitors like Tile. Instead, they’ve penalized Tile by additional warnings in front of their app.
WRT FaceTime - turns out video calling had patent encumbrances. Apple was sued for massive amounts as soon as they rolled out FaceTime on their own devices. The VirNetX saga just wrapped up earlier this year. [0]
And Apple has opened up their Find My Network. [1] Other trackers, such as Chipolo, are making use of it. [2] Also, Apple and Google just today published the latest revision of a cross-platform spec to detect unwanted location trackers regardless of which network you’re using. [3]
[0] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-wins-reversal-of-...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apples-find-my-networ...
[2] https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/category/chipolo-spot
[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-detecting-unwanted-lo...
They say in the post that they will focus on their own chat app going forward. This is their last attempt at making Beeper work.
What they say and how they really feel aren't necessarily the same thing
Imagine if they knew for some time the cutoff date from Apple so they released mini just before to ride the PR tsunami, That would be nice.
I'm also curious to find out how it works for multiple users on a single computer.
edit: I also wonder what the cheapest mini i can get is. Probably some used market? Hmm
Would it be possible for you to ssh into that Mac mini and generate imessages from the command line ?
You wouldn’t need beeper for that, would you?
Genuinely curious…
Or if you don't mind disabling SIP https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/imessage/mac-nosip/setup.html
With employers, you just never know - take the extra step and use your phone
Believe it or not, I’m not an Apple fanboy. It’s just that once you have an iPhone, the system really works well together. If I had an Android, I could not approve app requests or downtime extensions from the kids. I couldn’t instantly control the Apple TV. I’d have to use hacky workarounds for the HomePods. And, yes, absent Beeper the family would have to start using a different messaging app, which neither my wife nor girls would want to do.
I wouldn’t say we’re brand loyal. If other products worked as well, we’d buy them. I’ve tried several Samsung phones over the years, but I always come back given the friction above. Apple makes nice products that work well together. We’re an Apple household.
People wanted to be on BBM, but you couldn’t without both a BlackBerry and having BBM services activated on your cell plan (often for a premium).
Iirc, BB Messenger was centralized and managed all accounts (email, sms, BBM) and could upgrade sms to BBM if contacting another blackberry user. RIM was sitting on a gold mine but they didn’t use it right and then released BBM on Android (and iPhone, I think) only after the world had moved on and no one cared.
Are you confusing Apple Push Notification service (APNs) for mobile Access Point Name (APN)?
Although personally I thought Apple wouldn't try to block them because it might look bad with with a potential antitrust case, this is sort of why we haven't tried moving to Windows or Android at Texts.com
I'm glad to see Beeper getting back to focusing trying to make the best chat app in the world, we aren't Apple but we'll fight like Apple for that claim ^^
I have seen lots of comments like “well we need some kind of solution to this problem, whether it’s Apple launching an android app or a 3rd party”, and to be honest with you, I don’t even understand the problem. Maybe it’s cause I’m not from the US and can’t wrap my head around the social implications of message bubble hues?
I use Whatsapp for all my European friends, but getting Americans to adopt a different messaging platform is as unlikely as getting the Dutch to start using iMessage... So we're left with this situation, and it will continue until Apple/Google adopt RCS and cross-platform messaging becomes as seamless an experience as iMessage.
…because the functionality is a paid product feature that exists on their hardware and software? Because it’s a…product feature??
MMS was dated when I had a Motorola flip phone in high school, I’m not surprised it doesn’t handle 4K video lol.
You can blame your carrier for that.
It wasn't that long ago that MMS too large simply failed, or lived in limbo. I'm not a big fan of low res either, but it's absolutely an improvement and beyond what they need to do.
No. They love the iMessage experience and iMessage inertia means that people without iPhones have to negotiate to get people to use something else. It's not even necessarily malicious or obvious, but it does happen. I was a little hurt when I realized I had been left out of certain group communications that were happening over iMessage when I didn't have an iPhone.
>but for some reason they refuse to use any of the numerous free alternatives?
I guess you could say that, but it's more that the inertia pulls them back to iMessage. I'd try to get people to use Signal/Telegram/Whatsapp/Messenger and at some point, they'd stop checking those apps and I'd have to send them a regular SMS. I was the only person they were checking the app for, so any lapse in our communication could result in forgetting to check the app (and even having it get automatically offloaded).
It's also kind of like being the only vegan in a group of meat eaters. They just get invited to less dinner parties when people don't want to go somewhere that accommodates the vegan's diet. That creates a social rift even if it's not obvious.
Android guy here, so I may be out of the loop, but why do they have to check the apps at all? Shouldn't incoming messages from any app be shown as a push notification?
100% this. And sometimes I'll get logged out of a service and miss the notification that it happened, so I'll go quite awhile blissfully unaware that I'm no longer reachable. Had exactly that experience recently with Google Chat. Didn't see the message until I noticed the email it got converted to.
I'm noticing a pattern here where people who side with Apple on this issue rephrase what people say, almost to the point of making it bear no resemblance to what was originally said, to make it seem trivial or, in your own words, a "weak basis for indignation". If you need clarification, just ask for it instead of assuming. I'd also ask that you try to charitably interpret what people are saying and use empathy instead of being so dismissive about it.
The issue I'm describing here is quite the opposite: specifically because the chat application isn't generating enough notifications being that it isn't the primary messaging application--remember, they were only using it to communicate with me--it's easy to forget about, especially in a sea of other push notifications. This is just one element of the whole problem as well (lest we get into the circular argument where someone suggests some other suboptimal solution when the obvious answer is to provide some way to have iMessage on Android in whatever way Apple sees fit). It's not the only issues I and others have with iPhone dominance and iMessage only being on Apple devices.
I also don't care if what they're doing is legal or not, they're still fucking with my social network.
But it seems that your argument is exactly as subtle and indirect as I proposed. It’s not that Apple are stopping or even discouraging you from using third-party chat apps, it’s that your communication patterns makes using multiple apps slightly less convenient, hence you wish the first party one was more powerful.
It is quite amazing that you feel that they are “fucking with your social network” for not not making Messages more cross platform.
I dunno: to me, Apple's "rights" stop at their doorstep, and if they don't want their service to be accessible to third-party clients, they are more than welcome to just not build such a service (as we honestly don't have any reason to provide legal defense for this one specific business model).
We don't merely generally avoid extending rights over other people... usually we protect people from incursions into their rights by companies, whether by contractual or even by technological means: we have many laws and legal precedents designed to ensure interoperability, fair markets, and basic things such as "legal ownership" (see the right of first sale doctrine, for example).
When Beeper sues Apple (which I do hope is their next step), it is not at all obvious that Apple will get to keep doing what they are doing here... and, even without Beeper's involvement, we're already seeing government regulators and politicians rightfully poking around at the situation, ready to provide some clarification to the rules in order to prevent this kind of thing.
That is exactly what they did. Or rather didn’t. They haven’t sued beeper, or retaliated in any way. They merely blocked beeper from hacking into their network. It is crazy to think that beeper could sue them for that.
If this was YOUR network, would you be fine letting some third party, who’s not paying you, to use it as they wish and profit from that use? I really doubt it. If you say sure, that’s totally fine, I will challenge anyone here to prove it. Accordingly, please post your WiFi network credentials and GPS location here. We can use your network just like Beeper used Apple’s. Then sell access to others through our connection.
- It's not just bubble colors, those don't matter. What does matter is that image and especially video quality are absolute crap when texting between iPhone and Android, and almost all iPhone users in the US use iMessage instead of another platform like Whatsapp, so the experience tends to suck on both ends when texting between an iPhone and Android. It's all for vendor lock-in and it helps no one but Apple. Look up the "buy your mom an iPhone" bit.
- Not everyone cares about the private property rights of a trillion dollar corporation. I definitely don't! I think Apple can get fucked, and I think it's cool if people find ways to exploit their APIs to do things Apple doesn't want them to do.
What's the threshold below which we should care?
What does matter is that image and especially video quality are
absolute crap when texting between iPhone and Android
Oh. You mean MMS sucks? Why don't you complain to your carrier then? As of 2023 American carriers support attachments of roughly one megabyte. But the CTIA recommended supporting attachments of at least five megabytes… *checks notes*… back in 2013.
Remind me why this is an Apple issue?
I think Apple can get fucked
The poor MMS experience is entirely down to carriers creating a mess of it, just like they did with RCS. Or have you forgot that T-Mobile had to run (and probably still is, but I'm too lazy to check) both a Google and non-Google RCS stack to get a semblance of interoperability?
Here's Verizon's list of supported file formats:
https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-15892/
Wanna bet that they mean MPEG 4 part 2 and not MPEG 4 part 10?
Not sending high quality video via MMS isn't an Apple issue, it's a carrier one.
As a developer of a "companion" communications app, I understand Beeper's frustration all too well. I really look forward to a world of interoperable instant messaging one day; email is amazingly ubiquitous and it's because of open standards. There are pros and cons to this and, sadly, the biggest "con" is one can't completely control this to monetize the hell out of it (although Google did a pretty good job with Gmail?) and that's why IM is so siloed.
Google is pushing the hell out of RCS, but there is still no API on Android for developers to hook into this. Why am I not surprised?
Beeper is on the iOS App Store.
Microsoft got dinged for shipping IE by default, and so should Apple. Maybe you can argue Apple's not big enough yet, but I reckon we just need to wait a few years (87% of US teens use iPhones [0]).
[0] https://www.axios.com/2021/10/14/teen-iphone-use-spending-ha...
It wasn't just "you can't have a default web browser in IE", and reducing that case to that is ahistorical.
MS was prosecuted because they pressured OEMs into not installing a different browser by making that a requirement to be able to buy Windows licenses.
