Apple doesn't inherently prohibit programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do that. What they are against is spam and abuse. Therefore, as long as we stay compliant and prevent spam, Apple is not necessarily against this.
1. Since we're not fully self-serve right now, we can choose to only partner with businesses with use cases that are opt-in and non-spam.
2. If we find that one of our customers is using this for spam, we'll reach out to them asap and determine next steps
3. Not necessarily. We support both inbound (user texts the phone line first) and opt-in outbound (we text the user first) use cases
Yeah I agree. Our goal behind this is not to clutter up people's iMessage inbox with more transactional messages. It's to replace the SMS/RCS conversations that people are already having with customer service and scheduling agents with something more conversational and human.
I'd say mainly scale and stability. While people can definitely do this on their own through Bluebubbles or custom Applescript, stability is difficult to maintain, especially at scale. For most businesses, iMessage is not the core product they want to think about and maintain. They just want a reliable API and support/team to talk to so that they can reliably integrate it as a part of their existing business structure.