Beeper Mini is back | Hacker News Reader

Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

1,064 pointserohead1,239 comments

> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS.

These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and includes a single non-Apple device, it converts the chat into a group MMS at which point anyone in the group who was added by Apple ID email address starts receiving the messages via email with text messages arriving as text attachments to those emails.

The from/to addresses look like 2345678901@domain with domains such as mypixmessages.com, mms.att.net, mypixmessages.com, icmms1.sun5.lightsurf.net, etc.

It doesn't matter if you have a phone # associated with your Apple ID in addition to an email address. If the person who starts the chat accidentally uses your email address (which Messages makes both very easy to do accidentally and very difficult to notice because Messages hides the actual address behind the contact name) and there's a single non-Apple device in the group, you get to be on the receiving end of a barrage of emails from which you cannot unsubscribe.

When Messages converts a group to MMS, it really needs to make it obvious which recipients are email addresses and which are phone #s... it should either not hide the information behind the contact name and/or for cases where a contact has both a phone # and email addresses, it should favor the phone #.

Sounds like a great UX to me!!!

/sarcasm

I almost forgot that you could MMS to email addresses. Crazy times of old.

You can also usually send a SMS by sending an email to your provider, ie 9495551212@vtext.com, which is the poor man's way to wire up alerting to text the on call if you've yet to implement or afford a solution with proper sms/twilio support

https://www.verizonwireless.com/pdfs/user_guides/How_To_Txt_...

Spammers haven't, that's for damn sure

When I was in high school and not allowed to have a cell phone, I had to use email via Gmail in my PSP's web browser in order to message people. I relied on these addresses so heavily and many people gave me weird looks for "oh btw, I need to know which carrier you have so I can get the right email address"

When I was in high school and not rich enough to have a cell phone, I had to wait until midnight for my BBS to dial the upstream FidoNet host and exchange messages.

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change.

The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.

It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.

Let's imagine it is an engineering problem; how do they solve it? Give a disclaimer that "your communications are not encrypted" and turn the bubbles maybe light green?

Wouldn’t entire thread need to be light green. Wouldn’t android users not see the Tapbacks/threads in same visual UX. It makes sense to turn it off entirely than to deliver a subpar and confusing UX

Actually both tapbacks (for a long time) and reply threads (since the latest iOS release) are both supported in MMS group conversations. The iPhone will send a tapback as an SMS message such as "Liked 'contents of message that was liked'" and other iPhones convert that back into a tapback. Google Messages also does this (and in fact did it before Apple did). iOS does not convert Google Messages style tapback messages into tapbacks though, so iPhone users only have half of the solution.

As for reply threads, when it's used it creates a lot of confusion for non iPhone users and it's not clear how Google Messages and other texting clients can fix it post-hoc. I'm not even sure how iOS reconstitutes it-- perhaps Apple sends some message metadata on the side via iMessage?

I hate all of this. How depressing. As always, the actual people in the system wear all the cost.

Yes but ultimately those people are also responsible for chosing those systems and for electing politicans that allow this kind of behavior.

Well I didn't choose any of this iMessage nonsense, but I'm still paying for it.

Bizarre take. I had no call in electing any politician that has any influence over Apple or Google, nor do I really have the choice to pick beyond the one of the two systems. Neither does the rest of 95% of the world.

iOS does attempt to properly inline Android tapbacks and has done so since IIRC iOS 16. It's not perfect, though: if the tapback isn't one Messages recognizes, then you get it in message form, e.g. ":smile: to 'Have a nice day!'" (only with the actual emoji). It also fails all tapbacks if it's an image, presumably since it can't know which image is reacted to.

Hopefully the experience is improved when they implement RCS, though I'm not sure if tapbacks are part of the spec.

I just tested it in a group MMS with an iPhone user running iOS 17, and alas no, this is incorrect. Neither thumbs up (like) nor heart (love) apply as tapbacks when the tapback originates from android.

Unless there's something I'm missing, only Android users get cross compatible tapbacks.

> how do they solve it?

Release iMessage on Android. If there is a concern that it wouldn't be secure with Google controlling it, then they could put it out on F-Droid, which would simultaneously prove that they're serious and also undermine Google's own efforts at controlling the culture war.

But then they wouldn’t be able to claim that alternative app stores are bad for consumers.

The presupposition was "let's assume it was an engineering problem, how would they solve it". Obviously we can revert it back to a business choice rather than engineering problem rather trivially.

Part of the iMessage security model is that devices are attested. Without this, the service as-is becomes widely open to spam and other forms of abuse.

Yes, there are other solutions to the spam problem. They are nowhere near as effective as what I’ve witnessed as an iMessage user so far. I regularly get spam chats on WhatsApp and Signal.

As we know, the devices are not attested, because beeper works. They're also not attested on old iPhone versions which are valid iMessage parties. Some new devices being bound to the hardware key doesn't change that.

Spam doesn't matter here - same app is used for SMS, which gets spam, so there's nothing new here.

But if Apple wanted to, they'd just sort out a deal that allows hardware signing of iMessage accounts on Android. That's not an unfixable problem.

>As we know, the devices are not attested, because beeper works.

This argument doesn't make any sense.

They managed to figure out a way to create valid attestation data via old Apple binaries. Just because a security (well. "security") measure was circumvented, doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.

Software attestation of hardware is just pointless anti-competitive behavior.

Hardware Attestation however can have an actual security benefit.

If beeper was able to attest without hardware, Apple isn't doing hardware attestation and it's therefore just anti-competitive.

From the way I see it described here, it's more in-depth hardware attestation on newer models. So they're doing the good security thing here, but also not making millions of users' lives worse by outright blocking old phones that don't have the necessary hardware features to perform this attestation. x (5? 15?) years in the future they'll block super old stuff that doesn't meet these security requirements.

That's not how it works. Beeper uses the old binaries, because those come from older iPhones where the hardware signing was not possible yet. It's not circumventing anything as far as I understand, just connecting the way an older iPhone would connect.

I mean, we're splitting hairs on terminology here I feel like?

Apple does not want you to connect to iMessage with non-Apple hardware and Beeper uses old Apple binaries to let you do just that.

That, to me, does fall under the umbrella term of "circumventing" some measures that Apple put in place to stop you from doing that; but I guess I can see the point where you'd object to use of that word?

That's a different argument. I was responding to you saying "This argument doesn't make any sense." to the attestation not being required. Whether you call that circumvention or not, ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

The point was that if you can replicate it in software, then they're not requiring hardware attestation.

Sort out a deal with… whom? 500 different Android device OEMs?

Google. The company that defines what can you call "Android". They can define it to include a hardware crypto chip, signed with the right keys for Apple interop.

I've not received a single spam message on Whatsapp or Signal for as long as I can remember.

Same, in years and years of use, never a single spam message.

I got lots spam on WhatsApp, None on signal.

Guess it's local issue?

i've gotten spam on signal

Was it from a number with the same area code as your Signal number? What was the spam for? Care to share the message if you still have it? I research around spam as a hobby.

Email is in my bio if needed. Thanks in advance.

I always delete it, but 100% of it is cryptocurrency scams.

I have not participated in any cryptocurrency-related groups, so I have always assumed it’s just random.

Ditto. Add signal. Never

Same. Travelled all round the world for years using WhatsApp for local comms and Signal for long-term relationships, and never had spam on either.

good point. there are many other people who received more than once spam on whatsapp (to the point it become a meme in some subreddit).

Does f-droid allow non-open source apps?

No, F-Droid builds almost all apps from source. Even some open source apps don't make it to F-Droid if the F-Droid maintainer doesn't manage to build it themselves on their build server.

Additionally, F-Droid signs every app themselves.

[1] https://f-droid.org/docs/Building_Applications/

This make them a nice target for malware injection.

edit: When the signing is in single entity like f-droid, we have single point of failure.

When everybody sign their own app, we have trust scalability issues -- "trust" just can't scale to everybody.

The reason F-Droid does this is reproducible builds. Which is a big advantage because the code you see on GitHub is the binary you get in your device. It also means it's quite obvious when code is being added because you can reproduce it.

Of course the build platform being compromised is possible but that can happen even with binary distribution.

I thought they only allow you to guild/sign your own apps if it is a reproducible build, and they verify that the version they build is identical to the one you supply.

You can add a repository containing whatever apps you want.

Apple would prefer you buy an iPhone.

That's not an engineering solution.

They're social engineering your circle of contacts to pressure you to buy an iPhone

This kind of attitude (eventually) gets the government involved.

As it did in Europe.

Ironically, iMessage is not that common in Europe. WhatsApp and Facebook messenger won the game here (but they are also targeted by EU).

Anyway, I hope for Apple that they have numbers proving that this bullshit strategy really makes them sell more iPhones because it makes them look really stupid. In any sane society, nobody cares about the color of a bubble, in fact, as an iPhone user, I blame more Apple for the lack of basic SMS features than of the bubble color. I’d be a stupid friend if I pressured my friends to get a blue bubble, that’s insane.

> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change.

This makes no sense. What’s the point in degrading the UX without telling the user 1) why the UX is degraded, 2) what they can do about it? If the point is to steer people towards iDevices, why is it degrading the UX specifically for these people? Honestly, this sounds like a knee jerk reaction where you are convinced that Apple is bad and are looking for confirmation instead of trying to actually think rationally.

> It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.

They could not. They were neither here nor there in terms of platform use and applications availability and poured tons of money into it for no result. Nothing in their behaviour at the time showed that they even understood the problem they were trying to solve.

> What’s the point in degrading the UX without telling the user 1) why the UX is degraded, 2) what they can do about it? I

Because 1) everyone in the Apple world knows, and 2) they want the answer to "What can be done about it" to be "Shame your peers into switching to an iPhone".

And it works. A little too well, especially with younger folks.

I have never once felt any shame for using Android, nor have I felt any pressure to switch to Apple. If anyone in my social circle tried that sort of nonsense, I'd never stop ridiculing them about it.

But I'm also the opposite of a younger folk.

Yeah, I don't have issues either. But in the US, in gen z and younger social circles, the "green bubble stigma" is a very real thing.

I'd be sure this was why, if Google hadn't once tried to get me to use a combo SMS/MMS + some-other-Google-messaging-service app on my phone (by replacing the normal SMS app on OS upgrade—this was on a Nexus phone) that was so broken and janky it was unusable.

Like, it is for-sure the case that a rich, huge, "smart" company can fuck this up a lot worse than Apple has. iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app, at least.

I don't remember Hangouts being broken, but Google didn't keep their attempt to onboard people by making it the default SMS client going very long. To me, that seems like a major error on their part, though I think I'm glad Google didn't succeed in popularizing a proprietary unencrypted messaging service.

It would have been encrypted by now (at least for hangout to hangout chats) had it hung around.

And at least it was cross platform but overall I agree that mobile messaging should be standardized and open. So while the Google messaging strategy has been an abject failure overall, they did eventually trip over themselves and stumble onto the right path.

Google's implementation of RCS isn't very standardized or open. So far, I believe it's only available with Google's client and Google's servers.

> iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app

(Almost) nobody here is challenging that it is, under the condition that you communicate exclusively with iPhone users.

MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!

No, I mean as an sms app. It’s fine for that. Group sms can get kinda rough but I’ve also never had a phone that did it better, including pre-iPhone phones, and a few Android phones. Of course it’s better if you can stay in iMessage, to avoid SMS, same as switching over to WhatsApp or whatever is way better.

> MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!

Yes, agreed, I’ve never seen it not be awful.

iOS Messages is a terrible SMS app!

It doesn’t support delivery receipts (my old Nokia could do that in 2003!), doesn’t let me send texts to a specific number of a given contact, doesn’t let me pick what number I want to send texts from (for dual SIM), and most frustratingly I can’t send an SMS to any contact it believes to be on iMessage.

> most frustratingly I can’t send an SMS to any contact it believes to be on iMessage

You can long press on a sent iMessage blue bubble to reveal a 'Send as Text Message' menu item. It's quite hidden but it's there.

Only if the message didn’t go out to Apple’s servers. That doesn’t help me when I know the recipient won’t be able to receive it (e.g. because they are on roaming or out of mobile data).

If you know you want to send an SMS you can tap it right after you press send, there’s a small grace period. I just did it.

To send to a contact's specific #, there should be a disclosure arrow to the right of their name (as you're entering it) you can tap and then pick which # you want. You can also double-tap a name in the To field.

There’s no visual indication of which number messages are going to and arriving from for an existing conversation, though. Messages to and from all numbers are just collapsed into one thread.

It gets even worse when iMessage and multiple devices come into the mix. It all kind of works for 95% of people I’m sure, but it completely falls apart in some cases with absolutely no way to be more explicit.

Totally agree. I was on Google Voice till earlier this year and that was its own kind of awful. After more than a decade on GV, I ported my number back to my carrier. I keep WhatsApp on my phone to use with a single family member on an Android phone. Another member with an Android phone uses whatever the built-in messages app is. Everyone else is on an iPhone. It's a mess.

The annoying part is, that this ends up going back to the lowest common denominator. Where users that wont install another program end up being the boat anchor dragging everyone else to the bottom.

You can long press on the message bubble after hitting the send button in Messages to switch between sending as iMessage or SMS. Discoverability of UI/UX features on both iOS and Android is inscrutably horrible.

That button only appears when I don’t have a data connection.

Potential workflow, not that I consider this “sane” but rather a workaround:

Swipe up from bottom screen edge to open Control Center, toggle Cellular Data off, send as SMS, then toggle Cellular Data back on?

The ol' three-swipe-salute as it's known in some parts.

Maybe asking siri for help on this is the apple way.

What happens if you specifically ask Siri to send as text message and NOT iMessage?

I can choose what number I want to send from when using two SIMs. It's shown as "From" below the "To" when you write a new SMS using the new message button. In an existing conversation you need to tap on the contact icon and change the "conversation line" there.

delivery receipts = read receipts? They are a setting.

Tap on their name to change the "to" address; here it gives me a list of their Apple ID email and phone number to pick from.

You can enable fall-back for contacts which fail to send via iMessage to instead send via SMS, but I don't think you can send SMS to a phone number registered with iMessage by default without disabling iMessage globally.