The alleged illegal act here was the combination of them 1) leveraging the power they had over OEMs to 2) prevent them from installing a different browser in an effort to 3) kill competing browsers.
It was never just about having a default browser, it was about the combination of 1, 2 and 3. There were some other incidents other than the browser that involved elements 1, 2 and 3, but the logic behind it was similar.
I say “alleged” because MS won on appeal and the DOJ decided to settle.
Apple on the other hand, just has a default messaging app. They’re not using their power to block other messaging apps with the intent to kill them, nor are they pressuring other parties to do or not do an act to protect their default messaging app.
The only thing that comes closest to the MS case is that Apple told carriers that they can’t have their bloatware preinstalled from the get go with the first iPhone. The problem however is that Apple, when they imposed that restriction, had no power over carriers, they were just entering the phone market after all. If anything the carriers had power over Apple, but they still choose to play ball despite this restriction.
I’d they’d tried to do that now, then it’d be a different story, because now Apple has quite some market dominance and it could be an antitrust issue.
That’s why carriers are free to impose limitations on certain functionality like hotspot use, because if Apple would force carriers, especially in a heavy handed way, then it could be explained as abusing their power.
Apple is mainly lucky for always having done Apple things, even when they were small in the respective market.
A lot of what Apple does, Apple has done from the beginning when they were insignificant in the context of a market. They couldn’t do introduce many of those things now while they’re so big.
So for all intents and purposes Apple is treated the same as MS.
I don't think Apple would care too much if they were forced to allow other applications to be designated as default SMS clients for the phone, though.
Which sort of makes sense. You don't technically don't have the obligation to make your platform open or support specific APIs regardless of your market share.
They ultimately got sued for leveraging their dominance in the PC operating systems market to dominate the browser market.
Apple doesn't lock anyone into messaging apps (they have pretty great system intergration for alternate apps!) - social groups do.
social demographics just use the chat that is closest to whatever they like to do online. iMessage is more of a "it's always there if I need it" thing as I get it, not so much something chosen out of confusion -- the social demographic is quite good at compartmentalizing their lives across many apps.
IMO, the buy-in for iMessage is an iPhone. If you contrast a $429 new iPhone with the buy-in required for other mainstream apps (share and license your private data + metadata with advertising companies in perpetuity), $429 doesn't seem unreasonable at all; but if you prefer to pay with your data instead, all platforms (including the iPhone) provide an option to do so via options like FB Messenger[1] and WhatsApp[2].
If Apple were to remove these alternative options, along with SMS/MMS, and support only iMessage communication - there would be a much better support for the claim that they "lock in" their users.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/PuPIrvf.png
[1] https://bgr.com/tech/app-privacy-labels-facebook-messenger-v...
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-instagram-facebook-...
Most other countries are using some other messaging app, so clearly these aren't super significant hurdles. I agree "lock-in" is strong wording that probably doesn't apply to iMessage. But you cannot argue that iMessage is competing fairly with the likes of FB Messenger / Whatsapp / Telegram / Signal.
I love iMessage because it has a good feature set for family group chats (photo sharing is stellar), but I’m also happy with all the innovation, choice, and competition on features and governance provided by Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, et al, each of which have their own strengths and have to respond to improvements by the others. The worst thing that could happen to innovation is if we were all using the same iMessage protocol forced into the stewardship of a DoJ mandated standards body.
I really can’t understand the obsession with default SMS functionality. Other than 2FA codes or setting up Uber on a new phone who gets an SMS more than once a month?
https://beeper.notion.site/a96db72c53db4a9883e1775bcb61bb80?...
I think WeChat does something similar.
Wouldn't it be "fun" if Apple did this, too!?
0: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk.g...
1: https://kakao.com/talksafety/en/policy/stability/abnormalusa...
This has all been weirdly performative.
Considering the media coverage and that there are now bipartisan calls for an antitrust investigation I think they've succeeded very well.
How many people thought otherwise? If they thought about it at all? I feel like HN users vastly overestimate the amount of thought the average user puts into things like this.
Suddenly being able to text androids without issue made it clear to everyone it's a policy-limitation, not a technological limitation
Everything that has transpired over the last few weeks strengthens the narrative for an anti trust case and hopefully makes an illustrative case in favour for adversarial interop (w.r.t megacorps).
That itself protects an untold amount of OSS projects that have been victims to billion dollar megacorp legal threats and bullying.
Idk how these things work but I hope Eric and the beeper team take Apple to the cleaners and get enough to retire a thousand times over.
But that’s not really any different? Even if they hadn’t technically implemented it that way that is the intended way the service is supposed to be used. Locked to Apple devices.
Why does having specific Apple only features outside of the core message set mean it’s now locked down?
Absolutely zero chance.
There are handsomely VC funded successful startups that do exactly this in banking, for example Teller:
https://jobs.lever.co/teller/ebf503af-bb82-49fb-97bd-6d9bcbb...
Teller is giving users additional access modalities to services they’re already separately “paying for.” The directly analogous format would be if Teller was allowing you to store your money at Bank of America but Teller was preventing BOA from collecting revenue from you.
Many beeper mini users already have apple devices + Eric in his post said he's willing to pay some reasonable fee.
Nobody pays for iMessage directly.
Oh Eric said he’s willing to pay? Guess that counts as a deal then!
This threw it back up into the light a little more by not just complaining but trying to do something about it.
Probably decent marketing... how many people didn't know beeper existed before this?
Maybe they did get some users out of this who will use the non-iMessage parts of the service that already existed.
However while I now know who they are might view of them is also tainted a bit because they made (what I see as) bad decisions. So at least in my case I’m not sure it’s that beneficial to them.
Can someone help me understand a big question about iMessage? What makes iMessage so special that it needs to run on android?
There are plenty of other cross platform applications for messaging that fit the quoted needs. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram are a few examples. If end users care about “upgraded chats”, they can simply use one of those and ask those whom they message to also use those apps.
Am I missing something? What makes iMessage so special?
Other issues are limitations by the OS, like Apple doesn’t let you change the group name for non-iMessage groups. Or Apple doesn’t let you replace the entire messaging app, so you’d need multiple apps to cover multiple channels.
The issues and OS limitations leads to things like kids bullying green bubbles (as silly as that sounds).
I don’t think Android users have a right to iMessage but I can understand the need to properly interpolate with each other here and it sounds like RCS will be just that when Apple adopts it.
I think that both Google took too long playing with new messaging apps and Apple took too long to actually want to make this experience better for Android-iPhone communication (which they’ve been pretty clear they’d only do due to pressure, since it helps them sell phones).
The pressure is great. Maybe we’ll actually have a good experience with RCS, but we will see…
SMS doesn't support the concept of naming a group. That's not an OS limitation.
There's broadcast SMS (where the phone sends the same SMS to multiple people) and MMS groups.
That sounds silly, but it's important enough that Apple executives were talking about it ten years ago. See the link from the article at https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609
> In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service...iMessage on Android would serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones
That's from Craig Federighi, who is now the SVP at Apple in charge of all operating systems. If it were a minor silly thing, you probably wouldn't expect it to be talked about at the highest levels at Apple, would you?
Why not? I’ve been in C-level discussions where dark purple versus a slightly darker shade of purple turned into a weeklong shit show.
If so, it may have been important!
Yes, this is a framing that works for every strategic decision in business.
The C-level of a random software company talking about US-wide market lock-in is unlikely to make it work in practice. Apple has a very real chance of doing it.
No, they are nowhere close to locking down messaging.
Honestly, I missed that and my comment came out sounding like a gotcha when it should have just emphasized what you were saying. Sorry!
I'll believe it when I see it. Judging from Apple's past behaviour, I wouldn't be surprised if RCS messages will be shown in Comic Sans or something.
Anyone who knows more about this please correct me. This is purely from reading Internet forums.
Of course it was all jokey and no big deal but I still came away from that situation having learned that all this green bubble malarkey is very much real, and these were all grown adults (like, 30+ with children).
If you have all iMessage users, then you can do things like add more users to the chat, etc.
As soon as one Android user is in the chat, then you can't do that.
The other issue, for me, personally, is that I can respond to my iOS users from my desktop (where I spend most of my time), but I have to actually pick up the phone to communicate with my Android friends.
It's not the end of the world, as my Apple Watch tells me when I get texts from my phone, but it is a bit annoying.
See: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/messages/icht8a28bb9a/...
Apple degrade the user experience to spite their own customers. Quite bizarre.
Why can’t everyone in these situations just ask everyone to use one app like WhatsApp? If having good experience was important everyone would be on board.
Also it's not a "good experience" for everyone, not as much as just cutting that green bubble loser out. With no green bubbles, you get to use the default messaging app. With a different app, since you can't change the default on iOS, you have to have at least two apps, and many people balk at that.
Are Americans just too lazy to download another app?
More I think they are just really susceptible to marketing efforts by companies like Apple who tell them that it's a bad user experience to have multiple apps, and your own personal user experience is supreme, so people adopt and believe that. And for the people who don't, you can almost guarantee they have at least one "Apple fanatic" in their circle who will preach that gospel to them routinely.
Then there's the social status symbol of "Apple" that has become a big thing in the US. The killer on top is the invasion of the social sphere, partiuclarly with younger people, where you are bullied and isolated for not having an iThingy, and you've got a perfect recipe for Apple.
At some point I think it's got to come back around, but unfortunately that time isn't looking soon as it's trending heavily in the wrong direction right now. It's so bad now that "iPhone" has come to be a generic word for "mobile phones" and "iPad" a generic for "tablet." Just a few days ago I heard someone say something like, "Oh is that an Android iPad? aren't those just cheap knock-offs?" When this is the level of thinking in most of society, it's not hard for a company like Apple to manipulate to serve their ends.
