> “That means that anytime you text your Android friends, anyone can read the message. Apple can read the message. Your phone carrier can read the message. Google… literally, it’s just like a postcard. Anyone can read it. So Beeper Mini actually increases the security of iPhones,” he [the founder of Beeper] had told TechCrunch.
The phone carrier can read the contents of the unencrypted SMS. But the contents of the message never traverse Apple or Google networks.
If an iPhone user's device attempts to send an iMessage, and it fails to send, then the device falls back to sending an SMS via the cellular network (actually, it's not even a fallback - the user needs to long-press the message and resend it as an SMS).
The content of the message never reaches Apple because the device never sends it to them. It doesn't even send the encrypted content because it wasn't able to exchange keys. I'm not even sure it sends the unencrypted phone number of the recipient to Apple...
And certainly, no part of the message is ever sent to Google's network... that doesn't even make sense.
Now, maybe he's arguing "Apple can see it because they control the operating system," but that's a ridiculous argument because you may as well say they can access every iMessage too...