Have you tried sending a picture via iMessage MMS? My wife's iPhone compresses every single picture she sends down to like 32kb and converts it to a JPEG. That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off (I'd hate to see what it sends when its turned on). The pictures I send her arrive only compressed down to 700k-1.1mb and retain formatting and even transparency (our carrier limits MMS messages to 1.2mb).

Oh, what's even better is that it tricks the iPhone owner into thinking that a full resolution image was sent. On my wife's end she see's the full resolution original format image in the messages thread, not the blurry 32kb version everyone else gets so she had no idea that this happens.

> That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off

I think that setting doesn’t even do anything for MMS.

The compression level of MMS is set by the carrier, and cannot be changed or even queried.

Yes I'm well aware. What I'm talking about is iMessage doing it's own compression, which is more than what the carrier limit requires, as well as stripping file formatting from images and making them all JPEG. Me and my wife are on the same family plan so we have the same carrier. If the 32kb was a carrier limit, then the pictures I send my wife would be 32kb and just as blurry as the ones she sends me. They aren't, however. They're only compressed enough to where the fit the MMS size limit for the carrier

SMS is too underpowered in 2023

SMS works quite well for what it was originally designed: Short, text-only messages to a specific mobile phone number. Using it for instant messaging has always seemed like a very weird usage of the protocol to me.

The two just have very different semantics, just like how it's generally accepted that email is not a great medium for group chat either.

Wait, there are still places that charge per MMS?

Some countries/providers just never stopped, especially those where MMS never really became popular and was quickly replaced by WhatsApp.

Some carriers/plans don’t even offer it.

30p per MMS - everybody uses WhatsApp, the only time I use iMessage/SMS is for receiving OTP codes.

> The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.

Google Voice has been in maintenance mode for years. It's unlikely that Google resisted adding RCS, but rather there's been no effort to actually do it.

That might be true but they're also dragging their feet with RCS in Google Fi (still only partial support - have to disable Fi cloud sync).

Google fi works fine on messages and uses rcs.

Not if you have cloud syncing enabled - as I noted in my post and just rechecked on my phone to be sure.

Shh don't mention Voice. Google obviously forgot that they still had it turned on. If they remember it'll get killed.

Google voice has a paid version via Google Workspace, so I doubt the service will go away. But I wouldn't bet on the free version staying free, or not losing features forever.

Google domains was baked into GCP and had "enterprise" users.

A service having a paid version doesn't mean anything.

hehe

https://killedbygoogle.com/

> It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile,

Nokia's Lumia phones were so good at one time. The hardware was top notch (including cameras). The software was smoother than android and more intuitive than iphone. It was just a solid platform.

I would buy one in a blink if it was available today in the high end segment. I'd not even be bothered about google's anti competitive behavior wrt youtube and other apps.

Massive shame we lost Nokia and windows phone both due to the de facto duopoly that has taken hold in the market.

I used Windows phone only once, while I tried to find where I can remove SIM card’s PIN on my father’s phone, because he couldn’t find it. It took us a solid half hour, because I never imagined that it’s an application setting.

It wasn’t terrible, but it had its problems.

WhatsApp is that middle ground in some parts of the world.

Upon moving to Europe we discovered that WhatsApp is the preferred way to connect with friends, employees, social groups and schools. It was actually the driving factor in me conceding and setting up a FB account.

Why would you need an FB account?

Sorry I meant setting up an account in the FB ecosystem. Prior to that I didn't use FB, WhatsApp or Instagram.

*Meta

*The artist formerly known as Facebook

I don't think you need a FB account to have a Whatsapp account unless you imply they are the same (which I don't think).

IIRC I have not ever linked the two nor should FB have...

WhatsApp is owned by Meta/Facebook

It hardly matters, almost everyone on earth uses WhatsApp for group chats.

I'm not American and I've never seen anyone use WhatsApp. I only use it to text my family back in Morocco. Facebook Messenger is even more universal than WhatsApp in my experience

Sure, that one is popular too. My point was that almost no one uses iMessage group chats.

That's obviously not true or we wouldn't be having many of these discussions.

It’s clearly a US vs everyone else thing.

Despite your username, I just have to laugh. Millions of Americans use something other than iMessage. Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly.

True but it only takes one or two to become a problem, unless you really have a small circle of friends.

Agreed that I don't get the entire "iMessages is essential". I also have never seen it been used, I'm a zoomer and most of my friends use iPhones, but with snapchat or anything else for group messages. Maybe it's a generational thing!

The funniest part is all the olds (of which I am one) talk for your generation on this topic. Of course anyone who actually interacts with zoomers knows that this “green bubble blue bubble” thing is a media beat up: discord, Snapchat, instagram are what matter to western zoomers for group chats

"western" is too wide categorize for this topic because it's different per country.

Definitely not the case for Americans

It depends entirely on your social circles. That’s why all these discussions about $some_platform being completely useless because of course everyone uses $other_platform are completely pointless. I haven’t seen any of these in which there was any useful information or even a hint of looking things in perspective. It’s only people telling everyone else that no platform is relevant except for their pet app.

I agree, but I find it hard to comprehend the social circles that shun people for not having an iDevice. Why would people choose to use a platform that not everyone can participate in, when there are just-as-good alternatives that are available to everyone? Like, if there's a group chat that doesn't want to include me because I don't have an iPhone, I don't think I want to be in that group.

In quite a few countries, the vast majority of Internet users (in Kenya, 97%!) use whatsapp at least once a month: https://www.verint.com/blog/what-countries-are-the-biggest-w...

In India alone, whatsapp MAU already reaches nearly 50% of imessage MAU worldwide, and rapidly rising.

Source? Of the many group chats I'm involved in, exactly one of them uses WhatsApp.

(I'm American, for context.)

In the US, sure. Very few of the people in Earth live there.

Quite a few people commenting here live there.

You also seem to be forgetting the most-populous country in the world – no WhatsApp there either.

Between China and the US, that's already 20% of the global population unlikely to be using WhatsApp for most of their messaging.

> You also seem to be forgetting the most-populous country in the world – no WhatsApp there either.

However in the 4th largest (Indonesia) everybody uses WhatsApp (at least a few years back) as Facebook offered free data to their services there (internet.org / "Free Basics") whereas iMessage would cost money for data traffic or SMS/MMS.

Thus really different across countries and regions and social circles.

Same for the 5th, Brazil. Everyone uses WhatsApp here and has been more than a decade since the last time I've ever had to use sms (never even used mms).

Most populous is India now - lots of WhatsApp.

But very few of the people on Earth live where you live, either. What’s the point?

People I know in India tend to use WhatsApp. People I know in Europe tend to use whatever shit is popular where they live. Discord, Telegram, FB Messenger, iMessage for those with iPhones, SMSes as a default, you name it. Again, what’s the point?

WhatsApp is by far the most popular option overall and in Europe too. Facebook Messenger and WeChat are also popular.

iMessage is only used in the US.

> WhatsApp is by far the most popular option overall and in Europe too. Facebook Messenger and WeChat are also popular.

And Discord, and Telegram. Aggregate averages are not useful because they mask a lot of very different situations. Even at the country level, just look at this map for example: https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/wor... . And even this map obscures a lot: it does not show social effects, and it only shows the most dominant platform without telling how popular the others are. In these discussions you see a lot of people parroting anecdotes as if they were statistically significant. This is really unhelpful.

> iMessage is only used in the US.

This is factually false, for example. Loads of people use it in Europe as well, even though it might not be the case in your social circles. It is not dominant anywhere, but that includes the US. Looking here for example: https://engage.sinch.com/blog/most-popular-messaging-apps-in... iMessage usage varies from ~10% to ~35% depending on countries (with a lot of countries missing). That’s quite a few million people using it at the very least.

Again, asserting anecdotes that way is really unhelpful.

But how many of apples users live there?

Not that many, considering iPhones are popular in several European countries and in China.

I really don’t think Apple consider iMessage exclusivity that important.

> I really don’t think Apple consider iMessage exclusivity that important.

Then you missed the part where Apple executives explicitly said so in writing:

> "the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage . . . iMessage amounts to serious lock-in." Schiller stated that "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why."

https://www.phonearena.com/news/imessage-locks-ios-users-int...

If Schiller had to make those points in what sounds like an internal debate, and the plan of record at some point was iMessage on Android, then it follows that Apple didn’t see it as that important.

Seems like a decent amount to me:

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/08/29/china-biggest-iphone-ma...

Well, the most and third most populous countries on Earth don't.

As much as I don't like it, I am sure that Whatsapp is the go to communication channel in the fourth most populous country on Earth.

> Well, the most and third most populous countries on Earth don't.

WhatsApp is ubiquitous in India, the most populous country in the world.

I am in the United States. I’ve never used WhatsApp a single time. I’m involved in a number of different group chats across many different organizations and groups.

I live in the UK and have not seen an MMS conversation in about 15 years. This is crazy.

even SMS is seen as outdated here i feel

What do financial institutions where you live use to communicate TOTP codes? Here in the states, it's almost entirely TOTP codes over SMS (via a shortcode).

Usually their app, sometimes SMS.

SMS is outdated in a similar way that email is, it's something you use to receive notifications and messages from companies etc, it's not how you talk to your friends.

Thank you email is still somehow decentralized. I’m really frightened that sooner or later, one of the GAFAM tries to replace it with its own « open » solution.

It’s really not that decentralised anymore. I don’t have anything fancy, I just use a custom domain. About every fifth site can’t send email to it.

I’ve heard that if you have your own server, it’s even worse, to the point that you need to pay for some proxy which helps you avoid such problems, and also avoid that almost everything recognise your emails as spam.

I also use a custom domain. I’m on FastMail with DKIM and SPF configured and I really don’t feel like I have issues.

Whenever Apple tries to add significant new functionality to an already existing app, they screw it up. The combination of SMS/MMS and iMessage never made sense. Neither did the combination of purchased music and Apple Music. Or the traditional phone call with FaceTime.

Some useful history, the AOL/MSN chat wars: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

AOL finally "won" that one by making a buffer exploit in their own client part of the required protocol. Later a court required them to allow messaging interop (as part of the Time Warner merger). They never implemented it.

That story has been playing on loop in a dark corner of my brain the last few days. It's as close to an identical circumstance as I can imagine.

Did AOL really win in the end though?

My youth was in the late 90s and 2000s and I don’t know a single soul that used AOL, ICQ, or Yahoo. I imagine all of them must have been hoping for the reverse at that point, access to MSN.

Everybody was on all three for me. That being AIM and ICQ then later MSN. I don't remember much Yahoo messenger usage, just gaming on Yahoo, but everyone was on ICQ.

Yeah, what? I grew up (in the same era) using AIM and Yahoo, ICQ was a little before my prime. Everyone I talk to about those days used them as well. MSN was fine but AIM and Yahoo were where it was at for the bulk of my early years of instant messaging with friends. At one point a friend even made me an AIM account because I was using MSN and they wanted to chat with me but didn't want to do it through MSN.

Obviously just 1 anecdote but I just wanted to share that my experience and your experience were dramatically different.

Perhaps it’s geographically correlated, I’m from The Netherlands, which would be West+Central Europe in terms of cultural zeitgeist. Would map neatly to the iMessage / WhatsApp divide too, if for different reasons.

Also from NL, was using ICQ at first then everyone switched to MSN. I do remember using AIM a little bit to chat with some Americans. This was the late 90's.

Like today, it was highly regional. The talk about Beeper Mini sounds ridiculous in the UK because literally nobody uses iMessage.

IIRC AIM was popular in America and MSN was popular in Europe.

Correct. Same with South America: everyone used MSN Messenger.

Plenty of people implicitly (and likely unknowingly) use iMessage in the UK, because iPhones are quite popular here.

But indeed no one uses it for group chats. That's what WhatsApp is for.

Back then the networks weren't so locked down to the clients, so it wasn't as big of an issue to have friends on various networks either. I have to call out IRC too.

I definitely look back on those as the "good old days" of chat.

Especially with software like Miranda IM or Trillian, you didn't have to care which network your friends were on, you just had the one client.

I definitely miss IRC too

> ICQ was a little before my prime

Huh? Most people associating ICQ with the 90s is so strange to me. In Russia we used ICQ so much it pretty much became synonymous with the concept of instant messaging itself. That was in the late 00s. Skype was also prominent. Then everyone gradually switched to VKontakte, when they introduced instant messaging and group chats, and then Telegram. At no point did we even try to get into AIM, Yahoo, or MSN.

Fun fact about our ICQ use: almost no one used the crappy official client. For most people it was QIP or Miranda.

Yeah honestly I wondered if my timeline was accurate when writing this. I just recall it being mentioned and people talking about ICQ numbers and never personally having one and thinking "Nah I've got AIM and Yahoo and MSN I'm good"

My friends were all on ICQ and MSN, ca 2001-2007 was when I heavily used those.

Y!M was used by niches as is Telegram to Discord, I found.

Unless you actually sign up you tend not to find anyone using it. But when you do, it all appears out of nowhere.

Same as when you buy a car and suddenly everyone has the same colour/model.

I used Y!M for NeoPets stuff when I was 14, and MSN for school but never ICQ or AIM.

Those time's were specially magical.

In the US everyone used AIM, in Brazil everyone used MSN. Never met anyone using yahoo. ICQ was big before that (mid-90s).

You must have been very young in the 90s because AOL dominated the late 90s. And it carried over into the early 00s with AIM even as people started to drop AOL as an ISP.

MSN was more of mid-00s thing. The 90s were all AOL though. I knew people who used ICQ (it was definitely more of a nerd thing) and Yahoo Messenger too.

Thank you. I've been needing to read something retro like that for a while now. You scratches that itch.

Clients could probably hook/trap a fake buffer exploit for protocol compatibility without the security concerns. This ends up becoming a game of cat and mouse resulting in even more intricate technical workarounds and hacks.

That would be pretty hard in general because you’d have to read the code they sent and figure out what’s safe to execute.

I think one of the underlying issues is that many are now going to be hesitant to even bother with Beeper Mini anymore. I don’t think there is going to be a high tolerance for this game of cat and mouse from the end user perspective

I also don’t think goading apple is going to do much here either. Regardless of the current feelings around apple’s walled garden, they are not going to suddenly keel over and give up on locking out these commercialized attempted to bypass their security

Yeah I was super excited to try it out last week, but then it went down and I didn't receive important messages from my wife (didn't even realize the app was down).

I probably won't try it again until it has a few months of uninterrupted service.