Citation needed? Apple has pretty much marketed the exact opposite (e.g. the entire App Store concept)
Isn't Google using a proprietary version of RCS? That's not cross platform.
Thats ignoring that some people (like myself) have philosophical reasons not to support Meta via WhatsApp. Just like others will not install Signal since it requires them to know your phone number (at least currently).
Then try a couple APAC countries, and people will ask why you aren't using LINE.
This has been going on for decades, ever since we saw AIM/MSN/ICQ and so on divisions country-by-country. In some cases it was simply who localized their app first.
They have not restricted Android users to use third party messaging apps like Beeper. But Beeper isn't using their own infrastructure - they have reverse engineered third party API and are hacking them to work.
Apple's argument against iMessage being covered by DMA is that there are more popular third party products already running on Apple's platform in the EU e.g. WhatsApp.
On your iphone, in settings go to messages > text message forwarding and select the devices you want to allow.
It fails often enough that I can't rely on it.
You can't leave a green bubble chat. You can't send messages from your computer or non-iPhone devices (Apple has message forwarding, but it's unreliable). Pictures look awful, videos look worse. Read receipts don't work. Tapbacks/emoji/stickers/memoji/etc don't work. It's a drag to remember all these limitations.
I grudgingly got an iphone in 2019 for work. I no longer work there but now I'm locked into blue bubble chats with family. I've been trying to use Beeper to solve this it's not reliable enough yet.
(if RCS wasn't such a dog's breakfast, I might make more of an effort. Even when Messages supports RCS, the experience will still suck)
Pictures look awful,
https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018832773-Tw...
> videos look worse.
Same as above.
> Read receipts don't work
MMS read receipts have been a thing since at least 2004. Wanna bet your carrier still doesn't support them?
Why should it be up to the carrier? I guess that’s why it’s so broken.
"Oh no, our chat is acting weird because there is an Android user in here."
It's like hostages complaining that somebody left the door open and is letting in cold air.
And, to be fair, they didn't reject me per se, they would make slightly judgmental comments or observations. It just felt like it knocked me down a peg in their eyes and made it all the more difficult to make a real connection.
On top of that, switching to upgraded chats by switching platforms is not as easy as it sounds because you need to convince your friends to switch platforms. And that can be a hard ask, especially for friends and family that are less tech-savvy.
You could have people only message you via text, instead of iMessage, but doing that reliably is harder than switching platforms, unless you ask someone to disable iMessage in the messages app altogether, and no one wants to do that
My friend sent me the Beeper Mini article the other week and said "Look, you can have blue bubbles now!". I immediately scoffed - even if it wasn't going to break in a few days, I will never lift a finger to support what Apple is doing with iMessage. Absolutely absurd, even more so absurd the way folks talk about it.
Green bubbles are not just "a broke Android user" even though the Apple masses like to spread that image.
Green bubbles are a sign of a technological badass, a power user who does things with their devices that Big Gray doesn't think they should be able to. It's the sign of a person who thinks lock-in strategies are gross and an anti-pattern, and is principled enough to vote with their wallet. It's the sign of a non-conformist, a free thinker who makes their own decisions, rather than following the group-thinking masses. A green bubble is the badge of honor that identifies a person who thinks differently.
In the end, Apple's strategy will probably win because Machiavellianism works, but that doesn't mean we can't give it a hell of a good run.
But I also hear all these stories about kids being bullied for having Android phones, and see Apple executives talking about locking entire families into the iPhone ecosystem using iMessage [1] on that basis.
To me, this is pretty evil, monopolistic behavior which needs to be regulated out of existence. I'm glad Beeper is bringing it to light. The fact that it doesn't affect me personally is unimportant.
----------------------------------------
[1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609/ph...
The worst part is that the company knows about this and could simply end it by changing a single color in their app.
Moreso, there's no such thing as a default messaging app, just like there's no default phone dialer. The system handles telco messaging and calls.
But there's also no real limitations elsewhere as long as you aren't requesting SMS/MMS specifically. I can send an image to someone via Signal just as easily as I can via iMessage - they show up in the same lists.
This is different from cross-vendor standard protocols like email, where you may want a mailto: link to compose a mail in the app the user actually has configured. For mail you can configure a default application.
Because of Apple's actions, this has led to android users being ridiculously ostracized and discriminated again[0][1].
It's not that there are not alternatives, it's that iPhone users are unlikely to switch to those alternatives, leaving Android users no choice but to continue to be discriminated against if they want to talk to the majority.
This a uniquely US thing. It's very strange.
[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
[1]https://www.techdirt.com/2015/02/12/green-bubbles-how-apple-...
In most of the world iPhones aren't nearly as dominant so nobody would use iMessage or they wouldn't be able to talk to half their friends, and there was a much bigger incentive to just ditch SMS-related systems entirely.
It's completely awful we're strong-armed into having 6 different chat clients that send text messages because of gate-keeping. Chat has been fully commoditized since about 2000 or so.
This is so true, I think about this a lot sometimes. As someone growing up in the 90s who was considered weird for finding the internet amazing, I'm online substantially less than many of those people who made a big deal about it back then.
> There are plenty of other cross platform applications for messaging that fit the quoted needs.
Absolutely, and I encourage people to use them. Unfortunately, I can't force people not to use iMessage.
It's not about bullying (I've no doubt that it happens, but it's never happened to me). It's not about social pressure, I couldn't care less if someone wants to make a big deal over me having a green bubble -- don't let the door hit you on your way out. What it is about is the fact that I can't change my family members' behaviors, and the consequence of their behaviors is that all of their messages to me get sent unencrypted.
I would like those messages to be encrypted. I can't force them to use a better messenger, so it would be nice if I could on my end make a change that seamlessly, with zero friction on their part, causes their messages to suddenly be encrypted. No, I'm not buying an iPhone, heck off with that garbage. But I would be willing to install a separate app if it meant that my family members on iPhones could instantaneously have their messages encrypted.
Barring that, I can keep subtly encouraging them to use any of the other much more secure messaging services available, but... I mean, I don't control their phones. They are adults and they make their own decisions. And Apple doesn't really help here by marketing the Messages app as if it's secure while leaving out the fact in its marketing that a huge portion of the messages it sends have zero security at all. I tell people that we should swap to something else, their response is, "I don't need to, iMessages is secure." It would be secure if you were using it. But when you message me, you're not using it, you're using SMS.
> If end users care about “upgraded chats”, they can simply use one of those and ask those whom they message to also use those apps.
Like everything else in security, this boils down to the fact that people are apathetic and the people who are security conscious have to try and bend to meet them halfway. Beeper would have been a way for me to bend and meet some of the iPhone users in my life halfway. I'm not buying an iPhone, I'm not giving my family members an ultimatum that I'm going to stop responding to their texts if they don't use the messenger that I want them to use; that would be wildly antisocial behavior for me to engage in. So they'll send all their texts to me in plaintext.
As anyone who's tried to use Signal can attest, there is nothing simple about asking people you message to use a different app. And security in specific is a really hard sell for getting people to switch.
This is what I keep hammering when I talk about this -- Apple's position on iMessage makes iPhone users less secure. For anyone in my life who is security conscious, we couldn't care less about iMessage, we use actually secure cross-platform messaging services that allow us to actually encrypt 100% of what we send to each other. Emoji reactions do not matter, the problem is that iMessage can't send cross-platform encrypted chats, and Apple's position is that it cares more about whatever weird platform-exclusivity lock-in it thinks its getting than it cares about making sure the messages that iPhone users send are actually encrypted.
The motivation here isn't complicated, I want the iPhone users in my life to actually be secure rather than pretending that they're secure.
I'll note that the same problem also exists for Android. I'm not singling Apple out here, in practice Android users also send all of their messages to me in plain text regardless of whatever proprietary garbage Google is trying to pass off as message security nowadays. The same problem exists there, I can't get them off of the default messaging app. But on Android, there's not the potential of an app I could install that with no changes to their OS or setup would cause their messages to suddenly start being encrypted.
That is 100% accurate from the technical perspective.
As an iPhone mobile / windows desktop user I would love an interoperable protocol so I could respond to texts from my desktop
But from the business side Apple's decision is totally defensible and clear
The blue bubbles are a luxury item / luxury signal that let's apple differentiate their products
I assume an internal assessment of that "brand" value from blue bubbles is in the many billions of dollars
I'm willing to buy all of your property for $1, but that doesn't give me the right to come use it all, just because in theory there is a price I would pay to have it all.
No 3rd party batteries in devices or 3rd party ink cartridges either
That's about the strength of it. Unless the protocol is open, paid or otherwise. iMessage is closed and undocumented.
This is not to say that this entitles anyone to do so without Apple’s consent, but the argument about resource usage is a straw man here, IMO. This is not about who pays for the servers. Even if Beeper would offer Apple an appropriate portion of their revenue (edit: and they actually do in TFA), Apple would not agree. For Apple, this is about keeping the garden wall up.
On iMessage, all messages are stored on Apple’s servers (at least in-transit), even those that would be destined between two Android users communicating via iMessage.
At least with email it’s a bit easier to filter out spam, but iMessage is also E2E encrypted so automatic spam detection is much harder.
Which is the intent of running those email servers. These are the “public-use” servers. The iMessage servers are private.
There are much better business arguments to make here then "oh no! The 3 trillion dollar company might have slightly more overhead managing text messaging!"
From a business perspective, I'm much more sympathetic to arguments that iMessage is a perk Apple wants to keep as incentive for more users to switch to Apple's ecosystem and, likely more important, lack of cross-platform interoperability raises the cost for existing Apple users to transition to Android.
Are you claiming Apple would have to pay fixed costs a second time because new users were added to the already existing service?
And are you claiming that 1 million dollars is a lot of money to Apple, a company worth over three million million dollars?
I was responding to someone who said the extra overhead for running a chat service that has more people use it would be notable for Apple. A business argument - not a legal one.
It's also an abuse of their market position to discriminate against the competition, and they have done so very successfully.
There are far more subtle, less othering ways to indicate a participant in a conversation isn't capable of the same functionality as others.
Google is pushing RCS only because they are completely incapable of making their own protocol and lord you know they have tried (gchat, hangouts, allo, and now messenger)
And by the way, RCS is entirely carrier dependent. It’s awful. I wish my friends could also use iMessage but Apple is well within their rights to stop people from using their network against their terms of service.
Who is auditing Beeper's code for security issues? How big is their security team and their response SLA? How are they encrypting messages at rest? How much money are they prepared to spend on attorneys to defend these stances against various governments? What can their servers see, what do those servers retain? etc etc
Apple makes commitments about encryption and security, shown in-app via message colors, that Beeper has no right to subvert.
Those commitments are only as strong as the recipient's control of their Apple ID credentials. It should be up to them whether they want to entrust a third-party (whether Beeper, or someone with an actual Apple device) with their messages.
I don't see how Beeper makes that any worse - I've listed a myriad of ways a user can choose to compromise the security of any iMessages sent to them. These ways have been known for decades and Apple hasn't done anything (they could lock-out outdated and jailbreakable iOS versions).
Either way, it should be up to the user to decide what they want to do with their messages and how much security they attach to them. After all, even in case of a fully bulletproof solution that would even prevent screenshots, the user is still free to read their messages out loud in a public place or in reach of a recording device.
Also, again, Beeper Mini (different from Beeper Cloud, which is not E2E compatible) operates entirely on-device - no message data transits through Beeper's infrastructure. There's an optional cloud component to enable real-time push notifications but even in that case I believe their server merely relays data and doesn't have the decryption keys.
So you agree, it's wildly unethical to use Beeper because it doesn't give all the users in the convo the right to choose the security of their messages.
Whether you consider that unethical is up to you. Most people don't know or care and everything works out anyway.
Sure, many atrocious acts are fantastic business decisions. Slavery? Great for business. Massive ROI. Incredibly evil.
You can. I've been using Beeper Cloud for a year on a Windows desktop. It's fantastic. I also use WhatsApp in that same application.
Before that I had all sorts of workarounds that mostly worked. Like having a Mac VM running in the background with an AirMessage server and then using their web client to access messaging from Windows. Beeper Cloud removed all this nonsense from my life.
You have MANY of them. SMS/MMS and Matrix spring to mind immediately. Mastodon qualifies. You can use RCS today if your carrier has an app like Verizon's Message+. If you want to go all retro, IRC.
That's ignoring the productized implementations all over the place - Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger, Slack, Discord, and so on. MSN and ICQ are still running.
It certainly would’ve lasted longer than putting out a press announcement though.
It seems to be a uniquely American problem that I can't get any of my contacts (on Android too, by the way, users there are just as apathetic) to switch to secure cross-platform messaging services. In a better world all this talk about RCS and SMS bridges wouldn't matter because we'd all have already abandoned SMS entirely.
Your argument works pretty well when the hate for Apple is greater than the hate for Facebook. In my experience it's mostly the other way around.
They have effectively infinite latitude to change it to block unauthorized access.
Even if it took Apple a month or two to respond every time, how many times does it take before basically everyone gives up on Beeper anyway?
I can get why they did it the first time for the PR value and raising the issue in public consciousness but I can’t see any value in continuing to fight past that first block.
Apple owns those servers and has every right to control how they are accessed.
This isn't true [0], unless you count "always" as meaning "always [after the time that the new iMessage bridge was introduced]."
I don’t know if it would’ve made a difference, but charging a subscription out of the gate and poking the bear by claiming Apple would have a difficult time blocking access doomed this project from the start.
Again, I admire the hacker spirit, but what were they thinking?
I'll never forgive them for that. From the very beginning they decided to be hostile to users.
Are you sure it's Apple?
I had a similar problem for years, and it turned out to be AT&T.
I mentioned it to an AT&T rep when I was on the phone correcting a billing error. He was able to do something on AT&T's end, then send a signal that actually rebooted my iPhone remotely (!), and ever since then I get every SMS perfectly fine.
It's iPhone users creating the social pressure to use iMessage.
Not necessarily for myself, but more generally for the damage Apple is doing to society by creating a divisive wedge between people for the sake of luxury signalling.
Like you say, there are lots of iPhone users who pressure and exclude outsiders to try to force them to get iPhones. Android doesn't do anything like this.
Would you be able to elaborate on this and provide some examples, please. With respect to iMessage, that is.
Spoiler alert everyone: if you want the product feature, buy the product.
I'm generally pretty laissez faire about technology, but when it comes to things that have achieved high market adoption, I am more sympathetic to the EU's position of enforcing standards.
I have no idea why people support corporations creating these weird little walled garden fiefdoms that are actively user hostile. This seems to be a relatively new phenomenon. Imagine how stupid it would be to have to have an Apple phone to call another Apple user. Or to have to go to a Ford gas station to fill your car. Or if you could only send/receive email with other Gmail users.
Because of the limitations of SMS (not supporting high res pictures, no groupchats over 10 people, etc) it effectively is only for iphones. People with Android phones in the US in iPhone-circles simply cannot be socially integrated and have full social lives
Having all my chats in one place have helped me better keep in touch with friends and family.
I use several different SMS texting (some also voice call) apps on my iPhone, in order to keep SMS numbers as required by various segments of digital life apart, as well as to serve as the "mobile" number for SMS on my contact info.
For a decade my iPhone's primary voice and SMS line were even an original "Grand Central" number before it was acquired by Google Voice.
If your preferred number is stuck on your iPhone, you can port it to any app backed by a service that supports porting, then keep using your number not just on that iPhone but anywhere you run the app.
If I were mainly on linux, I'd do the same with open messaging apps. (admittedly, not mobile ones. YET)
Except that I already gave away all my old PC hardware.
There's actually a benefit of using software that's not tied to a phone number, a drastic decline in spam. I really don't intend to apply for a laborer position in Alameda.
And let's face it, the unreadable white type on a bright green background punishes only the Apple users who have to squint at it. (Will rose-colored sunglasses work?).(pulls out No. 25 photographic filter) YES!
What are they doing about people using someone else's number to gain access to all their messages?
After all, the whole SV is trying to make the world a better place, make humans interplanetary species, protect freedom of speech, democratise stuff etc.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/758811/palm-gives-up-la...
Because of anticompetitive behavior by Apple, yes.
That’s literally the whole point people keep missing.
If they were up against any other company, I'm absolutely certain this thread would be rooting for Beeper hard, with all the usual arguments about interoperability, open source, the right to control your own devices and own your data.
Only for Apple, suddenly all of that falls out of the window and the most blatant anticompetitive behaviour is ok because of "security".
Hacker - It's my stuff and I'm responsible for how it works. User - I'm using this and it's the suppliers job to make sure it works.
Where you sit on this spectrum from Hacker to User defines your opinion on this.
Neither end is wrong, they just want different things.
In a closed system the sender trusts Apple and the person they’re sending to.
If you are sending to someone receiving in some other app, you have to trust the receiver, Apple, and who ever makes the thing that is being used to display the decrypted message. You don’t even know what app you’re trusting as the sender.
The further you go down this rabbit hole the more ergh it all feels, but actually being able to trust the whole chain from your mind to someone else’s over the internet is quite hard.
> I see this more like an attack on private property
Why are the iPhones that people bought the private property of Apple?
> Device control is integral to the iMessage service as an offering because it improves the user experience, and people are willing to pay for it.
How exactly does it improve the user experience?
Probably every company that manufactures smart devices makes that argument. That's how Microsoft justifies Secure Boot with a hardwired key and how John Deere justifies locking up their tractors. What makes Apple special in that regard?
Nobody does in southern Europe, not even iOS users do, everybody just uses WhatsApp.
Even on early iPhones you still had to communicate with friends with Androids, Sybians, Windows Phones, Blackberrys.
Those all had Whatsapp, but iMessage was unique to iOS.
It connected everyone. The answer's obvious.
Then WhatsApp appeared, with an offer of $1 per year for an unlimited amount of messages.
As can be seen, the value proposition of that was tremendous in e.g. Europe, but non-existing in the US, as it just was $1 over what the US users already had. Most of the world got sucked into WhatsApp pretty quickly. The US never followed suit.
Er...not 'everybody'. *currently in S-Eu, I've never had wa, getting along fine with signal. As are several other people...maybe slowly, but surely. Can confirm nobody I've ever met has mentioned i-stuff.
He said the quiet part out loud, and no one did anything about it. That moment (or any time before then) is when the battle was lost.
If our governments had any sense of justice, Apple would be facing anti-trust enforcement over that statement alone.
I can’t think of any abusive act that prevents competition, I do see them not going out of their way to facilitate competition with themselves, but they have no positive obligation to do so.
Do you really think that teenagers in America wouldn't be bullying the outgroup—to the extent that they actually are frequently ostracizing their peers over this, which is not at all clear—over something else if all the bubbles were blue?
We didn’t need special intervention that made all shoes Nike or all backpacks JanSport.
Regardless of size, no company owes users or the public free service using their servers. Fairness always cuts both ways. As an iPhone user, I demand apple provides me iMessage and ensures non-imessage clients can't message me.
Beeper can make a chat client and compete, they can advertisr in the appstore and elsewhere. Internet Explorer and now Edge are default on windows but Chrome is the number one browser (despite edge using chromium). Why can't beeper do the same?