Right now Beeper Mini only works without registering your phone number, and I'd be ok if that's all I ever got. In fact, I hope they make number registration optional if they do get that working again.

I still have my Macbook if/when Beeper is cut off again.

It definitely might be better at the moment without registering your number as then you won't have messages disappear into nothingness if the service goes down again.

I missed a few messages when I switched from iPhone to Android because I hadn't deregistered my number from Apple.

I don't think I'd use my existing Apple ID for this -- probably easy enough to create a new one with a new email.

Number registration is and always was optional on Beeper Mini!

iMessage is reliable, ‘free’ and encrypted. Beeper mini is unreliable, paid, and encrypted. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore to my Android friends.

Is it free? I have it bundled as part of my hardware purchases. Is there somewhere to get it without paying?

The quotations would indicate that he is using “free” facetiously.

They put free in quotes because it is bundled in, I’m pretty sure. It is, from a user point of view, free if you are already buying an iPhone anyway.

I have no idea how to compute the actual price. It really isn’t any better than SMS anyway, so I put the value at $0.

> It really isn’t any better than SMS anyway, so I put the value at $0.

Depends on what you do with it. You can send much higher-quality photos and videos over iMessage than SMS/MMS. You can also do things like play games (chess, for example) entirely inside iMessage.

If you're just sending short messages of plain text, yeah, it's not much of an improvement.

It’s free. The fact it’s only available on Apple devices doesn’t change that fact.

You can only get Apple Fitness on Apple devices, but you also have to pay for it.

Seems a silly distinction. So you're saying Beeper could make paper clips, sell them to you for $2/m, and then give you Beeper Mini for free and you'd consider it free?

Imo the only thing that should be done here is only valid Apple IDs should be able to use this service. Then paying customers are the ones using it. Problem solved, right?

Come on, you can make arbitrary analogies until the end of time but it doesn’t change the facts:

1) you have a device

2) you have software

If you buy the software, it is paid.

If you do not buy the software, its free.

If the software is not available for your device that does make it not free; you just have an incompatible device.

Any other take on this is subscribing to some bias.

Paper clips, are not relevant.

There is a distinction, to be fair, between “free open source software” which is free and you can take it and port it to your device if you want.

…but no one is claiming iMessage is FOSS, and when someone says it is “free”, that is not what they mean.

Is Windows free because it comes pre-installed on your laptop when you buy it?

No. Windows is not free - the manufacturer prepays for the license and it’s built in to your hardware purchase price.

Look up “windows oem” using your favorite search engine.

Right, I know Windows isn't free. My point is, it's the same situation with OS X, and with iMessage. Just because OS X is made by the hardwae developers doesn't change it. Windows still isn't free on Surface laptops, believe me that the OS team gets a cut of hardware sales.

Maybe it seems confusing because OS X isn't sold as a standalone product, but consider how Apple cracks down on Hackintoshes. They definitely consider it stealing.

Hackintosh isn't cracked down on. Commercial use of it is. I had an osx snow leopard partition I hackintoshed and I was trying old HDDs and it booted on my netbook. Most of the times it doesn't work is based on broken APIs or changes that aren't related to osx. 10.8 or 10.7 was the first free osx and the first one that included iMessage.

The difference is that my device isn't incompatible, Apple just doesn't want me to run iMessage on it. They don't just not care, they're actively blocking companies that released clients.

There’s iMessage the app and then there’s the proprietary Apple Push Notification Service. that Apple use in its implementation.

The iMessage app is incompatible with non Apple devices - there is no iMessage app available period outside of those that run on Apple operating systems.

The APN is not licensed for “public” third party usage unless permission is explicitly and expressly granted by Apple.

So yes, your non Apple device is 100% incompatible with iMessage, and unauthorized usage of the underlying APNs is illegal under the Apple Terms of Service.

So if I write an Android app that polls for messages, or uses my own notifier, that's fine by Apple? They'll leave it be?

What?

I never said that. The Apple iMessage APNS is proprietary - and Apple explicitly state it cannot be used without their blessing.

In addition Apple have the right to terminate any Apple IDs that they feel are being used to circumnavigate their approved service access.

I’d be grateful if you’d stop putting words into my mouth here. I’m not claiming any analogies- just facts.

What? Where did I claim that?

You are the one asking if iMessage is “free” (as in beer) software.

It comes with iOS - the license of which is provided free of charge for each user to run on their respective device.

I never made any statement about Beeper - I was talking singularly and only about Apple.

> You are the one asking if iMessage is “free” (as in beer) software.

No, i was asking if it was free in respect to beeper, because the beeper not being free is literally the comment i replied to. I feel like you're looking at my comment in isolation, but expecting me to keep your comment in context - which also seems to be lacking context.

graphe: “iMessage is reliable, ‘free’ and encrypted. Beeper mini is unreliable, paid, and encrypted. I wouldn’t recommend it anymore to my Android friends.“

You: “Is it free? I have it bundled as part of my hardware purchases. Is there somewhere to get it without paying?”

Not sure where the confusion is. Seems from the quoted text you were expressly asking if iMessage was free or not.

If not, what is the “it” you were referring to in your reply? Your initial response did not seem to compare cost to beeper.

I was definitely referring to iMessage. I was just saying that the conversation is about Beeper and iMessage. The comparison was taken place in the quote you posted.

Anyway, i'm just saying that the mints on a hotel pillow are "free" too, but if you cannot acquire them without paying for another service or hardware, they're hardly free.

Best i can give iMessage is that it's complementary. Please correct me if i'm wrong, but almost no one gets iMessage without paying Apple for an associated product to gain access. It's a mint on your pillow.

There’s barely a nuance between “free” and “complementary”.

Both are essentially the same thing.

https://thecontentauthority.com/blog/free-vs-complimentary

I dunno, it just feels some silly definition or thought experiment to define away the money missing from my wallet.

I'll concede all day long that i may be using the wrong definition, that's definitely not my objection. However free is pretty simple. Entrance fees or any price blocking you from the "free" thing is in any practical sense, hardly free. At least imo.

A lot of things are free if you ignore what you paid for in the first place.

Out of curiosity, how would you even define what is free and what isn't? Lets say a snickers bar released an April Fools edition where you paid the standard price, but only for the wrapper. The snickers bar inside is free. Or the silly paper clip example i gave, with beeper mini. Is there some definition that you would see apt to describe these as practically (as in, how people would interpret them) not being free?

It is free even without purchase. I could give someone an old iPhone and they can use it without issue.

Even if old iPhones were free: There’s still a significant issue for people not wanting to carry two phones.

"Cars/TVs/insert-other-thing-here are free, because I could just give an old one to someone!" That ain't how it works bro . . . .

One would say you can watch stations for free over the air even though you have to buy a TV.

A better comparison would be a free over the air station that only works on a particular brand of TV.

Or XM Radio "free" stations that you can only listen to if you have XM radio subscription and hardware.

Is Linux free? I have a computer that won't run it.

What kind of computer is this that Linux doesn't run on, and can't you just make Linux run on it?

Read the post; they've made it free now. They said they'll consider charging again if/when things stabilize.

They said they made ‘beeper’ free, not ‘beeper mini’ free. Unless they combined them since the last post. But maybe they should say beeper mini is free.

All Apple needs to do is send a few scary C&D letters from their army of lawyers and this will be done. If they run the infrastructure for imessage, I'm sure there's something in a ToS somewhere that talks about spoofing device IDs and unauthorized use of their services blah blah Apple's sole discretion.

In theory I love it but in reality it'll be dead soon as Apple has too much to gain from the walled garden they've spent decades and billions building and defending.

A $3T monopolist sending scary C&D letters tends to get the attention of the government.

What is your evidence for this assertion?

Since when? What country?

I'm sure they're quaking in their boots over the prospect of paying a $2m fine a decade from now.

That decade of lawyer fees is much more than $2m.

If it was obviously bogus (think SLAPP territory) then that would make sense, but I don't think it is as likely to get their attention if the offending behavior can reasonably be classified as a potential violation of the CFAA.

(Whether it is a violation or not, I certainly couldn't say, but my point being that there is a reasonable good faith interpretation of the behavior that would not raise eyebrows.)

what is SLAPP in this context?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. In other words, "Sue somebody when they criticize you, hoping the legal expense will make them stop." This isn't exactly the same scenario, but would be similar (in the poster's hypothetical) in that it was a lawsuit meant to intimidate rather than to seek justice.

The problem is that Apple has valid case, because these guys are making money with the app, by using Apple’s private backend services without permission.

Eh, just being really big isn't going to be enough by itself. Apple has just a bit over half the market, they're definitely not a monopoly. The gov't won't get involved.

I've been on the receiving end of this - as an individual maybe, but as a committed startup not necessarily. Rooting for them!

Beeper isn’t using Apple services (at least not in Beeper Mini, their new e2ee iMessage client), and thus is not subject to any Terms of Service from Apple.

They’re publishing client software, which is protected expression provided it’s original and doesn’t infringe any trademarks or copyrights.

The end users are the ones potentially violating the ToS by connecting to Apple APIs.

Apple has no basis to tell Beeper to cease and desist from the publication of software that it is legal to publish.

But as part of developing the application? Can they realistically do that without violating ToS?

Someone said they are embedding Apple binaries for crypto stuff. Clear copyright infringement if so.

They might argue that this is like the inclusion of the Gameboy logo to boot a Gameboy game.

Only in the open source example PoC, not in the proprietary/closed source Beeper Mini. (They are not the same.)

That would be a clear and avoidable error and would get them shut down instantly.

That sounds a lot like the P2P file sharing companies' argument that didn't hold up in court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....

I believe that reverse engineering for the purpose of interop is different and has been found to be fair use by the courts.

They could take it the other way and start suspending accounts that use a spoofed device id. For me that's my main hesitation, I don't want to have my apple accounts suspended for violation of ToS.

Apple doesn’t even need to do that. They can send the DOJ after Beeper.

Many people hear about a reverse entering exception in the DMCA and call it a day. But it’s not that simple.

Reverse engineering is allowed for a very narrow case, namely interoperability between two software programs (for which you have a license granting you legal permission to use), as defined in paragraph 4 of Section 103(f).

The DMCA decidedly does not permit you to use reverse engineering to package someone else's software or service and sell it.

Jurisprudence also established that EULAs that explicitly prohibit reverse engineering supersede the exception granted in the DMCA, see Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]

Apple has explicitly forbidden reverse engineering in their macOS license agreement[1], the iOS license agreement[2], and the Apple Media Terms of Service[3].

Agreement with those terms is necessary to reach the parts that need reverse engineering.

There’s also the matter that the pypush repository seems to include Apple’s proprietary code, which wouldn’t fall under reverse engineering.

Worst of all, even if reverse engineering was allowed, it still doesn't allow you to connect to other people's servers. The Computer Fraud Abuse Act of 1986 explicitly prohibits unauthorized access to computer systems, and the DMCA exception doesn't supersede the CFAA.

A lot of states have criminal statutes that mirror the CFAA.

So, at this point, it wouldn’t be inconceivable for Apple to try and get the DOJ involved.

0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...

1: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSonoma.pdf

2: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS16_iPadOS16.pdf

3: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/

let's be honest. it isn't for security. security is just the hand they wave to prevent people from tapping their walled garden.

I'd be willing to put up with it if it were free, like the good ol MSN messenger / AIM days.

It is free

From their website [0]:

> We currently offer a 7 day free trial, afterwards there is a $1.99 per month subscription. Beeper Mini is available to download today with no waitlist.

That doesn't sound free to me. Am I missing something?

[0] https://www.beeper.com/

The article we are commenting on says they have made it free for now. I just don't think they've updated their main site yet.

Ah, thanks, I missed that (I skimmed until "What happened")!

"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. If you want to keep supporting us, feel free to leave the subscription on ."

I agree that right now, most people shouldn't give this a try. But at some point it will reach a steady state.

Either Beeper manages to make a client that is truly indistinguishable from old iPhones, and gets to exist for a few years, or Apple somehow manages to patch all existing iPhones in a way that makes it impossible to spoof (not sure if that's possible with old hardware that don't have a secure enclave).

> But at some point it will reach a steady state.

I highly doubt that these guys will win. I would bet 5 AAPL on it.

> Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button.

This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to intergrates natively into the system where they are presented as equal peers to iMessage and default phone app.

When I view contacts in the first party Contacts app, it presents message & call as the top options for my contacts. The first time per-contact it'll prompt you which you want to use, with third party options getting equal billing compared to first-party, but after that it'll remember.

Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all.

Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols?

You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

You wonder how anyone survives in all of the world where nobody uses iMessage (which is everywhere except the US). How do people even manage to open WhatsApp? How do people survive this horror!

I have an iPhone (and macbook if that matters) and have no idea what all the rage is about.

Is iMessage the default sms client? It's just called Messages on my phone. What does it offer? Mine looks like the stock android one. I see virtually zero options to do anything else than to send a message. Is it US only thing?

If you only have friends that also have iOS devices, you can create an iMessage group and send messages in it. I don’t know how that works in the US but apparently it’s really popular.

Messages sends SMS/MMS (on a Phone or configured Mac/iPad/Watch), but will transparently upgrade to the iMessage protocol when talking to another Apple user. This has substantially better features over SMS, including network access and the ability to send higher quality multimedia.

If you don't ever want to fall back to SMS, you pick some other app (WhatsApp, Signal, etc).

In the US, unlimited texting became a thing much earlier than in the EU, partly because the carrier and network relationship is structured differently. So SMS is bad but free, and thus a bit more tolerable.

A higher percentage of iPhone users means that more often than not, you'll find your text is using the much better protocol. As a result, many in the US never had to pick a third party to be "winner" via network effects (like say LINE in certain asian countries).

This puts things into a weird state, where SMS and iMessage sort of act like a single pseudo-"product" in the US available to both iPhone and Android users, but where Android users get a way worse experience and where iPhone users get a worse experience when talking with Android users.

Which is where I get to personal opinion, and say this is mostly Google's fault. https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/21/22538240/google-chat-allo... . As owner of the other major platform and with the ability to release a compatible chat app for iPhone, they've had and squandered every opportunity to own the space.

Thanks for the details and background. If I recall correctly, back when I had an Android, every app (Signal, Telegram, Messwnger I think) wanted to become my default messaging app. I'm assuming to do basically do what you are describing. Google had like 20 messaging apps over the years, but they never combined ot or I guess other vendors went with stock sms-only one instead?