This whole "eat the rich" crap needs to end. People like apple products the way they are. You succeed by figuring out why that is and competing. I used signal on iphone for a couple of years and then got rid of it for example. Didn't like the ui as much as imessage, can't import backups and lost all message and contact history I built on signal over many years. Similarly, i have had a lot of bad experience with usb-c but lightning has been great in every way for me but thanks to this same anti-capitalist attitude my choice was taken away.
My problem is not that the biggest company on earth is being treated unfairly and will lose chump change. My problem is that I am being affected! My choices and preferences are being taken away in an undemocraric and anti-capitalist way. I didn't have a vote on usb-c, to the contary I paid apple a lot of money for their product to show support. Same thing with I message, why donmt the voices mine and the majority who use iphones' voices not matter here? What is apple doing to prevent beeper from creating a chat client that does things just like imessage and then have other better features? Of all the chat clients I have used, imessage has superior ui and reliability, that's why I use it. They make it sound like iphone users don't know how to search the appstore for better chat clients. Outside the US, even on iphone people use whatsapp as a default for example, because that's what they prefer (international calling friendly) and most americans haven't even heard of viber.
Clearly othere have demonstrated that you can compete with default apps and even beat imessage in some markets outside the US by competing fairly. Now what is the reason you all have your torches lighted and pitchforks sharpened so that mine and iphone user's choices get limited once more?
No, as history has shown, apple can just make up and spread arbitrary FUD about your business, and a lot of customers will believe them. Apple lobbyists will then use the FUD to push laws which put your business at risk.
What a brazen characterization. They try to take a free ride on someone else's infrastructure by a process akin to breaking and entering, charge their own users for it, and when Apple fends them off, they call it interference. I'm speechless.
Chat apps is largely represented by iMessage, but dwarfed by WhatsApp. But for the most part there is _some_ competition. And Apple requiring that you _purchase_ their product in order to use its services is not harmful to consumers. Been crazy watching people do mental gymnastics trying to make that sound like a huge problem.
Meanwhile, Google has effectively sterilized all competition in the browser market and is definitely, willfully using their market share to push around other companies and make purely self-interested, consumer-hurting choices. _This_ is where antitrust scrutiny needs to be aimed at.
Yet the moment it’s an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the above matters.
I remember the late 90s / early 00s when we had MSN, AOL IM, ICQ and others. People got so fed up with different people using different services that a whole slew of 3rd party clients were available that supported everything. Like Pidgin, libpurple, Bitlbee (an IRC server that supported IM protocols), and Trinity (or something named like that).
Now we are stuck with vendor lockouts and crappy 1st party apps that are usually little more than a web container.
It’s weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.
I’m not in support of Apple here but it’s pretty obvious which way this would go.
But the point of Beeper was to bring iOS compatibility to non-Apple devices. There’s a literal XKCD comic about creating new standards.
> They didn’t have to reverse-engineer iMessage.
Sure. But that’s not a reason not to do something. The literal same remark can be used against Apple too:
“Apple didn’t need to break support for Beeper”
“Apple didn’t need to make iMessage proprietary”
Etc
For what it’s worth, I’m not against Apple per se. In fact I’m typing this on an iPhone. I’m just commenting about how locked in messaging has become and how it’s weird that people are ok with that (or more precisely, only ok with it when it’s an Apple protocol).
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m an Apple user and I don’t really use iMessage deep enough to have issues talking to Android users.
I’ve just seen Beeper being incredibly entitled about another company’s service that they’re not paying for throughout this whole process.
As a previous startup founder and a developer (which is HN’s primary user-base), I just think it was obvious which way this was going to go.
And saying that making a service closed is equitable to reverse-engineering said service is a weird take. Should every non-public service be allowed to be attacked like this?
If I were to comment on the Beeper thing specifically, I think they were wrong to make it a commercial project (something they’ve now rectified). But I think Apple are wrong to break Beeper too (though I get why they did).
I think there is enough blame to go round to all parties involved.
It would have also shown that Apple's platform isn't as secure as they position themselves to be if someone other than them can utilize their services without their permission.
There was no winning move here for Apple except to close access off to secure their closed protocol. It was just inevitable at that point.
This doesn't answer your question though. I guess what I'd have liked to have seen is Apple release a public iMessage API. I know that would never happen, but one can dream. The approach Apple took was certainly predictable. I have no sympathy for Beeper either.
Even if we accept your faulty premise, the solution would be to encourage the open protocol, not build on top of closed ones…
iMessage does have an API as well, it’s just not publicly available. Hence the current debacle
I never said anything about the protocol needing to be a standard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
> iMessage does have an API as well, it’s just not publicly available.
That’s a hell of a “just” ;)
> It’s weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.
Something can be open and not a standard. Like the HN API.
> The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP) and has been highly critical of services closing their integrations with 3rd party clients (like Reddit and Twitter).
You’re comparing companies who had open and public APIs and then closed them, with one that was never open to begin with. Apple didn’t suddenly tell hundreds of third party developers to pound sand, they made a thing for themselves and never pretended it to be something different.
> Yet the moment it’s an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the above matters.
Again, that’s not because it’s suddenly about Apple. It is because it’s an entirely different premise.
Generally HN and others with similar expertise will applaud hacking and tweaking things for the sake of hacking and tweaking things. If you’d want to do a deeper analysis on it, I’d say it’s primarily applauding the skills that are at display.
This, however, was a bit different. For starters Beeper tried to monetize it, it being someone else’s services and resources.
While many are put off by monetization, no manner the skills involved on the basic premise that it loses its “rebellious” and “counterculture” edge, even more are put off by recurring monetization schemes. Add to that the fact that it is recurring monetization of empty air (or Apple’s resources if you will) and you lose even more people.
Then there’s a subset that simply is of the mindset that they can recognize accomplishments but don’t condone subsequent usage of said accomplishments in the manner Beeper tried to do as opposed to individuals doing it themselves in a grassroots way.
There are also many that fall within a spectrum of all of the above. I don’t speak for all of these people, I’m merely attempting to describe the mindset of some people here on HN and the subsequent lack of incongruity you seem to think exists here.
> I remember the late 90s / early 00s when we had MSN, AOL IM, ICQ and others. People got so fed up with different people using different services that a whole slew of 3rd party clients were available that supported everything. Like Pidgin, libpurple, Bitlbee (an IRC server that supported IM protocols), and Trinity (or something named like that).
I can be wrong here, but I don’t recall any of those efforts trying to charge people $2/mo for using their creation. That alone makes this situation not analogous. Another would be that the ones I recognize from your list were licensed under FOSS licenses, as opposed to being the pet project of a SaaS startup.
> Now we are stuck with vendor lockouts and crappy 1st party apps that are usually little more than a web container.
iMessage clients on iOS and macOS aren’t web containers and are more and more becoming fully native SwiftUI projects so I fail to see the relevance of that remark. As for vendor lockouts, you say that as if it’s a dirty thing.
Personally I take more issue with something that was open and then squeezed shut after everyone’s inside, less so with things that were closed off from the get go and people still adopted it despite that fact, provided later down the line, after significant growth, there wasn’t an abuse of power.
> It’s weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.
What’s weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open source as if it’s a staple value for you, yet here you are carrying water for commercial SaaS startup. Comparing their efforts to the likes of those who created Pidgin and libpurple.
Beeper has done a ton of open source work on matrix bridges, both themselves and through sponsoring other developers. I don't see how it's out of place to compare them to libpurple devs at all.
And by the looks of it, many of their matrix bridges were created by their, now Lead Architect, before they joined Beeper. Those are under GPL so Beeper doesn’t has much choice but to keep them open source.
So it’s kind of like me bragging about doing good for society by virtue of me paying my taxes.
Yes, the clients (both beeper mini and beeper cloud) are closed source. That's their business model - open source bridges that anyone can run if they wanted, then they just make it more convenient if you use their services by hosting it all for you and giving a nice polished client. The comparison was to libpurple devs - bridges are the equivalent of libpurple. This is like if libpurple devs decided to write a closed source client based on libpurple and then charge for it. Sounds good to me if it lets them keep working on the open source stuff.
AOL / ICQ's proprietary Protocol (ICQ moved to it after being acquired by AOL): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol
I don't really care to look up the details of MSN, but at the time Microsoft was not "open" friendly by any means.
I don’t see that as a false equivalency. Plus AOL IM, MSN and ICQ weren’t open either.
> I can be wrong here, but I don’t recall any of those efforts trying to charge people $2/mo for using their creation.
There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free. They were seen as the good guys when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they didn’t want 3rd party app support.
> iMessage clients on iOS and macOS aren’t web containers
I agree but iMessage is the exception in that regard. Pretty much every other messaging app on iOS and Android (and even desktop applications too) are little more than Electron or web views.
> What’s weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open source as if it’s a staple value for you
It’s not. My comment there was that Android, iOS and macOS are all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are more closed than ever. I just find that a little ironic.
> This, however, was a bit different. For starters Beeper tried to monetize it, it being someone else’s services and resources.
I saved this to the end because I do actually completely agree with you on this. At least they’ve done the right thing now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have been a commercial product to begin with.
To me and perhaps others, those elements matter when making a comparison, so it seems we’ll disagree on how equivalent the examples are.
> Plus AOL IM, MSN and ICQ weren’t open either.
I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren’t amongst your examples, presumably because they’re not equivalent to Twitter and Reddit (open to third parties and then not anymore).
But I feel I’ve covered the initiatives “against” AIM, MSN and ICQ and why I think they’re not equivalent to Beeper extensively enough further down that comment.
> There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free. They were seen as the good guys when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they didn’t want 3rd party app support.
So now we’re going from one false equivalency to another?
Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the board are:
A) Grassroots selfless non-profit initiatives vs. corporations, the former having the goal to enrich community as a whole instead of enriching themselves
B) Small for-profit indie developers + grassroots non-profit selfless initiatives which tried to help people with disabilities to participate in online discourse + well as researchers trying to contribute to general knowledge who all were paying a fee for API usage commensurate with market value and financial capabilities vs. corporations who in actuality wanted to kill third party API access but instead of outright saying that and doing so, instead decided to hike their prices to ridiculous astronomical levels in a surprise with not enough time to even digest the changes, all while making duplicitous comments throughout even going as far as reassuring developers right before, only to follow it up with derogatory comments and in one case defamation and utter disrespect to both the affected developers, the people with disabilities that got excluded and their everyday users l, and all but ensuring the death of both third party apps (if not outright bankrupting them) as well as grassroots projects for the benefit of the community as whole
C) A for-profit SaaS startup using fake credentials to receive authentication blobs, violating the CFAA’s computer trespass statutes by accessing another corporation’s servers unauthorized and facilitating unauthorized access by third parties with goal of selling the other corporation’s services for $2/mo
A) came about without any profit motives and in cases, like Pidgin, didn’t even involve reverse engineering[0], but were created with public documents and even help from people of the company they were trying to connect to[1]. Let alone spoofing credentials to circumvent authentication. They weren’t owed anything, but were being selfless
B) Has mostly to do with poorly treating paying customers, closing up something that was open, having benefitted from third parties’ work to grow, and even then the “normie” backlash only really gained traction after abysmal and unprofessional communication by the people in charge at Reddit and Twitter. They were owed something (at the very least decency) but didn’t get it, with a small portion being selfless.
C) Is mainly a company trying to make a buck, wrapping it in some moral stance and feeding it to the masses. They weren’t owed anything and acted wronged.
A, B and C are not comparable in the slightest. All three are wholly different scenarios.
> It’s not. My point was that Android, iOS and macOS are all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are more closed than ever. my point was just that it’s ironic.
I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the opposite. Granted I haven’t looked into this, and perhaps this is because repos are more readily accessible than ever, but I have the feeling there’s more open source stuff available than ever before.
So much so that 9/10 when I’m thinking of creating something because “it would be so darn handy to have” I check if someone beat me to it and often times this ends up being the case and there’s a GitHub repo available with a permissive license that does the very thing I was about to waste my time on.
> I saved this to the end because I do actually completely agree with you on this. At least they’ve done the right thing now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have been a commercial product to begin with.
It seems we can at least agree on some things. That said, I was mainly trying to explain why people on HN might not be fully on Beeper’s side.
Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround they bought (pypush), but didn’t think it was smart of them to try and sell it.
As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing for people to do themselves then I would’ve probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it. But by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper.
In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent “woe is me” by Beeper as well. Whereas I’m more of the mentality that if you’re gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on the chin if it doesn’t work out.
But that’s just me I guess.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/19990210175349/http://www.marko....
1: https://archive.ph/2012.12.08-193508/http://www.forbes.com/2...
Yes they were
> So now we’re going from one false equivalency to another? Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the board are: [...] Pidgin [etc]
I'm not talking about FOSS when I say "There’s been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that weren’t free."
Apollo is a great example of a paid 3rd party app that HN were sympathetic to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312122
> I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the opposite. Granted I haven’t looked into this, and perhaps this is because repos are more readily accessible than ever, but I have the feeling there’s more open source stuff available than ever before.
I agree there is. And commercial operating systems are taking advantage of that too. Yet our walled gardens are more restrictive than ever. Messaging protocols are more locked down than ever (libpurple is a pale shell of what it used to be, Facebook and Google used to use XMPP). There's ongoing legal disputes about Apple's App Store and how restrictive that is. Windows and macOS both treat any unsigned 3rd party programs as suspicious. Our hardware itself is become more locked down than ever too.
It's a better story on desktop Linux for sure. But I'm stuck with Android and iOS for phones because building a FOSS handset is almost impossible (and I've tried!). Even the hardware on modern phones are full of closed binary firmware, SoCs and closed Linux drivers.
But I digress. My original complaint was the, in my view, double standard happening about people shouting for greater openness yet also supporting Apple in locking out 3rd party iMessage clients.
> Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround they bought (pypush), but didn’t think it was smart of them to try and sell it.
> As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing for people to do themselves then I would’ve probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it. But by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper.
> In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent “woe is me” by Beeper as well. Whereas I’m more of the mentality that if you’re gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on the chin if it doesn’t work out.
Yeah I completely agree with you regarding Beeper. That said, I don't think that should really change things on Apple's side. It just means both parties are at fault rather than it being a hero vs villain story. I guess I just view this debacle as more nuanced than a lot of the comments on here would like to claim. People are definitely picking sides but, personally, I don't think either company has come out of this looking particularly great.
In my view it has been a very one sided discussion and I wanted to shine a light on that fact. It definitely isn't a sneer at the wider community (I mean why would I? as a prolific commenter myself, I'd be tarring myself with that same brush!)
So I do not believe I'm breaking any of the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I do want to shine a light on one of the guidelines though:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I appreciate your comment is well intentioned but it's not taking my post in good faith.
If you want to respond to a comment, respond to the comment. If you want to write about some broad sentiment, just write about it without attributing it to the forum or thread as a whole, it avoids all the tangential umbrage and counterumbrage.
I don't see any moderator comments. Though isn't Daniel (dang) the only mod left since Scott departed?
> If you want to write about some broad sentiment, just write about it without attributing it to the forum or thread as a whole, it avoids all the tangential umbrage and counterumbrage.
I do appreciate your point of view, I honestly do. But it feels the only issue you take from my comment was that it had two letters in it: "HN". I could write my comment in a way that infers the subjects without saying "HN" but it wouldn't change anything about the tone nor content of the post. So I don't agree with your interpretation of the guidelines on this occasion because Hacker News isn't like Voldemort -- it's ok to say "HN" in a comment on HN. You just can't be derogatory about the HN community, which I wasn't. And the high quality of the discourse that followed should demonstrate that.
Anyway I don't wish this to become a tangent. Perhaps it's better to agree to disagree. Your point is valuable generally speaking though. That much I do completely agree with you on.
The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP) and has been highly critical of services closing their integrations with 3rd party clients (like Reddit and Twitter). Yet the moment it’s an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the above matters.
This is meta, it's sneery, it's an inaccurate thing to write about any threads since threads change quickly and it's not particularly meaningful since the forum is big enough to contain multitudes of conflicting viewpoints at different times. It's the stuff that gets comments deranked. If you have trouble finding exact moderation comments to that effect, you can email the mods and ask.
You’re off topic and you’re not reading comments charitably (I was not being sneery, as I’ve said repeatedly already). If you have an issue with my comment then downvote it or flag it. That’s what you’re supposed to do as per the guidelines.
Again, I know your comments are well intentioned but I absolutely do not agree with your interpretation here. I think you’re twisting my comments unfavourably and creating meta arguments from them rather than using the peer review systems in place. Which is ironic because you’re breaking those very guidelines you’re trying to uphold.
So let’s just agree to disagree please. Because you are no more of an authority to dictate who’s right or wrong here than I am and arguing with me about those guidelines is absolutely not what you’re supposed to do as part of those guidelines.
unless they’re dumb as rocks they knew this was the end game and this whole thing was a marketing stunt.
While I like Apple, their iMessage shenanigans is classic monopolistic bully behavior.
I firmly believe that if the large tech behemoths were broken down into smaller focused companies, they would create much more value for everyone.
The professional managerial class is optimizing for rent seeking at top levels.
Is this a “true right now” statement or a “true now and always” statement? I have a tough time seeing smaller, focused companies coming up with the original iPhone. And is there a good way all those small companies decide how to integrated their offerings? Xkcd’s “now there are 14 industry standards” comic comes to mind…
These "monopoly" accusations are pure nonsense.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly in the smartphone market, they don't even have a majority market share (less than 30% globally, in fact).
And Apple certainly doesn't have a monopoly in the (secure/rich/whatever) messaging market. In most countries, WhatsApp is vastly more popular than iMessage, even on iPhones.
Saying that Apple's behavior here has anything to do with a monopoly is like claiming WhatsApp has a "monopoly" on sending WhatsApp messages, or Facebook has a monopoly on publishing Facebook posts.
That instantly unlocked a big previously-unaddressed portion of the US music streaming market, likely apprehensive or lay-people. It’s what made Apple Music viable and rocketed up its market share.
The pop-up did not include an option to try Spotify (or Tidal or Deezer) instead.
With a couple hundred million iOS users out there in the US.. yeah. Not okay.
The only reason Apple was able to do this because they own half of an extremely quintessential market. Monopoly (well, duopoly) behavior pur sang.
If Apple said to Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile that they could only sell iPhones if they only sold iPhones and _then_ used that position to bundle other services they would look like Microsoft. I could see potentially on the supply side (buying all of TMSCs most cutting edge capacity) Apple has that power, but on the consumer side they have no price control in any market (Apple products are not a market).
It's a strained argument to say that if they hadn't have put the OEM agreements in place that they would've been completely unchecked by the antitrust authorities in the browser market.
One of the amenities that MegaMarket offers is a water cooler (music app). Then, one day, they decide to change the water cooler into a house brand coffee machine (music streaming) that has the water tap function stuffed away on its back.
All the other coffee brands are in the back of the store in a rack, all next to eachother. Meanwhile, MegaMarket’s coffee is front and center right as you walk into the store. And a bunch of people who’s store route never took them to the back of the store now also try coffee and get used to buying it each month.
See how that horribly disadvantages the singular coffee brands? And none of them have the capital needed to start their own supermarket. And even if they did, their new grocery platform could never build enough marketshare before MegaMarket coffee entrenches itself in the coffee market.
This is assuming every person has a phone, which they don't. Looks like that metric is about 85% of the population. If you factor that in, it's about 160 million iOS users. Is it less than 200 million, yes. But "couple hundred million" sufficiently implies an estimation.
And this is just looking at iPhones, not factoring in users who use iPads or anything else.
From an antitrust perspective, this is the whole point. The antitrust argument would be that Apple is leveraging its dominant position in smartphones/smartphone OSes to gain market power in the messaging market.
It's pretty clear to me that blocking Beeper is an attempt to ensure that iMessage doesn't have a viable substitute.
And not just one, many of them.
The iMessage substitutes often offer more features, work on more platforms and are widely adopted across the globe.
At the risk of making a sweeping statement, and with no data to support it, I’d guess that no one outside of the USA seems to care about Blue Bubble vs Green Bubbles.
Being on iMessage vs SMS isn’t a conversation in my world.
Teenagers that I know all have iPhones, but use Discord or SnapChat for messaging.
I use iMessage for conversations where everyone is on iPhones and Signal for mixed groups. iMessage isn’t the only reason I use Apple products, but it is a reason.
They don’t need to have 100% market share to be behaving monopolistically. And whether you feel the impact of the monopoly is also irrelevant.
> I use iMessage for conversations where everyone is on iPhones and Signal for mixed groups.
I thought you said there isn’t a viable substitute? Who knew Schrödinger’s messenger is a thing?
That's not really how that works. That's a company blocking unauthorized access to a service they provide. BBM used to be only available on blackberry devices as well, they never got sued over blocking attempts from others to use BBM outside of their devices (that I'm aware of).
I am aware BBM is no longer platform locked. Didn't know they shutdown BBM...
This is absolutely monopolistic shenanigans.
Complaints about monopolistic behavior in the smartphone market from Apple are always met on HN with “Apple doesn’t have a monopoly in the global market” - who cares? Apple is from California, the Bay Area is famously self involved, Apple has a majority stake in the US and certainly in California.
But regardless - trying to rebut the argument “this looks like monopolistic bullying” with “but they aren’t a monopoly” isn’t a good argument. Debate why it doesn’t seem like monopolistic behavior, the debate about whether Apple is a monopoly is whataboutism.
It’s a great argument because a monopoly is a very clearly defined thing, not whatever you want it to be.
In the USA, which is where this case matters; Apple has a monopoly on messages. iMessage is the most popular chat platform there.
What happens when you try to write a client for What’s App? https://austinhuang.me/barinsta.html
A 54% market share, compared to Google’s 46% market share doesn’t seem like a minority to me. It’s not a large majority, but it’s definitely not a minority market share in the US. And just for context, the Justice department filed an Antitrust suit against Google in 2020 for controlling 80% of the market share in search[1].
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/the-u-s-dept-of-justice-to-file...
I find it odd to argue that the 4ᵀᴴ most popular (likely less) messaging platform should be forced to open (primarily due to a huge misunderstanding of what monopolistic and anti-competitive practices actually are).
You might wonder why you'd group those three together without including other messaging apps. There's a few factors:
- Every phone comes with a texting app. It's the one that sends text messages to phone numbers
- Within a user's texting app, the underlying technology chosen by the app (SMS, RCS, iMessage) is mostly transparent and automatic. It is not a conscious choice by the user, nor is it something the texting app goes to pains to ensure you understand. And in Apple's case, it is not an option to choose a technology for a specific conversation, you can only configure the entire app to use one technology versus another.
- End users consider it to be an overall unified platform, despite the technology mess. Consumers say "I'll text you", they don't say I'll SMS you.
they don't even have a majority market share (less than 30% globally, in fact)
And, regarding market share from the perspective of competition regulation: Who cares about global. It's all about local (state/nation level).
The reason why WhatsApp does not face any regulatory scrutiny in any highly developed countries with strong competition regulation: It is free on all platforms, including the desktop web browser. Time and time again, we have seen that free and non-free products and services are treated differently by competition regulators. For example: "Free" mobile games that are stuffed with adverts and use deceptive advertising techniques to attract more downloads.
I mean we’re talking about text messaging. Practically everyone on the planet has myriad options. It’s really hard for me to see any consumer harm.
If you just want to lobby the government to make Apple do stuff, that’s fine.
In the case of Amazon, Google - possibly. Their solutions generally tend to be disjointed anyway, so if they were operated by different companies i doubt much would change.
In the case of Apple this would absolutely result in worse products - the defining characteristic is the vertical integration and cohesive ecosystem driven largely by hardware revenues.
If you prefer to use subsidised products where the cost is offset by advertising, where there’s less single-vendor functionality and a larger focus on third parties: that already exists, there are dozens and dozens of Android-based phone brands, there are Windows and Linux PCs, there is also ChromeOS on tablets.
> Side note: many people always ask ‘what do you think Apple is going to do about this?’ To be honest, I am shocked that everyone is so shocked by the sheer existence of a 3rd party iMessage client. The internet has always had 3rd party clients! It’s almost like people have forgotten that iChat (the app that iMessage grew out of) was itself a multi-protocol chat app! It supported AIM, Jabber and Google talk. Here’s a blast from the past: https://i.imgur.com/k6rmOgq.png.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531759
To now:
> As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we can’t win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth.
I really do wonder what they genuinely thought was going to happen...
The fact is these clients never face much in the way of market fitness tests, as they often use the threat of legal action to deter any other clients.
This is not what computing should be. We've pretty much just let every rando user who doesn't really give a care about how this stuff goes down decide things for us.
They support SMS as the standard carrier-supported messaging protocol (in the states, not sure globally). They also have a private protocol for apple devices which they fully own and control. And they have now announced that next year they will be supporting RCS, the next-gen carrier-supported protocol.
I think it's fair to say that Apple has been slow to adopt RCS - but I don't think that makes them the bad guy.
(SMS is insecure, iMessage is a lock in that they use to their benefit, RCS has been on Android forever, etc etc etc)
This is why I think they are the bad guy. They aren't passively benefiting from an iPhone network effect, they are actively and aggressively prevent workarounds that users can do to get around their lock-in.
During the 90s, Apple was the victim of similar behavior by Microsoft, and most tech people correctly vilified Microsoft for this behavior. Now Apple is acting as the villain and we should call that out.
How do you think Apple pays is for that? It’s subsidized through device cost.
I get why people hate the App Store rules and no side loading, etc. but that’s a different situation in my mind.
Why should Apple have to give Android users free service?
Who said anything about free? Apple could charge Android users.
But I have a sneaking suspicion the instant Apple releases a paid Android app HN would be having this exact same discussion, except complaining it’s not free.
It has never been easier to switch platforms, and the gulf between iOS and Android has never been shallower. Android users not having access to one also-ran messaging service is not some sort of fundamental injustice, and Apple is not a villain for building features that they think will appeal to their customers. It's sort of their whole business!
The only reason iMessage isn't available on Android, is because Craig Federighi explicitly wants it iPhone only to lock users in to iPhones.
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?la...
Why should they have to give it to Android?
I just don’t see that quote as a smoking gun. Why isn’t that Apple‘s choice to make?
On the other hand, its because it fucking sucks. It's the largest company in the world (by market cap) which has a revenue of a third of a trillion dollars every year. They can afford to make it free but they don't for their own gain. All their competitors make their myriad of chat apps (that only Americans don't seem to want to use) free and available on as many platforms as possible. The only real reason Apple doesn't is because they want to hoard more and more of their money and become an even bigger company. That just sucks, it's shitty, it's worse for the world. They have hundreds of billions of cash reserves that they don't even know what to do with. I don't give a shit if it's their right or whatever to do it, I still think it sucks and is worse for everyone who isn't a VP at Apple.
Open standards are nice, decentralization is nice, having options and choice and cross-platform things are nice. Having a gigantic company make a choice to create a silo where they're the only ones allowed to use it is not nice.
What I have trouble with are the people who confuse that with existing law say Apple is doing illegal things, which has been sadly common in these threads.
But from an ethical perspective, it sucks. I own Apple devices and Android devices and I have friends on both. Why should my life be more painful just so Apple can squeeze out a tiny bit more money?
That shouldn’t come as a surprise of course, but the Apple reality distortion field is real so I think it’s worth noting.
IMHO, Beeper is the one with an ethics problem.
Ie i can't use the message platform i pay for on many of my devices unless every single one of them is Apple. I use Beeper to use iMessage from my Linux desktop.
You don’t get to say, “we compete just like any other messaging app, we shouldn’t be forced to integrate with anything” while also enjoying OS-level integration to the point where many (most?) people were onboarded into the iMessage ecosystem without even realizing it.
As the Microsoft anti-trust case established, defaults matter.
edit: even a separate preloaded app could still be considered anti-competitive if it’s selected by default, cf. Internet Explorer
The MS case wasn’t all about defaults. I’m not sure any of it was about defaults. The thing that killed them was deals saying you couldn’t offer competing programs or had to pay them regardless of if you put Windows on the machine (so it was a waste of money to ship anything else). Plus changing code to break competitors.
They tried the unified SMS/proprietary message protocol approach with Hangouts but that was short lived. I'm not even sure if it was ever at any point installed by default on a majority of Android phones.
After Hangouts, they tried Allo which did not support SMS and was not a replacement for the default messages app which did support SMS.
The issue with IE, besides the “don’t install Netscape” contracts, was that they undercut Netscape’s price by charging $0 which is impossible to compete with. Essentially dumping. I don’t think it being default was also an issue in the US case, but the 90s was a long time ago.