Android has a concept of a default SMS client, but not one of a default messaging app that isn't an SMS client. Signal, for example used to include an SMS client but no longer does.

Your summary is right but is missing one key detail. In the period since iMessage was developed, every single direct messaging and group messaging app that got to scale has been x-platform across Android and iOS, and many of them have even been x-platform to web/browser clients and/or desktop apps across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Namely: Telegram, Signal, LINE, WhatsApp, Discord, among others.

That is, all except one.

The one exception is, of course, Apple's iMessage.

> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

And on top of this, other voice apps are merged with the list of incoming calls, e.g. discord calls show up in the same list as phone calls.

This really highlights the intentional degradation of chat behavior. From a pure user experience standpoint, Apple’s own product does not meet their own philosophy and guidelines applied to other categories of app.

Or just one app that spoke a single protocol that all phones implement, like SMS used to be. That way you wouldn't have to install and juggle 20 apps to cover all of your friend's preferences, and manage which type of messenger they prefer over time.

Because then SMS would never progress, and we’d all be stuck with 140 characters under the hood along with optional subjects and zero security.

There was no push for RCS until iMessage came along.

Internet Explorer introduced a lot of new capabilities to the web platform. Those features were highly innovative and we take them for granted today. But for many of those features they did not do the work to get them standardized, or under-standardized them. They did not work with other vendors to get them implemented. Apple's automatic replacement of SMS is similar and had the same result: vendor lock in.

Also it's worth noting that RCS originally launched in 2008, a year after the iPhone and iMessage launched in 2011. Many features we expect from both iMessage and RCS today were not present at the time, but a next-generation messaging spec was there- Apple chose not to engage with it- which is too bad because at the time Apple could have helped to defragment the implementations and make it a better specification. The carriers fumbled pretty hard on compatibility, also probably because they saw it as a way to produce vendor lock in for their customer base.

FWIW, my understanding was that Apple did try to engage with carriers, but there was't interest in turning RCS into what Apple wanted (for instance, adding E2EE). AFAIK 15 years later, RCS still hasn't started to define E2EE.

Interesting, I tried to find a reference to this online but was unable. If you can find a link to such a statement let me know.

What's kind of interesting about this to me is that Google was able to add encrypted messaging on top of RCS without the help of carriers (and it's not just because they develop/host Jibe, the most common RCS server side implementation-- E2EE messages can be sent over any RCS server/relay from what I understand). They just use a special mimetype and some base64 encoding and a custom identity server for exchanging keys. All things Apple could have done with RCS back in 2011.

Google's whitepaper on their E2EE: https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

Only Google Messages supports end-to-end encryption. E2E is not part of the official RCS spec, instead it's Google's extension.

I'm well aware! At this point I think everyone is, as it seems to come up in every sub thread!

That doesn't change anything about what I said.

What was also really revealing is Signal’s operational cost breakdown. Their biggest cost is activation texts, because providers have lost consumer SMS as a milk cow, so they’ve now started to charge insane rates for business texts.

With RCS or iMessage they cannot justify charging for these.

Both iMessage and RCS require carrier services to register phone numbers. In iMessage' case it is an activation SMS text.

Well that's their own fault for requiring a phone number. They could just support creating accounts with username and password and they would never have to send texts. It would be way better for user privacy too.

RCS existed as a concept, but was extremely flawed and underfunded. Carriers had zero interest in changing from SMS at the time. Apple tried, and gave up, instead choosing to build iMessage. You may recall that when it was announced, it was actually touted by Steve Jobs as an open protocol; that never materialized, largely because Apple realized how massive of a lead they had on every other handset maker because they weren't beholden to the whims of the carriers, who had decided not to move on RCS for many years.

Well, making it a standard would not have required capitulating to the admittedly terrible carriers.

Those are just a bunch of unproven claims. An alternative theory is that Apple rejected RCS in favor of iMessage because vendor lock-in boosts their US profits.

I was alive and recall the reporting at the time? I don’t have the energy to find sources right now but my memory, while not perfect, is pretty certain this isn’t the Mandela effect.

I also worked at Apple in 2008, and recall the discussions then too.

I don't believe Apple ever said iMessage would be an open protocol. It was Facetime that Jobs announced as an open protocol (as a surprise to everyone else inside of Apple), and supposedly that never materialised due to patent BS.

You’re right. I stand corrected. There was discussion about it internally but I forgot that iMessage didn’t make it out as “open” by the end.

If vendors were required to conform to standards, I suspect we would have had something like RCS a lot sooner.

> why can't we have the same for messages?

I wonder if e2ee makes this difficult.

> You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

Because there are standards there - SMTP and MIME and HTML for email, vCard for contacts.

For the contacts app, whatever fun graph or RDF or whatever format you use for contacts, your extension has to provide contacts via the surface of the SDK, which luckily had vCard to influence it. That may mean that the contacts app cannot support round-trip edits of those contacts, and you need to go back to whatever source to change things.

Same with calendar events - applications can expose a calendar, but this is typically not editable and you need to go back into the application to change things (e.g. to remove a session from your calendar, go into the conference app and say you no longer intend to attend it).

The message apps typically have none of this. They don't have commonalities in terms of identifiers (and may all claim authoritative use of say a phone number, with no approval of the carrier). They have no consistency in formatting. They have a varying set of additional features, none of which are designed to be compatible (e.g. person-to-person payments in Facebook Messenger vs in iMessage). They may also support extensions by third parties, business accounts with custom routing and workflow, etc.

XMPP and later Matrix tried to create standards around this, and for XMPP there was a brief time we thought there'd be buy in by larger parties like Google and Facebook. I'm very curious to see if we see uptake in ActivityPub, or if the same product/market forces make its popularity transient as well.

> you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols?

There's nothing that does that though so this seems a bit of an odd statement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software) ?

I’m curious what their best-case outcome is here. It’s fully transparent at this point that Apple has no appetite for a third party iMessage client on any platform and will take whatever technical steps needed to prevent this from happening.

I’d wager heavily that even if Beeper plays cat-and-mouse to the point where they’ve exhausted Apple’s budget for blocking them and somehow managed to avoid Apple’s legal team putting a stop to things via other channels (very unlikely), Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.

It’s easy to read this as a pure publicity stunt on Beeper’s behalf, but that’s not what I’m getting from the tone and content of these announcements. And I also don’t think the market for a paid all-in-one chat app is large enough to justify the expenditure that this iMessage for Android project represents, if the endgame is ultimately a PR stunt.

They seem too smart to realistically think that Apple is going to just shrug and let them continue unbothered after a few rounds of back-and-forth, so what are they playing at?

Best-case outcome is that Apple decides engaging in an arms race with a motivated competitor isn't worth the time or effort and they enable some (probably limited) interop.

I can imagine a "blue-green" type of message that's encrypted but not from an Apple device; Apple keeps their status symbology and users on both ends get E2E encrypted messages to and from Apple device users without Apple users switching to a third-party app.

Apple's never had to confront this because nobody's had this much success smashing the walled garden on iMessage before. If Beeper is persistent and good enough, they'll have the first foot in the door of such an outcome.

Worst case is Apple keeps escalating the fight knowing that Beeper can't outlast them. Everybody loses in this situation; Beeper and Apple both burn a bunch of money with no benefit to anyone, iMessage users see people popping into and out of chats because Apple keeps blocking them, and most non-Apple users continue sending unencrypted SMS messages because Apple users won't switch off iMessage.

Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary. Allowing strictly controlled interop with non-Apple devices doesn't change how good iMessage is, it only dents the ecosystem's most superficial status symbol.

I'm rooting for the better outcome but expecting the latter.

> Worst case is Apple keeps escalating the fight knowing that Beeper can't outlast them.

I feel like this is in Apple's DNA. Perhaps Beeper is lucky that Apple needs to support a lot of legacy devices and they might not be able to fully plug this hole without creating a big support nightmare.

Please explain to me why that wouldn't be in anyone's interest?

Why should I pay costs for server uptime and maintenance for clients that I a) did not authorize and b) did not pay for me keeping up my servers and c) actually accept that a third party is getting money for providing said access to my servers?

I really don't get how Apple is to blame for protecting what they pay for.

Apple also uses a lot of infrastructure that they don't pay for on their devices. Everything from open source code used in Darwin to public internet infrastructure. Besides that, if that is the reason that they don't want to offer this, they could offer a paid subscription for Android users.

The reason they block this is not that they cannot afford the infrastructure, it's peanuts for them. It's because they want to continue maintaining the schism in the US where Android users are stigmatized for green bubbles, pushing them to buy iPhones. (AKA exploiting teenagers' insecurity for profit.)

Apple has every right in the world to use open source software if they comply with the code's license. The Beeper client has no right to interact with Apple's servers in a way that involves faking an Apple authorization.

Apple has chosen not to provide an iMessage client. The mere possibility for one existing does not mean Apple can be forced into providing or tolerating one, given that it involves cost on Apple's server side, no matter how small that might be to them (how can you even tell?).

The fact that US teenages stigmatize each other has nothing to do with Apple's business. Apple has always advertized iMessage as an Apple-only messaging platform. If teenagers are to be protected here, it is up to US legislation to create a law that prevents the undesired behavior. Until such a law is present, what Apple is doing is legal, and what Beeper is doing is probably not, they're certainly creating server upkeep costs that they do not pay Apple for, despite Apple telling them clearly not to do so.

>If teenagers are to be protected here, it is up to US legislation to create a law that prevents the undesired behavior.

The Sherman Antitrust Act is broad and vague. It's practical definition depends on common-law precedent. While the system may seem baroque, it offers a kind of stability that has made common-law jurisdictions the preferred arena for most international business across the world. Hence, this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the relevant competition law.

> The Beeper client has no right to interact with Apple's servers in a way that involves faking an Apple authorization.

I'm not completely down on the implementation details but is there really anything "faked" here. If they have a service that client and authenticate against using an Apple ID and I just use a different client with my Apple ID then nothing is "faked". It's just implementing the protocol.

> Apple has chosen not to provide an iMessage client. The mere possibility for one existing does not mean Apple can be forced into providing or tolerating one, given that it involves cost on Apple's server side, no matter how small that might be to them (how can you even tell?).

I agree. But if they're going to provide these servers on the Internet without any sort of paid authentication and I can utilize them with an alternative client then I'm going to do that. They don't have to tolerate it.

I also use an adblocker when I browse the web.

Who do you think maintains all that OSS in Darwin?

What OSS - why do we have homebrew - Apple stuff is years behind current ever since GPL V3 murked the waters.

> I really don't get how Apple is to blame for protecting what they pay for.

I don't think Apple is going to get bankrupt for forwarding a few SMS, they'll be fine don't worry.

"They can afford it" is a terrible argument. There's literally no upside for Apple providing their infrastructure for free to third parties, particularly given that it's a potential vector for flooding their customers with spam.

Up until quite recently, most phone carriers metered the number of texts you could send per month and then charged extra. Many still charge per text when you're roaming overseas. Perhaps Apple could offer API access on commercial terms to third parties but that's their decision.

I really don't think anybody should think about their decision, they are too big for fully owning the platform.

Additionally, iMessage is full of scams and spams already, it's not hard to buy a box of old iphones and turn them into spam relays and that's exactly what is happening now.

> Why should I pay costs for server uptime and maintenance for clients that I a) did not authorize and b) did not pay for me keeping up my servers and c) actually accept that a third party is getting money for providing said access to my servers?

Because you designed the system in such a way that interoperability was impossible without non-customers using your servers?

Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary.

100% I have been an iPhone user since 2009, but for me the most likely reason to go to the competition is not if it gets iMessage (I don't live in the US). The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what has changed or improved besides the camera, the underused dynamic island, and USB-C [1]. And USB-C is nice, but pretty much a letdown because they capped it to USB 2 for market segmentation and it still has excruciatingly slow charging. At least on the Android side, for better or worse, interesting stuff is happening: from Fairphone's phone that is repairable with a single screwdriver, foldables (finally a phone that is small and big), Samsung S-Pen, to Nothing's slightly whimsical back LEDs. Also, pretty much every phone above 300 Euro has a good OLED screen with 120Hz, whereas I am still looking at 60Hz (because segmentation).

At any rate, Tim Cook will fight this nail and tooth. By now it's very clear that he has a blind spot where he thinks Apple is entitled to some things and is not sensitive to different viewpoints in other cultures/legislations. He thought Apple is entitled to a 30% cut. But he pushed it so far that the EU will regulate them. Now they have to offer side-loading and open the iPhone to alternative app stores. This will lead to segmentation of the platform, because some apps will only be available in app stores with better terms for the developer.

Ideally Apple would stop Beeper in its tracks by releasing an Android client themselves, because then they could dictate their own terms (orange bubbles, feature segmentation, etc.). Now they open up themselves to the risk that regulators in some regions will require opening up iMessage.

[1] Of course, the spec sheet contains more improvements, like a better SoC, but it is barely noticable.

> The most likely reason is that Apple has become utterly boring when it comes to innovation. I recently purchased an iPhone 15, coming from the iPhone 13, I can honestly not say what has changed or improved

Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you?

Is there some law of nature that allows humans to achieve a rate of technological advancement that is beyond what “bores” you?

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say?

Are you saying that I am not entitled to progress? If so, I am not saying that I am. I am just saying that (IMO) some other companies are now more innovative and that should worry Apple more. Short term they can try retain users by locking them in, but at some point people will buy alternatives because they surpassed Apple's products at their price points.

Apple's whole schtick is that they exercise restraint on design so that it works well across many constraints, not just optimizing for one, such as newest or best feature.

I am sure engineering these devices involves lots of compromise, and maybe they did not find sufficient benefits to outweigh the drawbacks for those other features.

Maybe it is possible they swing the pendulum too far into the cautious territory, but given their track record, I would not bet on it.

I mean I kind of like "boring"?

I upgraded from a 11 Pro Max to a 14 Pro Max last year and it was my phone, but better.

To be honest, given Apple has already committed to adding RCS support next year, the market for this thing is limited anyway. Apple has said they won't implement Google's encryption extension, but your average person doesn't care much about that anyway. They just want to be able to group chat and send media to their friends.

> Of all the moats Apple has, iMessage's "blue bubble" is by far the most arbitrary. Allowing strictly controlled interop with non-Apple devices doesn't change how good iMessage is, it only dents the ecosystem's most superficial status symbol.

I've said this before and I'll say it again here. No Apple device user I've ever met thinks of the blue bubble as a status symbol. This is only something that Android users for some reason covet. In fact I've never heard it mentioned by any Android user in real life. This is only an internet thing that a tiny segment of people, like those who post to hacker news, seem to care strongly about.

I personally couldn't care less if Android got iMessage or not as long as it doesn't force any changes on the Apple side of things. It doesn't prevent me from communicating with Android users in any way currently. I also don't want to see any spam start to appear via iMessage, as there is currently none of it.

I think they’re a lawsuit startup, as in funded in service of the speculative opportunity of favorable court case and/or political outcomes stemming from their intentional behaviors. Think Uber being funded to set case precedent versus taxis, in order to pave the way to deprecating humans taxi drivers in favor of robots. VCs love speculation and Beep’s PR has been quite effective at riding the coattails of pre-existing beliefs to push for their desired legal outcomes, from which they would profit.

The best case outcome is to get publicity leading to US and EU antitrust regulators to file a lawsuit against Apple, both of which Apple loses. The conclusion of this lawsuit is that not only must Apple allow access to iMessage, they also must allow changing the default for every component of iOS - messaging app, browser, app store, let you replace Siri with other voice assistants - and to lower the 30% app store fee to 10%. Same rules apply to Android.

Okay, that might not be likely, but you did ask about the best case outcome.

US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years? I’d buy the EU stepping in to mandate interoperability though. I’d welcome that!

But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

Many of us on this site think modern hypercapitalism, the US system, and VC financing are basically evils, and are here for the general tech content. US regulators have been captured by monied interests, so rooting for the EU to do the job the US government won't is the best we can currently hope for.

> US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years?

United States vs. Microsoft Corp, 2001? [0]

And ongoing: United States vs. Google LLC (2020) [1] and United States vs Google LLC (2023) [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2...

Edited: formatting

> United States vs. Microsoft Corp, 2001? [0]

As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal.

> And ongoing: United States vs. Google LLC (2020) [1] and United States vs Google LLC (2023) [2].

Ongoing, so a bit hard to count these as evidence of successful market regulation.

Overturned on appeal but MS was fined heavily over the years using the same justification. The one I remember off the top of my head was the WMP fine[0].

If you have an OS, everything within should be open for competition and courts have generally ruled as such for years.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2007/09/17/14465160/eu-court-defeats-mic...

> As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal.

So the law says "Don't do behavior X", the government takes you to court, there is a judgment, you appeal, and win the appeal.

I'm not sure "dismissed on appeal" means "this isn't working as intended".

Successful market regulation includes investigating issues, prosecuting them where there is reasonable grounds to do so and it also includes a determination (either in investigation or in court) that something is not an issue.

> But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

European here. From my POV it seems as if the USA have forgotten that for a truly free market to exist, there needs to be serious oversight to prevent capitalism from devolving into "corporate Darwinism" - aka the strong ones staying strong because they (b)eat all the competition by being so strong in the first place or because they impose their externalities upon everyone else.

There is many an argument to be had if a free-market system is better than one more oriented on the government running things (obviously, I'm in the latter camp), but the problem is y'all don't have a free market at that point.

Where are you coming up with these theories?

A capitalist economy needs the government for some very key laws like upholding private property rights but how does that extend to "mandating interoperable message systems"?

> Where are you coming up with these theories?

By simply looking at the general state of the US economy that has lost competition across the board over the last decades as large companies consolidated to form extremely large behemoths that dominate their respective markets (e.g. Boeing for aircraft, Microsoft for computer operating systems and office software, Meta for social media, Walmart for groceries, Google for search, Cargill/Tyson/JBS in agriculture, AA/Delta/Southwest/United in airlines), use both legal and illegal (such as wage collusion) tactics to cement their marketshare, and extract ruinously low purchase prices from their vendors. This shit used to be different, with lots of competition and resulting innovation, not even a few decades ago.

> A capitalist economy needs the government for some very key laws like upholding private property rights but how does that extend to "mandating interoperable message systems"?

Easy. Apple has a very popular product that they (ab)use to push its users to push their friends to get themselves iPhones. Breaking up their stronghold over iMessage would allow Android users to communicate on their devices with people who own iPhones, and it would lead to a flurry of competing messenger applications.

The definition of "free market" includes being free from monopolies.

If the government wants to maintain a free market, that means they need to step in and prevent monopolies, which includes preventing anti-competitive behavior.

Apple is being very anti-competitive with iMessage. It's not just the blocking of Android clients, but the fact that Apple will not let you use any other SMS app on iPhone, so users are locked into iMessage.

The government has done a dandy job enabling tech monopolies by making copyright and patent law so draconian.

Also European^wfrom the european area (I think you get lynched here if you say that after brexit), and I completely agree. But it seems an awful lot of USian cheer for “free markets” only when it is giving the specific outcome they personally want, and I think you should mostly approach these “US Company” issues without the expectation of a Europarliament-ex-machina solution.

How would interoperability and end to end encryption work together?

There's no technical reason why services could not interoperate and still provide end-to-end encryption.

The same way HTTP+SSL/TLS or OpenPGP/SMIME work: by standardization. No matter if you run Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, cURL or your own client, you can connect with end-to-end encryption to any HTTP server with any kind of SSL frontend. For email, it's just the same - any client communicating with any other client implementing the respective standard can do so with e2e encryption.

If we’re talking best case outcomes, then why settle for 10%? 0%! Free distribution for everyone.

Yes! We don't need any moderation or policy enforcement, viruses for everyone!

You have a garbage sandbox if you can get viruses that easily. People expect much better from modern operating systems.

By viruses I don't only mean them in the classical sense, but also apps that steal your data, apps that mislead you, apps riddled with ads everywhere. That's the future if you want app stores with no oversight, and you will have app stores with no oversight if you put 0$ as the budget for managing the stores.

Today iOS doesn't allow running apps that were not vetted by Apple. And yet you can find loads of apps that steal your data, with ads everywhere. All approved by Apple.

In contrast, Android has multiple app stores that exclusively host open-source, non-spyware and ad-free ads.

> ad-free ads

The future is here!

I have found the overall design aesthetic and user experience to be tremendously worse on Android however, and with a lot more ad-riddled apps.

God I miss F-droid, hope EU makes apple allow them in soon

That doesn't mean there will be an ecosystem of ethical FOSS app developers though. That will take much time to develop and it only being available in the EU will limit its growth. And you'll probably still have to invest in a Mac to compile for iOS.

I think the excellent FOSS apps ecosystem will remain exclusive to android even after Apple is forced to open up.

Or even Apple paying developers a cut of iPhone sales, since apps provide so much value to the hardware ecosystem.

And maybe a pony.

Apple is THE consumer tech company in the USA. Its their darling. The only way the USA will rule against Apple is that if they are losing them money elsewhere.

Not to mention that virtually the entire ruling class in the USA has iphones and are largely tech illiterate so incapable of understanding nuance. Add some big lobbying money from Big Gray and Apple seems pretty safe

The actual best case outcome is consumers become increasingly educated on these issues and use the market to not reward Apple for these practices, rather than relying on the coercive apparatus of the state that easily falls victim to corruption and regulatory capture, until such the time where we can have an actual functioning government again that isn't strangling small businesses, close the revolving door and get money out of politics and, yeah.. pigs flying and all that.

I don’t think relying on consumers to “not reward” anti-competitive behavior is a good strategy.

I own several Apple devices primarily because the UX and ecosystem is so far beyond anything Android offers (in my opinion), that I’m simply not willing to switch. Of course, Apple’s anti-competitive behavior is a big reason for that.

But I’m not willing to hurt my own daily interactions with the tech that enables my life just because the US Government isn’t willing to do its job.

I am the opposite of you, in that I refuse to buy Apple products, regardless the degraded UX I experience because of it. I will gladly suffer with a worse UX in order to vote with my $ and support vendors that align with my principles.

But I fully agree with you on this. It would be ideal for consumers to change, but it's not going to happen and it's not reasonable to expect it or demand it IMHO. If we rely on consumer behavior then things are only going to get worse and Apple more entrenched. Machiavellian behavior in business works. We have long known that individuals making microeconomic (e.g. personal) decisions can have a negative macroeconomic (e.g. big picture) effect[1]. I don't think anything will change for the better if left entirely to the market.

[1]: Tragedy of the Commons

I would hope that this “best case outcome” also comes with regulations to keep other giants (mostly Google) from marketing and cross-promoting their way into dominance on iOS, creating monopolies in the process.

For instance, Google apps shouldn’t be able to drive Chrome installs by presenting a sheet offering to download Chrome every time I tap a link in them, as they do currently.

This happens to me constantly when I use google search in ios safari.

Chrome’s quality is what’s usually cited as being the primary driver behind its rise to its current position of most popular browser, but the reality is that Google’s intense marketing is at least as responsible. In-app prompts, prompts in Google search, and Chrome getting bundled in installers for every other Windows app were big contributors to its momentum.

Of course it becoming the default browser on the majority of Android devices and Google web apps underperforming in other browsers also played a role but that’s a bit of a different topic.

I have no doubt marketing played a role, but Chrome and Chromium-based browsers were the only ones with a multi-process architecture for over half a decade after Chrome's launch. That meant a bad web page couldn't crash the browser or block the UI, which used to happen frequently on other browsers.

Firefox eventually caught up, but had lost much of its userbase and mindshare by that point.

WebKit went multiprocess with the release of WebKit2 around 14 years ago, with the difference being that the multiprocess architecture is part of WebKit itself and thus easily reusable — just embed a WebView in your app and you have it. This contrasts to the Chromium implementation where multiprocess is handled by Chromium rather than Blink, meaning to get multiprocess you have to ship the whole of Chromium and can’t just embed Blink.

That said this really only relevant for Apple platforms and Linux/Android, unfortunately. WebKit for Windows is somewhat in a state of disrepair.

Microsoft does this with Windows links, to the point it opens edge despite my default browser being set to not edge.

The insidiousness of them all is frustrating

> and to lower the 30% app store fee to 10%.

In danger of being an Apple apologist, the app store fee for the vast majority of sellers is 15%.

Only now, because they were forced to lower it. There is nothing stopping them from raising it again, once the prospects of antitrust prosecution disappear.

When were they forced to lower it? It seems like you are saying they decided to lower it

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/18/21572302/apple-app-store...

For context: Epic launched their lawsuit in August 2020, fighting the 30% cut, and less than 3 months later Apple lowered it to 15% for small businesses. Absolute coincidence, I'm sure.

If it's not in the ruling, it's their choice, maybe they read the room...

I guess that depends on your definition of "forced". In my recollection, the wave of bad press was so big that they really had no choice but to give ground.

Like I said, maybe they read the room...

...which is still more than 5x the normal rate for payment processing.

Reducing your price gouging from 10x to 5x isn’t exactly a kindness.

Clearly, App Store is not just a payment processor, stop misrepresenting the situation.

15% seems reasonable. They're not only charging to cover payment processing, there are salaries to pay for those developing the app stores, the human app reviewers (virtually non-existent in case of Google Play), storage, bandwidth, etc.

Granted, both Apple and Google also earn money from ads (shame on Apple's part). In that case I can sort of see the justification to lower their cut to below 15%.

Even the normal 3% overhead for credit card payment flow charged without these monopolistic practices isn’t reasonable. Even 0.1% allows the bloodsucking rentseekers a gigantic margin, as their marginal costs are approximately ZERO.

15% is pure “you have no other options” robbery, expanding on the same thing pioneered by Visa/MC/AmEx.

All of the expenses you listed are a) trivial and b) already paid for by iPhone purchasers. Apple is a hardware company with the highest margins in the industry.

They’re double dipping, and gouging whilst they do so.

The storage and bandwidth costs of the App Store are the size of a rounding error at this scale. Furthermore, the App Store is a marketing tool and value add for the iPhone, and benefits them directly. To expect app developers to pay for it is insane.

Ironically, if Google were ever allowed to replace siri on iPhones, I would probably never buy an android again.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-chatgpt-as-a-siri-s...

https://www.howtogeek.com/713498/how-to-launch-google-assist...

I remember doing something like this a while ago.

Siri is so incompetent it's basically unusable. I would love if they were forced to allow 3rd party assistants.

How is this an actionable anti-trust issue?

iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally.

In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms.

Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service?

The purpose of anti-trust is to increase competition and prevent unlawful monopolies. Apple is a flea on the tail of an ox when it comes to messaging, as capable of influencing the market as I am.

> In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms

Maybe because it comes preinstalled?

This makes no sense.

“Because it comes preinstalled it is dwarfed by at least three other platforms”??

Which other 3 platforms come preinstalled?

Edit: wait, are you talking about iMessage being preinstalled? If so, how does iMessage being preinstalled make it dwarfed by other non-preinstalled platforms? Are you suggesting it’s human nature to use third party apps, or maybe you mistook the meaning of “dwarfed by”?

I am very curious what three other messaging application are available on iOS and have more market share than Apple Messages! Nearly every member of my family has an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages.

Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram

maybe Discord, FB Messenger

I started looking around, I can find charts that show messaging app market share on iOS but none of them include Apple Messages. For sure Apple doesn't share these numbers, it looks like no one else has gone through the trouble to collect them.

They do supply the number of active iOS devices, though it doesn't necessarilly mean that they are all active iMessage users. 136 million iPhones in the US, ~140 million active Facebook Messenger users in the the US.

We can assume that there are close to zero iPhone owners who don't use Messages, considering that almost half of the US population has an iPhone. This calculation fails to account for the critical aspect: Messages is the default SMS app, it's not just a group chat. Comparing it to WhatsApp is just incorrect.

If it's the default app and all iPhone users actively use it, and FB messenger beats it by 4 million active users, then your argument hasn't really got a leg to stand on, especially given that the market share for iPhone in the US is ~53%.

My argument is only strengthened by your data?.. Messages app is the app every iPhone user uses to send and receive SMS messages. It's not about some exclusive features, blue vs green bubbles, etc. It's just SMS messages.

So just citing the number (130M) means nothing in this debate. WhatsApp or Signal or FM Messenger are not SMS apps, so we can't just look at the number of active users and make conclusions.