You’re 100% right about the power of defaults. That was a big issue in the EU which is why MS had to include the first-run browser picker. But I’m not in the EU and didn’t follow that case so unfortunately that tiny bit is all I know there.
Apple made an Apple service for Apple users.
Because no one else has succeeded in the US at taking over a large chunk of the market Apple became de facto bad and loses their rights.
As almost every thread has pointed out, this situation is very unique to the US. Almost everywhere else other apps have taken over. So it’s not like Apple is PREVENTING people from using other apps. People just like it better.
Just like most people like Google better as their search engine. It has a huge market share too but no one seems mad about that. (Their tying that to advertising IS horrible, but not an angle in the iMessage analogy)
And as you said, Apple has announced RCS support. So I wonder if any of this will even matter much in a year or so.
Make no mistake, it’s a meme among gen Z about how if a man has an android phone, they better hide it for at least 3 dates as a woman seeing them having an android phone is enough to get them ghosted on subsequent dates.
There are literally hundreds of articles written about green bubble discrimination in the dating world. Before the knee jerk downvoted, please google my claims and read some of them.
There are plenty of men who have android phones who date women with iPhones.
Even if the bubble color were the same those men would be rejected anyway for not having an iPhone. I guess the government should mandate all phones look the same to prevent further discrimination against those without iDevices.
"She dumped me because I use Android!"
Well, that's partially true...
But, also, some people are shamed for simply using Android as well.
https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
A lot has been written about the perception of "green bubbles". It's well documented.
RCS is pretty old at this point, almost a decade. But its also not as open a protocol as it says on the tin. Android is using a ton of extensions, notably end to end encryption, that are not standardized and the infrastructure is hard to run. Carriers are for the most part using google rcs infrastructure or users are accessing google infrastructure directly because the only relevant RCS users are android users who default to not using carrier RCS servers that don't have the google extensions. So its really an "open" protocol managed by google.[1][2] Somewhat of an upgrade over the closed ecosystem of imessage in principal but RCS isn't the open protocol win that many fantasize about; it feels more like hoping on to a product that's in the late extend and extinguish phase.
1: https://9to5google.com/2023/09/21/t-mobile-rcs-google-jibe/ 2: https://9to5google.com/2023/06/09/att-rcs-jibe-google/
I would not be surprised if there was another patent stew going on with Google's RCS extensions.
The rollout has been pretty slow, fragmented, and annoying.
They want to keep people in their walled garden so bad, that they'll transparently attack attempts to make things better for everyone.
On top of that they’re acting like spoiled children used to getting their way, pointing fingers, because they ‘lost’ the instant messaging war.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23883609/google-rcs-messa...
Their extension is proprietary and unavailable to anyone except themselves and Samsung. This means that Google is making a bad faith argument as they’re not advocating for RCS, but their own incompatible version of it.
https://www.phonearena.com/news/rcs-support-on-iphones-what-...
And Google has said that they plan to switch to MLS [1]. Releasing their own E2EE spec more widely at this point would be pointless.
[1] https://security.googleblog.com/2023/07/an-important-step-to...
Using an analogy from a person I follow on Mastodon: “For $1.99 per month, I will give you a QR code that tells 24 Hour Fitness that you are their customer when you really aren't. You can work out for free whenever you want.”
And:
“The Department of Justice is investigating 24 Hour Fitness for banning the people I charge $1.99 per month for access to all 24 Hour Fitness locations without actually being a member. What a world!”
> Beeper uses real registration data from real Macs and iPhones. These credentials are being used by real people, with real Apple accounts, to send real iMessages.
I doubt it'll have an impact though, and this will likely get shut down just as other methods have been.
this hasn't changed, has it?
When iMessage is under their control (it is their creation after all), they (Apple) can be sure that what is happening is exactly what users expect. We can know that the messages are encrypted E2E without someone in the middle.
With Beeper, there are no guarantees of that anymore. I could be messaging a person that is using Beeper, or some other tool, and the messages are being intercepted by that other tool's server and decrypted there. I'd be _expecting_ E2EE but not getting it.
Perhaps Beeper has the best of intentions, but if you _allow_ Beeper you will need to allow everyone or then it gets even messier than it already is.
When I see a blue message, or know I'm in an iMessage chat I have certain expectations. If you allow outside apps to interface with it like Beeper is doing then my expectations would need to be adjusted and I would no longer be able to trust that what I expect to be happening is always happening.
Beeper's integration is open-source. Anyone can audit it. That means that Beeper requires less trust from its users than iMessage does! Nobody gets to audit iMessage.
> Perhaps Beeper has the best of intentions, but if you _allow_ Beeper you will need to allow everyone or then it gets even messier than it already is.
And if iMessage's protocol is E2E encrypted, then that is already guaranteed to be secure from MITM. The only new attack surface would be the endpoint, AKA the messaging app itself. The only way to guarantee coverage for that attack surface is to audit every messaging app, including iMessage. That is not the case, so there is no change in expectation.
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Your entire argument boils down to this: You trust Apple, and distrust everyone else: therefore, as an iMessage user, you should just throw E2E encryption out the window, and use unencrypted SMS instead!
Beeper is only ONE of the concerns I mentioned. As I said, Beeper may have the best of intentions, but not every solution will be. And if you allow Beeper, you're going to have issues with others doing the same.
iMessage is end-to-end encrypted. Here's how you can MITM it though, if you allow third party tools like Beeper.
For an app like this to work it uses a 3rd party app, because it has to fill the gaps of work being done by iMessage, which means it's handling keys, handling encryption, as well as all the user facing functionality.
How do we know that all of these tools are not MITM'ing the solution? It could just as easily not E2E encrypt the data and decrypt on the server, before sending it to you via the app on your device (an Android device, or web app, or whatever you're using to interact with Beeper as a non-Apple device user). I understand Beeper operates locally, but even in that scenario a malicious app utilizing this same functionality and code could send the decrypted data elsewhere, requiring no server MITM, just a modified client side app.
To an Apple user, we would have no way to tell that the user on the other end is potentially compromised. This _does_ change the trust model, does it not?
Again, Beeper may have the best of intentions, but allowing Beeper to operate would mean allowing others to operate and they may not have the same intentions.
Allowing these types of tools absolutely changes the trust of the solution.
And to be clear, yes, we can view the Beeper code since it's open source. The real concern is other tools utilizing the Beeper code but in a modified way. Just because Beeper's code is open does not mean all solutions are open. And on my end, as an Apple user, I have no way of knowing someone is using a "best of intention" app like Beeper, or a maliciously modified fork of it.
OK. I agree to drop the word, "even". I could have phrased that more generosly. Here's a try: "Did you consider the rebuttal provided in the article?" I didn't want to be redundant by repeating it.
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Let's look at this with some perspective. There are 3 ways this can pan out:
1. What Apple wants: Everyone buys an iPhone and uses iMessage.
In this scenario, the security of literally everyone depends on their trust in one party (Apple), because iMessage cannot be audited. It's also never gonna happen, so there's that.
2. What Beeper wants: 3rd party apps can send and receive messages with iMessage, and all messages are E2E encrypted.
In this scenario, trust is only needed when the app at each end is closed-source. Open source apps can be audited, so conversations between them can be known to be secure. Messages between closed and open source apps must rely on the trust of one closed source app.
This is worse if one or more 3rd party apps is closed source, because that introduces more parties who demand trust.
This is better if all 3rd party apps are open source, because it allows guaranteed secure comms between users of open-source apps. It's a neutral change for iMessage users, because they must trust the same number of parties (just Apple).
3. What we got: iMessage is only encrypted (if Apple is trustworthy) when both users are using iMessage.
This is worse, because iMessage users (and everyone who messages with them) are practically guaranteed to send and receive unencrypted messages. We have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Many of us willingly pay a premium for that. It has its benefits and nobody forces you to lock yourself into their ecosystem. Crying about it when you willingly pick something outside of their defined ecosystem and have some weird expectation of access is baffling.
Cool, stay in the walled garden if you want to. That doesn't mean other users need to be forced within in it with you, too.
The vast majority of people aren't thinking "Wow, I love how Apple takes away my freedom and forces me to use apps even if I might want to use something else", they're buying an iPhone because it's shiny and is what they're familiar with.
Those people deserve to be afforded user freedom and to own the devices they purchased.
Go up to a random stranger and ask how much it would be worth to them to be able to sideload apps or have a bash terminal on their iPhone. They wouldn’t even say “zero dollars”, they would just laugh.
I am a professional iOS developer and I also couldn’t possibly care less.
The average user doesn't give a crap if you can sideload some random app that is only needing to be sideloaded because its likely dodgy as hell.
Also if someones using an iOS device and is skilled enough to need to sideload then they'll know full well they CAN sideload by deploying an app from xcode.
Not a single one of the items you've mentioned has to be a 'walled' experience when interacting with someone not inside the ecosystem, it's bizarre that you'd even think it would be unless you've got very little understanding of how computers work in 2023.
Also your reply suggests you haven't actually understood what I wrote
Your reply suggests you never understood what my original post was refering to.
Network effects absolutely do and Apple knows this. Otherwise they wouldn't go out of their way to distinguish non-Apple users in chats.
One of the things I liked about earlier OS X and Macs was the potential to do hacky things, and the plethora of tools to accomplish just that on your Mac.
Turns out hacking and tinkering has the potential to impact their bottom line, so no more of that without Apple getting in the way to make it inconvenient to impossible.
There are too many hardware and software decisions they have made in recent years to list, but one decision I think representative of the company's pursuit of profit in spite of its users interests is the fact that iPhone cases do not fit models from year-to-year, even for the small refreshes.
[0] https://techland.time.com/2013/11/12/for-one-night-only-sili...