How many angsty teenagers must have an iPhone because of the color of their chat bubble? That's the number that (apparently) matters.

No. That’s appealing to emotion, it’s a fallacy and has no place in a sensible discussion.

As for SMS, I can say with a high degree of confidence that deliberate SMS sending is very low outside the US. Besides, the feature being spoofed, and therefore discussed is iMessage, which categorically is not SMS/MMS. Bringing it up is introducing a strawman.

> therefore discussed is iMessage, which categorically is not SMS/MMS

That's not the reality though, correct? When I send a message to a friend using the Messages app it's being sent as an iMessage if both of us use an iPhone. I don't care what the format is, my intention is to send an SMS. So you can't use this as evidence of popularity of iMessages.

Just looking at my message list: at least 40% of my messages are alerts, reminders, payment confirmations, etc. Are you saying in Europe people get those via Signal?

No, I’m saying it’s irrelevant what businesses are sending you. And since SMS is fundamentally limited to 160 ASCII characters, I doubt the majority cares. Getting hung up on a default SMS client feels like a waste of energy. I get that, as a convenience, you’d want one location for all your messaging needs. For an alternative view, I like the separation that multiple apps provide. I’m not against iMessage being on other platforms either. What I am against is the pitchforks and bullshit reasoning around why this is anti-consumer/trust. The whole polemic is just bullshit.

Edit: in fact I'm annoyed at myself for adding to the pointlessness of what amounts to petty nerd-rage. I apologise to everyone...

> I get that, as a convenience, you’d want one location for all your messaging needs. For an alternative view, I like the separation that multiple apps provide.

Wait wait... now I am totally confused. I don't mind the separation of my messaging needs. In fact, I use Messages only for SMS (or SMS-like) messages, and WhatsApp and Signal for everything else.

> What I am against is the pitchforks and bullshit reasoning around why this is anti-consumer/trust. The whole polemic is just bullshit.

That is what I am saying :) All this debate about bubble colors, anti-consumerism, monopolies, etc is a waste of time, we have much bigger problems to deal with.

Cross-purposes?! Ha! I think I need a break from this site...

There's no way WhatsApp is more widely used in the US then iMessage. Same with Signal and Telegram.

It's a ridiculous comparison. How do you calculate "more widely" usage? I use Messages for all SMS messages. I've had maybe 5 group chats in Messages over the last 10 years, all groups are organized in WhatsApp or Signal. So what is more widely used in my case?

Messages is the default SMS app on iPhones. 130M iPhones in the US does mean there are 130M Messages users. So what? Some teenagers are angsty because of green bubbles? FFS do we not have bigger problems to deal with?

Do you live in the US though?

Messaging is done extremely differently in the US. All those group chats on Whatsapp or Signal would be done in iMessage because most Americans don't have Whatsapp or Signal, and Android users would likely just be left out of them.

I do live in the US. All my friends are on Signal and WhatsApp.

There are 140M FB Messenger users in the US, more than iPhone users.

This discussion is baffling to me. People buy devices that have exclusive content and features all the time. PS5 has a ton of exclusive games. So sometimes a group of friends is divided: some people have Xbox, others have PS5. Also some have no console at all. And some people will make fun of others, some people will get bullied because of that. This issue will not magically go away if we force Apple to "equalize" the chat bubble color. Some teenagers will still get bullied.

Interesting, my experience is very different in the US. I know very few people who use WhatsApp or Signal except for when they are outside the US.

WhatsApp has ~100M users in the US. FB Messenger has ~140M. I would argue that Messages has a far lower number once you exclude pure SMS usage.

IMHO, it's unlikely anyone with an iPhone uses it "purely for SMS usage." That would mean we have an iPhone owner who only receives SMS from services, only sends messages to people with an Android device, has gone through the trouble to deliberately disable iMessage messages or lacks a data plan of any kind.

I agree with you. The problem is that we conflate SMS and iMessage usage in the Messages app. Most people do use Messages for SMS-like messages (meaning not for exclusive iMessage features). E.g. looking at my message list: at least 40% of messages I receive are alerts, payment confirmations, appointment reminders, etc. These are SMS messages in terms of their purpose, even if some have the blue bubble and whatnot. Messages is a popular app in the US, but what we need to look at is how popular it is for specifically iMessage-exclusive features, not as an SMS client.

Since I’ve moved out of the US and started using Line (the message service of choice in my country of residence) I have no idea why the US market continues to cope with SMS.

iMessage is confusing. I get constant random authorization requests on my iPad because it got un-synced. Messages never come through to my Mac either.

Line is nowhere near perfect, and the app does have ads, but it works, it’s fast, and encrypted. People even use it for calling. I’ve literally never gave my phone number to someone for communication. Not even my coworkers.

It’s so prominent that data only cellphone plans are actually usable-and cheap.

I’m not saying we should all use Line (I would prefer Matrix). What I’m saying is there are so many communication platforms out there that are way better than S/MMS.

I don't think the core motivation in this discussion (or the monetary motivation from Beeper) is due solely to "angsty teenagers." Clearly there are adults out there, with money to spend, who would prefer to send an iMessage to an iPhone owner rather than an SMS message.

While I find it annoying to constantly hear from my mother and other members of my family how messages from me are "a hassle" or "always getting missed" or "never show up in the group chat", I am not willing to spend the money on something like Beeper. But some people are spending the money, it looks like there is a market there.

In my bubble I switched everyone to Signal. I acknowledge that this is an anecdote and don't propose this as a solution. However, complaining about features in different apps is even less of a solution.

WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, QQ:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-glob...

We're talking US, not global.

Aren't 70% of American teenagers on iPhone because of the iMessage network effects? The whole "green bubble" shaming issue.

its more than a shame. emoji, gifs and images are a core part of teens' communications (I have one, I know all too well), and iMessage's green bubble is also a guarantee that these things won't work, so its not just a shame, it is a hard road block.

Fortunately a lot of teens moved to discord.

Based on all the messages I get from my work colleagues (mostly android users much more into memes and things than I am), gifs and emojis and other features work just fine these days with MMS messaging on iPhone.

videos taken on your or their phones don't show up postage stamp sized and blurry/bricky any more? that's usually how a green bubble drags an iphone group down

although the "liked your message" type stuff is also annoying.

Google thankfully added a workaround/fix for that. "Liked your message" shows up as a reaction on Google Messages.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/10/googles-message-app-can-no...

In fact, the role's been reversed - the iPhone user now gets the "liked your message" text message while on Google Messages it shows up as a reaction.

When iMessage has to send a pic or vid to a group that contains non-iMessage recipients, iMessage will fallback to MMS and may need to recompress the pic/vid to get under the MMS media limit.

MMS, introduced in 2002, has much lower limits for pictures/video than if the messaging apps were to send the media over data/internet.

Also these MMS media limits aren't hardcoded, the limits are set by the sending and receiving carriers.

see https://www.androidpolice.com/why-text-message-videos-look-b...

>The whole "green bubble" shaming issue.

Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.

70% of American teenagers may have access to iMessage due to it being on their phones but there is a 0.0% chance that, in aggregate, iMessage is in their top five most-used messaging apps.

I can't speak to the anti-trust issue but it is a real thing. My daughter couldn't join the group chat used by her (all iPhone) cheerleading team. We ended up missing last minute changes to practice locations more than once.

And, of course, there was some teasing from the other team members about how my daughter's parents were too cheap to buy them a proper phone.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their SMS but by the content of their character."

... "by the content of their messages".

I can't play many games on my MacBook, so can't play and hang out with friends who all have Xbox/PS5. What should I do?

We had the same issue when Blackberry ruled the roost at school and the go to question was what is your BBM PIN.

Eventually we gave up and bought two Curve's.

Never discount peer pressure.

> Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.

I'm in a group chat with (former) coworkers who repeatedly (albeit playfully) shame the one group member who forces us all to use green bubbles. It's a real thing

Sounds like you need a new group of people around you.

You honestly see Apple as the aggressor in that situation and not those people?

> Sounds like you need a new group of people around you

...

> You honestly see Apple as the aggressor in that situation and not those people?

Where did I call Apple an aggressor? Stick to the facts, please.

Your comment came across as defending the position that Apple is in the wrong for not allowing iMessage to be accessible from all platforms, my crude definition of "the aggressor" my apologies if that is not how you meant your comment to come across.

This whole green bubble equal shame thing is 100% on people.

The reason there are 2 different colors is so people can tell when they are using SMS because SMS are capped / cost money in most of the world - while iMessage messages are unlimited and free.

> This whole green bubble equal shame thing is 100% on people.

Easy, then! Let's just fix people

Do you have data to back this up? I would be shocked if iMessage wasn't the most used messaging app by US teens or consumers in general.

I would guess Discord is more popular, based on my teens’ usage.

Maybe, but they probably text you through iMessage.

This just in, teen prefers to message with friends via Discord, but uses iMessage to message parents who are also on iMessage and not discord. We must file an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, stat!

Do you realize how ridiculous this reasoning is?

No where have I argued for antitrust. I'm just saying iMessage is probably the most used messaging app in the US, others are claiming it's not without any data.

> I'm just saying iMessage is probably the most used messaging app in the US

> others are claiming it's not without any data.

So quick question, why do you get to claim something without data but others have to back up their claims with data?

Anyway, I can't find anything that is specifically about the US in 2023 (so far) that isn't requiring a payment for a large sum, but everything else I found seems to back up the claims by everyone else.

Most of them don't even include iMessage in the top 10, and the one that does has it in like 8th place with one caveat, facetime itself is 2nd to Facebook Messenger which absolutely dominated the list.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/messaging-app-market/

That's because the data doesn't exist. Even the site you linked said they don't have data for iMessage.

I'm calling out people for making a claim without any evidence. I'm not providing evidence because there isn't any.

> I'm calling out people for making a claim without any evidence. I'm not providing evidence because there isn't any.

I can't tell if that's intentional sarcasm or something else.

I'm not sure why you're so confident in that 0.0% assertion. iMessage is integrated with the default/ubiquitous messaging app on iPhones, and I think it's reasonable to assume that teenagers are messaging mainly other teenagers who are likely to have iPhones (and thus using iMessage).

What do you think is beating out iMessage here apart from SMS? Snapchat, WhatsApp, various social net DMs? The biggest non-iMessage usage numbers I can imagine still don't exceed what I'd expect from iMessage, just based on its ubiquity in that demographic.

> it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.

why?

I have teen girls in Oregon. iMessage is decidedly the number one messaging app. The others aren't even close. There's no universe where my daughters use anything but iPhones. For better or worse, their friend group deliberately excludes those who cannot use the full functionality of iMessage. In case you've forgotten, teen girls are not terribly "equity" minded, particularly when it comes to tech.

Teen girls and clique's - tell me about it as a parent of two daughters.

from Piper Sandler's 2023 Fall survey of US teens ( https://www.pipersandler.com/teens ):

"87% of teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone; 34% own an Apple Watch"

No idea how many bought them specifically for iMessage...

we should caveat all of this with "USA teenagers" as Apple does not have nearly these adoption levels anywhere else in the world.

"...2023 Fall survey of US teens ... "

Canada is somewhere else in the world. As are Japan, Norway, Denmark and Australia.

So "monopoly" as a single entity controlling a single market is a simplistic view of the issue at hand. Anti-trust is far broader than that, where any anticompetitive action can be subject to anti-trust lawsuits/regulatory action.

So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition.

Apple has a very, very talented legal team though, so, for this to even see argument in court someone's going to have to realllly have to want it, and be able to fund it.

> Apple allows for a single messaging app

Do you mean that Apple doesn't allow third-party SMS apps? Because there are lots of messaging apps on iOS.

IMHO, the argument is that Apple does not allow any third party messaging app to send message to the built-in messaging application (Apple Messages) on the iPhone. That is Apple ships one messaging app that is the default and may not be removed, and they also do not allow any interoperability with that one messaging application.

Apple Messages is not an SMS application; it's an internet messaging application that falls back to SMS messages when communicating with any non-iOS device. There are some situations where there may be no data network and, maybe, it falls back to sending an SMS message to another iOS device but this is pretty rare.

They don't know what they mean, because there isn't a legal precedent for narrowly defining monopolies to facets of a single company's stores and platforms. It's just wishful thinking phrased authoritatively.

>So the legal argument would be that, because Apple allows for a single messaging app, and interacting with that app requires an iphone, they're effectively preventing messaging app competition.

That is weapons-grade horseshit. You can put WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Signal on your iPhone and message to your heart's content. (I know, because I've had the first two on my phone before and they did not get killed in their sleep by Apple's native messaging app).

> iMessage … messaging platform

For me, personally, it’s an SMS app not general messaging. And on iOS there is absolutely no competition for SMS by design.

I suspect iMessage would enjoy far less adoption if the iMessage features were a separate application from the SMS features, or if a 3rd party app could assume the role of handling SMS (I.E. Signal).

If Signal were allowed to handle SMS on an iPhone, ditching iMessage would be one of the first things I’d do when setting up my device.

On iOS, if I want to send a message to a phone number using a cross-platform protocol that (nearly?) all cellphones understand by default without coordinating a separate communication channel out-of-band, my option is: iMessage. That is not organic, it’s Apple using its position as the device manufacturer to force all competition out of the SMS space, and then offering a “progressive enhancement” on top of an open protocol that nobody else can compete with or interopt with.

Slight correction - you can't (or rather, shouldn't) override the SMS handling on an android phone.

Instead what an app like Signal does is request all the permissions it can from the SMS/MMS handling service of the phone - to read and send SMS entries, and to get events on an incoming SMS, and then request to be the default handler of the `sms` custom URI scheme.

But you can have any number of SMS clients at once. It is likely if Apple Messages ever came to Android, it would do the same thing - otherwise, the fallback behavior (when talking to an android user without the app installed, for example) would be sub-par.

> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service?

The top messaging services are SMS and email. Do these allow different companies to interoperate with each other? Yes, of course.

And so should all messaging apps, regardless of how many other messaging apps there are, because they all have a network effect. They're segmented into their own markets by the act of restricting interoperability.

There is no carrier with a monopoly on SMS but Apple is trying to maintain a monopoly on iMessage. Why should that be allowed for anyone? Restricting interoperability -- i.e. competition -- is not a legitimate business practice.

I dunno, fixing the market to be “company X’s own services” doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of antitrust laws. Should I be allowed to sell gasoline at Shell’s gas stations?

You should be able to sell your gasoline to customers with Ford's cars, regardless of whether or not Ford has their own gas stations.

But why are we reaching for a car analogy? Should gmail or google.com be able to block Firefox and force you to use Chrome? Not make use of some feature Chrome has, but just purposely block Firefox even if it supports that feature or its users are content to use the service without it.

How is Apple Messages not the #1 most popular messaging application on the iPhone? I know many people that use an iPhone and they all use Apple Messages. I know because I have an Android phone and this is the only way to communicate with them.

There seems to be a huge disconnect from people who are in countries where texting is not dominant. In the US (and apparently the UK) that is not the case, and iMessage and texting more broadly are overwhelmingly dominant from all indicators I've seen.

> How is this an actionable anti-trust issue?

How is this less of an issue than Microsoft integrating Internet Explorer with Windows back in the day?

The shit Google and Apple seem to be getting away with these days would make regulators of yore spin in their graves.

It is less of an issue because of market share. MS crushed Netscape with IE. imessage is not used in the EU

Does this mean that existence of Android allows both Google and Apple to mutually shield themselves from antitrust accusations? They basically get to do what they want, and argue "us refusing to give you X is not antitrust-relevant, because there's the other 50% of the market that refuses to give you X in an entirely different way".

This has nothing to do with android. iphone comes with an app store and that app store contains lots of messenger applications. Users overwhelmingly download one or several messenger applications from the store and use them instead of imessage. What's the similarity to IE here? IE had over 90% of browser share at some point.

Integration. None of the alternative messaging apps are first parties on iOS. Just like IE, for a moment, was the only first-party browser on Windows.

I don't see any practical difference between whatsapp and imessage. iphone has so many apis such as callkit that make apps that use them feel like first parties. I think the only real difference is that you can use the built-in messages to read and send sms... which nobody uses anymore.

But being first party on iOS has had no impact on the market.

Messages is not even in the top 5 used messaging apps globally.

The only reason we are having this conversation is that some Americans can't fathom the idea that something they want is not available to them for free.

I believe MS didn’t get nail on integrating IE into Windows - at least in the US - they got nailed on threatening to increase Windows prices for OEMs (which will ruin them in the competitive OEM market) that bundled Netscape, i.e. abusing their Windows monopoly to harm a competitor.

WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger are all free to download on iOS - heck it’s offered for download at Apple’s expense; since it’s from their App Store servers.

I'm not a lawyer.

But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. Apple's behavior is not significantly different from Microsoft's, which instigated US v. Microsoft [1]. That case largely took issue with Microsoft's mandatory bundling of IE with Windows and the extent to which Microsoft created an inorganic monopoly. In addition to how Microsoft's monopoly came to be one, the judge also took issue with Microsoft's methodology in quashing threats to that monopoly. One could claim that Apple is taking similar quashing action relative to Beeper now.

Microsoft of course appealed the judgement, and prevailed. But they prevailed only because the judge had broken his code of conduct in discussing the case with media; not because Microsoft's behavior was not monopolistic.

I don't believe global or domestic iMessenger usage is relevant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

> I'm not a lawyer.

> But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic.

In order for antitrust laws to apply, it’s not enough to exhibit monopolistic behavior. You actually have to be a monopoly and use this behavior to achieve and/or retain it.

> You actually have to be a monopoly

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony — Sherman Act, Section 2

That's not the whole story in the United States. Antitrust law prohibits monopolization, which is monopoly power couple with anticompetitive practices, but it also prohibits various practices from companies that do not have monopoly power.

For example the Sherman Act prohibits attempted monopolization. You run afoul of that for anticompetitive conduct and a specific intent to monopolize if there is a dangerous probability that will achieve monopoly power.

The Clayton Act added restrictions on price discrimination, exclusive dealing, tying, and mergers and acquisitions that substantially reduce competition or tend to create monopolies.

> But they prevailed only because the judge had broken his code of conduct in discussing the case with media;

You seem to think this was a terrible, terrible accident on the part of the judge, rather than just one of the many mechanisms by which the powerful evade laws to protect the weak. That is, a deliberate terrible terrible "mistake".

This is a silly argument: Microsoft's bundling of IE resulted in real damage to another company (Netscape) that had a viable and independent competitor product. Beeper doesn't have an independent product: they have a hacky workaround that Apple fixed.

What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure. This isn't even as egregious as patching iTunes to break the Palm Pre sync was, and the legality of that action seems pretty settled by now.

> What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure.

Zoom out for a moment and take Beeper out of the picture. The issue is not Beeper specifically, it’s the underlying reasons that Beeper even exists.

If you buy an iPhone and want to interoperate with friends/family on Android, the default experience is extremely broken.

Apple’s behavior here is directly driving users away from Android, not because Apple is better, but because it’s the only way to actually use the native experience.

I don’t know if the cases are equivalent, but there’s certainly a case to be made that they’re in a similar category.

If I want to "interoperate" with friends and family who use Android, I have zero issues doing so. SMS works fine, and the default experience being "bad" is really completely unrelated to any sort of antitrust concern. If we want more features, they're an App download away.

Apple offers a product that has seen significant success in a small number of markets versus android, including the US. Dressing up what is ultimately the normal bump and tumble of competition in a market as antitrust because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly.

> …because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly

I disagree that what follows “because” is an accurate representation of what is happening, and reduces a more complex issue to an oversimplified notion of “winning”.

Microsoft was also winning in the market. How a company wins is what matters in discussions about anti-trust. If that winning is appreciably supported by anti-consumer behaviors, it becomes problematic.

I don’t know if what Apple is doing rises to the level of antitrust, but it’s certainly anti-consumer.

> Dressing up what is ultimately the normal bump and tumble of competition in a market as antitrust because they're winning enough in the market(s) you care about is silly.

Anti-consumer behavior being part of the “normal bump and tumble” is hardly a good reason to find it acceptable. Anti-trust actions have been weak or almost non-existent for years now, but again has nothing to do with whether or not the status quo is acceptable.

I don’t find those arguments compelling, and we’ll have to agree to disagree

I wouldn't categorize it as anti-consumer. Apple is not under any moral, legal, or ethical obligation to provide access to iMessage to users outside of their ecosystem. Moreover, it's crucial to note that no significant tangible harm is being inflicted on anyone unless they willingly choose not to explore more widely-used alternatives. Some individuals argue that there should be broader access, but these arguments primarily rely on appeals to emotion ("...hardly a good reason to find it acceptable") and pleas for sympathy, as your post demonstrates.

iMessage is essentially a convenience feature designed for Apple customers to communicate with one another free of charge. While some might view it as a potential loss-leader for Apple, for most of it's users it's just another feature, with a majority already utilising alternative messaging platforms.

A comparable example is BlackBerry Messenger, which initially followed a similar path. BlackBerry only opened it up to other platforms when they found themselves losing the smartphone market to both iOS and Android. In contrast, Apple does not appear to be facing the same competitive pressure, which is why they maintain their current approach to iMessage access.

Edit: In another thread, you say "They’re selling a general purpose communication device that is incapable of exchanging run of the mill content with other general purpose communication devices, and using that poor experience to drive iPhone sales." which is a demonstrably false premise. The mere existence and prevalence of more successful competitors show us this. The problem here is that there are those arguing that iMessage is the only option, when it clearly isn't.

Ultimately, whether or not iMessage is availble to Android users is immaterial. Apple are 10 years too late to the party. Add that RCS is comming to the platform (of which I am disappointed - it a half-baked solution that risks ceding control to carriers, which IMHO is a terrible idea), iMessage on Android is moot.

> I wouldn't categorize it as anti-consumer. Apple is not under any moral, legal, or ethical obligation to provide access to iMessage to users outside of their ecosystem.

Apple is intentionally degrading the experience of sending messages to non-Apple devices for the explicit purpose of driving iPhone sales. This is anti-consumer, full stop.

"They must provide access to iMessage outside of the ecosystem" unnecessarily restricts the possible ways that Apple can address this issue, and is only one of many solutions to the problem.

My point and stance is not that Apple should be forced to implement iMessage on Android, but that the intentional and artificial restrictions baked into the Apple <-> Non-Apple experience is unacceptable to me as a customer.

I've commented at length about this elsewhere in the thread, but they could:

- Implement RCS (which they're finally and reluctantly doing due to regulatory pressure, but we have no idea how much they'll hamstring it, and it's borderline ridiculous that they haven't done something yet. Too little too late)

- Allow 3rd party apps to surface messages in a unified interface like they do with other iOS capabilities (e.g. the unified voice call experience from various non-Apple apps/services)

> In another thread, you say "They’re selling a general purpose communication device that is incapable of exchanging run of the mill content with other general purpose communication devices, and using that poor experience to drive iPhone sales." which is a demonstrably false premise.

The premise is demonstrably true, and can be experienced by trying to send someone a text containing an image or video using the phone's native capabilities.

I think it's worth reiterating here that Apple has explicitly restricted the messaging experience while allowing other categories of app (Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Phone calls) to natively interact with 3rd party services from a single interface. The argument that "just use another chat app" would be a lot stronger if Apple actually supported other chat apps in their native experience.

Zoom out and stop focusing on "iMessage on Android", and it becomes extremely obvious how anti-consumer this stance is based on comparing it to Apple's own design philosophy and other capabilities across iOS.

> iMessage on Android is moot.

On this I tend to agree. But this doesn't get Apple off the hook, or make the dark patterns acceptable.

As I've said elsewhere, Apple may have every right to do this, but customers have every right to be pissed about it, especially because there are ways to solve this that don't require Apple to open the floodgates to iMessage.

> If you buy an iPhone and want to interoperate with friends/family on Android,

Then use a cross platform messaging app. FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord. I have all of them on my phone.

> the default experience is extremely broken.

It’s not broken. Apple devices have a low-friction “hot path” for communicating with other apple devices. That’s it. Want to use it? Get an apple device.

Apple isn’t obliged to make its messaging app work for everyone, on all platforms.

> It’s not broken. Apple devices have a low-friction “hot path” for communicating with other apple devices. That’s it. Want to use it? Get an apple device.

As an Apple user who likes Apple products (I just really dislike this iMessage stance), I don’t agree. When I open the app that allows me to communicate with other users via phone number, and when that experience can’t handle sending a photo in the year 2023, the experience is broken.

I’m glad they’re implementing RCS support (which seems to be their acknowledgement that there is an issue to solve), but the fact that they chose to wait until 2024 is unacceptable.

> Apple isn’t obliged to make its messaging app work for everyone, on all platforms.

That’s not what I’m arguing. The desire for iMessage is a symptom, and I’m not saying they should be forced to make iMessage work everywhere. The problem is that non-iMessage support on the phone is atrocious. They’re selling a general purpose communication device that is incapable of exchanging run of the mill content with other general purpose communication devices, and using that poor experience to drive iPhone sales.

There are many ways to solve this that don’t require Apple to make its messaging app work for all platforms. They’ve already solved this for other categories like VOIP apps, which enjoy a unified OS-level experience.

> when that experience can’t handle sending a photo in the year 2023, the experience is broken

It’s Apples fault SMS is an archaic protocol? Wow, I truly learn something new every day.

> The problem is that non-iMessage support on the phone is atrocious.

I have fb messenger, WhatsApp, telegram and discord on my phone. I don’t find having to use these “atrocious”, they’re just different apps. Atrocious would be the awful “this messenger does all chats, but awfully” experience of early Android devices, that was a dumpster fire of confusing contact details and lost messages. Also, it’s not like Android is immune from these issues: your complaint is that SMS/MMS is archaic and needs an upgrade, not that we need to make iMessage bend over backwards to support everything else.

I guess I just don’t see the argument why iMessage explicitly needs to shoulder the burden here.

> It’s Apples fault SMS is an archaic protocol? Wow, I truly learn something new every day.

Why would this only be about SMS? RCS has existed for 15 years. It has its issues, but it’s not as if there hasn’t been an option. Apple will finally add some level of support next year (yikes), but as evidenced by the Beeper brouhaha, it’s unacceptably late to the party.

> your complaint is that SMS/MMS is archaic and needs an upgrade

No, it’s really not. My complaint is that there’s been an upgrade to SMS/MMS for many years that would make the iMessage limitations irrelevant, but Apple has refused to address the issue. There has been too much focus on iMessage itself, and not enough on the underlying behaviors they’re forcing and the obvious intent behind this.

> I guess I just don’t see the argument why iMessage explicitly needs to shoulder the burden here.

I honestly don’t care if Apple makes iMessage work on Android. There are numerous options that solve this issue without crossing that line. RCS next year is a step in the right direction. They could also follow their own design philosophy and allow apps to surface their messages in a unified interface like they do for most other iOS capabilities.

I can receive a discord call and it shows up next to my normal phone calls. This kind of UX would solve the issue without requiring Apple to touch iMessage.

But they won’t, because this isn’t about security or some undue burden to support android devices; it’s a calculated decision to degrade the user experience when messaging non-iPhone devices for the purpose of driving sales.

This has even been confirmed by discovery documents from recent lawsuits.

> I'm not a lawyer.

This is very obvious because you have a poor grasp of the facts.

a) The issue with Microsoft was that it had a monopoly in operating systems. At the time it was about ~95% market share. Gates woke up one morning, decided web apps were a threat to this, saw Netscape as their major competitor and decided to eliminate them. It didn't try to compete with them. It went straight for elimination by bundling IE and coercing OEMs e.g Compaq to not bundle Netscape. Using a monopoly in one market to force a monopoly in another is exactly what the laws were designed to prevent.

b) Global and domestic iMessage usage is relevant. In fact it is the whole point. You need to demonstrate that there is an absence or distortion of a market for anti-trust laws to be applied.

c) Apple is not trying to eliminate Beeper, they have no monopoly in anything and there is clear evidence of a fair and functioning market by the presence of WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal etc.

Agreed. Every single platform/device has apps that are exclusive to it. It's mind-boggling to me that people are so obsessed with Messages. I can't play thousands of Steam games on my Mac. My friends who have PCs play those games together, have fun, chat online. Should Steam be forced to "open their protocol" whatever that means?..

Steam does run on Macs. The individual games do not.

I never said it doesn't.

> I can't play thousands of Steam games on my Mac

This is the point I am making. There are certain apps and features that are exclusive to certain devices. I can 't play the vast majority of Steam games on my Mac. Should Steam (and all game companies involved, including Valve) be forced to enable support for MacOS for all their games because Mac users have FOMO?

... Steam isn't the thing that doesn't support MacOS. I don't know why you're mentioning Steam.

But yes, console and OS exclusives are a plague and people should stop making them.

I am mentioning Steam as an example of an ecosystem that offers exclusive apps on different devices. The fact that I can install Steam on a Mac is sort of irrelevant considering that I can't play the games that are offered through Steam on my Mac. Many indie games are offered only on Steam, so it's a monopoly in this sense.

I don't dispute these facts. And I don't think they dispute my comment. By mentioning US v. Microsoft, I pointed out that there are similarities between Microsoft in the 90s and Apple today.

> b) Global and domestic iMessage usage is relevant. In fact it is the whole point. You need to demonstrate that there is an absence or distortion of a market for anti-trust laws to be applied.

Thank you for the correction.

> c) Apple is not trying to eliminate Beeper, they have no monopoly in anything and there is clear evidence of a fair and functioning market by the presence of WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal etc.

Unless one can believe that Apple is both willing to block Beeper and not eliminate it, then Apple is trying to eliminate Beeper as a Messenger competitor. From their statement: "We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage."

I think Apple has a reasonable argument for doing so. Though, in a world where Apple controls the only App Store where iOS users are blocked from downloading alternative SMS applications, they do hold a monopoly over both how iOS users install applications, and the only SMS application available on iOS: Messenger. Non-iOS users who want to message iOS users with the same quality of service as iMessages may only do so by installing 3rd party software. Otherwise they need to implicitly agree to having messages treated as second class, to Apple's likely enrichment. I think reasonable people can perceive some amount of anti-competitive intent in Apple's action. Should Apple be able to block 3rd parties from using the iMessage service infrastructure? Possibly, but it's hard to argue that doing so is pro-competition.

I think most of the concern over Apple's refusal to admit 3rd party iMessage clients will be eliminated if and when they make good on their promise to support RCS next year.

Apple has a literal complete monopoly on operating systems. Every iPhone must either run iOS or be cracked (jailbreak). That's not the whole story, though: Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior was not monopolizing the OS market. It was using that monopoly to promote IE.

> Apple is not trying to eliminate Beeper

They are literally eliminating one of their products. That's anti-competitive.

> they have no monopoly in anything and there is clear evidence of a fair and functioning market by the presence of WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Signal etc.

You just moved the goalposts out of the stadium. Anti-competitive behavior doesn't need to overwhelm every segment of a market to be anti-competitive behavior.

a) That's not how it works. You need to have a functioning market in order to have a monopoly.

b) Apple is not interfering with the ability of Beeper to sell their product or add new features. They are simply closing loopholes in their product.

c) I never said that anti-competitive behaviour needs to overwhelm every segment. In fact I said the complete opposite when I referred to market distortion.

What dwarfs iMessage in the US? I would assume that it is the most used messaging platform in the country.

Facebook Messenger - approx 140 million users, then WhatsApp at approx 75 million. iOS has approx 136 million users (not sure if that includes iPad). So "dwarfs" might be a bit extreme. However, its extremely unlikely that all the iOS users use iMessage and none use either Facebook or WhatsApp. Statista has the figures, but I'm not going to pay $149 per month to find out more!

Source: Googling around, so take it for what it is!

With this numbers I would still guess that iMessage has WhatsApp beat.

I would also guess it does more volume then FB Messenger, even if it technically has less users.

How? 140 > 136! And the figure reported are active users. I accept it's back-of-the-napkin, not trustworthy sources, but even so, your math just doesn't make sense.

I'm just speculating that iMessage users use the app more then FB messenger users use FB messenger. I don't think there's anyway to know, so I definitely might be wrong.

Many Americans have Facebook/WhatsApp accounts they haven't used in years. I'd be skeptical they surpass iMessage in terms of volume of messages

It's not about having accounts. Again, the data source (which I admit could be wrong/misleading) all say active users, which I take mean users actively sending messages using FB messenger. The sources, by the way, are companies that sell services that market to consumers using these services, so it's in their interest to know usage stats and patterns. Admitedly finding information around iMessage usage is harder, which is why I went with number of active iOS devices. Yes, it's sketchy AF, but I'm not going to pay Statista $149 in a vain attempt to pyrricly win internet points.

> In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms.

Do you have a source for this?

> iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally.

It doesn't matter what the users think. However, the EU Commission agrees with you here, as it explicitly decided that iMessage doesn't fall under the DMA: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_... ("gateway" is one of the three conditions to be a gatekeeper, see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... )

> Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service?

The one I know a lot about — Telegram — has official public protocol docs and is fully open to third-party clients: https://core.telegram.org

Not allowing interop makes it harder for new competitors, because no one is going to use a messaging app that no one else uses.

My opinion from the beginning

* Platform dependent messanger is a terrible idea, but perhaps anyone have right to implement legal terrible idea.

* Why the US people widely adopt terrible idea? It's terrible as designed.

* Although, since it's widely adopted in the US, it should be opened, maybe. EU won't help because they don't adopt terrible idea.

Let's say that Apple is forced to allow third parties to use iMessage. Can't Apple just make the cost prohibitively high?

The “forcing” would likely come with conditions and some oversight. See how big phone companies in some countries are “forced” to allow competitors (eg. MVNOs) to connect to their networks at wholesale prices - do you think they chose that price point themselves?

That's the best case for most of us, but probably not Beeper Mini, since the cat-and-mouse game is their killer competitive advantage. With the barriers gone the space will be totally flooded with options, not to mention just normal Android integration.

Best case outcome for who? Super happy user of Apple here, I would hate that outcome.

Apple shit just works, I like my wallet garden, don't want third party trash or getting spammed from android clients.

Ha, "wallet garden" gave me a good chuckle. I usually hear it expressed as a "walled garden", but this might be the perfect typo (or clever twist / word play).

I'm guessing it was a typo, but well done nonetheless.

this might be the “best outcome” for some nerds or android users, but it certainly isnt the best outcome for most consumers.

iOS has resisted a lot of the crap and cruft of windows and android because of its opinionated nature. sure, siri could use improvement, but at least iPhones never fail to call 911.

I’ll admit I’m one of these nerds but I disagree. There’s a difference between being opinionated and not allowing me to change the defaults on a device I own.

While they are at it, can they file an antitrust action against Google for making changes that break ad blockers and third party clients for YouTube?

Reminds me of how bleemcast made game console emulators officially legal

A lawsuit to do what exactly? Require Apple release an iMessage client on Android for free? That'd get thrown out pretty quick anywhere with a functioning legal system.

The only antitrust comparison I can see was Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer, but that doesn't really work because that was Microsoft preventing other competing chat clients from accessing the wider internet, not Microsoft's own servers. There has never been an antitrust lawsuit won anywhere that forces a company to open its own servers that its paying for open to anyone who wants to access them.

How many ways does Apple have of blocking Beeper interoperability without major changes to their protocol that breaks existing functionality? They've already exhausted 1 of them without much delay.

> Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.

You say this as if it's a bad thing, I think that would be mission accomplished for Beeper... tbf, though I suppose their moment would be over by then.

Right?

For all Android users this would mean there's now an official client.

For Beeper devs this means there's less RE needed for their client.

Even if Apple released an official app, Beeper is still useful for aggregating other services, something Apple will never do.

I see noone but Beeper winning in this game barring legal skirmishes.

Define "over". Opera the web browser earned $80 million on $380 of revenue and I don't know anybody that uses it. If Apple releases an Android iMessage client, but Beeper still has enough paying MAU so they can pay their employees and investors, is anything "over" just because there's competition? It isn't a winner-take-all like a game of football or something.

By over, I just mean that their days in the spotlight/media would be gone and people would generally be less aware of their existence. Not that they won't be able to compete against Apple.

If anything judging by Apple's Android apps recently, especially with my personal experience with their Apple Music app I would say they have a really bad track record thus far. It's a really buggy and almost unusable mess.

This is unrelated but I was actually duped by Apple Music, I intially thought that the audio quality was noticably better but as it turns out it was actually just louder. Raising the volume made YouTube Music sound just as good.

> Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.

This looks like a great outcome?

I think they ignored a rarely talked about but important aspect. iMessage is free for Apple users because it comes bundled with all Apple products. The cost to run iMessage and deliver millions of messages daily must be a significant number.

With beeper, they are enabling the functionality for android. That is every android user signed up with beeper will end up costing Apple some money to send messages to iphone (or to send messages to other android users using the same thing).

In my opinion, next step for Apple is to mandate having an apple device to be able to use an Apple ID as part of their TnC. They will keep closing loopholes in the meantime, but don't think Apple will let beeper win this, purely because of the can of worms it opens up.

I'm sure most android users would be happy if iMessage-on-Android was included as part of the $0.99/month icloud subscription.

I would imagine a significant number of people would be willing to spend $5-$10/mo to be able to use iMessage + FaceTime as native Android/Windows apps (you can already FaceTime with non-Apple users via a link [0])

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619

Yep, I already pay for iCloud, Applecare on several devices and yet I am still punished by Apple via iMessage for using Android as my main device. (I also own a newish iPhone but even that's not good enough without workarounds to use my primary phone number with iMessage).

I don't like the idea of ever being bound to a single ecosystem and Apple's lack of interoperability by design keeps me using many Google services because they offer almost everything for both iOS and Android.

Sounds like you're just bound to Google rather than Apple.

It’s actually really surprising to me (from a technical perspective) that this wasn’t already the case. Based on what I’ve read they’re basically spoofing the fact that they’re an iDevice which seems like it should be much more difficult than Beeper has made it look.

It was open sourced by a 16 year old apparently.

https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

They used this and added their own changes. From their communication about what they are doing, it's remarkably similar, and i would be very surprised if they did not see this before.

You'd think. But a great big pile of intel-based macs without TPMs are still supported iDevices. And the tail for supporting those macs (that have been on iMessage for some time) might be quite a bit longer than the tail for, say, OS updates to those macs.

So there's quite a window where spoofing that kind of iDevice will be easy.

Based on my understanding, Beeper is using false or duplicate Apple device credentials in order to authenticate with Apple as "being a legitimate iMessage endpoint".

There's no need to take the—rather draconian—step of locking out all Apple users who are using Apple IDs through the browser; all Apple needs to do is ban the false device IDs and possibly close the loophole that allows Beeper to create them.

Any time you see something that looks like a jailbreak, at its heart is a vulnerability in the device or service that is being jailbroken. That is, fundamentally, a security flaw, and fixing that security flaw is all that's necessary to prevent the jailbreak. The fact that this one is with one of Apple's services, rather than with iPhones or other Apple devices, means that they don't even have to push out some software/firmware update and hope everyone applies it: all they have to do is update their own servers, and Beeper will be locked out again.

I don't think they're using false or duplicate Apple devices for this. I think that it may be likely they are using AWS resources for it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

When AWS first came out with these, this was my first thought. People could spin up an EC2 instance and use it for iMessage, and Beeper came to be shortly after this feature went live in AWS.

Not fake devices, fake credentials. Beeper Mini is explicitly using a different method to access the iMessage system than Beeper and some other previous services; it's not spinning up virtual Macs and bouncing off them. Because of that, it also doesn't require you to hand your Apple ID login & password over to Beeper in cleartext just to make it work.

At least, from what I've read over the past few days.

I don't think the credentials are faked. The author's blog post seems to give the details. He is publishing a public key to Apple's servers and figured out how to read the public key of other users. It seems like he is using the normal Apple encryption path from there. Although I don't fully understand the details.

https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/

This aspect is ignored, because it's clear that Apple blocks third-party clients to maintain its dominant position in the US (social unacceptability of green bubbles among teens).

If cost was the problem, they could offer a subscription.

Exactly, iMessage is not a product they want to sell or spread around, it is a marketing tool that loses it's potency once it's not exclusive.

It's pretty clear why they don't want an android iMessage app.

In this case, what beeper enables (if successful) potentially is to use Apple's infra for future communication between android to android phones, or android to iMessage groups, while on Apple's infra and dime. Beeper will likely collect a fee for it as well. Thats not a position Apple would want to be in.

Or Google doesn’t want one and wouldn’t let Apple release one unless they allowed third party Siri replacement in iOS…

Like I said, if that was the issue, Apple could just charge $10 per month for iMessage users that don't have an Apple product linked to their account.

The only reason is to bully people who fear social exclusion into buying an iPhone.

(I am an iPhone/Mac user, so I am not trying to bash Apple from the other side of the 'divide').

So I'm imagining Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp on my iPhone? And the appeals to emotion really have got to stop.

People do not by iPhones because of iMessage. I'll totally accept that some, even a majority, buy them as a fashion item, in a similar way that Samsung S series phones are, but iMessage will not be a significant driver for many.

"exhausted Apple's budget for stopping them"

Is this "THX1138"? Is this the Manhattan Project?

It's Apple management asking a messaging lead to spend a few minutes figuring out how Beeper is masquerading and submitting a fix.

Beeper seems to be masquerading as an Intel Mac. These don’t have any hardware attestation, and many of them aren’t receiving software updates anymore either.

This might be extremely hard for Apple to fix.

I'm just glad to see Apple's proprietary gatekeeping being challenged and this app has helped bring "green bubble bullying" to the fore. A lot of Apple fans seems to applaud Apple for acting ethically (at least relative to other big tech) and I hope they now view this marketing tactic by Apple as unethical and demand it be stopped.

It isn't generally illegal to publish software that interoperates with third party platforms that don't wish to be interoperated with.

If this uses copyrighted keys then it will be a bit more tricky (although fair use could still come into play).

we've seen this play out so many times. It's over.

Your view on iMessage depends on your social network. If your social network uses other messaging apps, this whole exercise seems pointless. Many of you outside of the US fall into this category. Many of you technically-savvy commenters also fall into this category. But if you are a teenager in the US, 85%+ of your social network uses an iPhone, and you will not convince everyone you know to switch apps for you. The green bubble causes real problems, and Apple does this intentionally to coerce teens and others into buying their phones. It’s anti-competitive and immoral for a company of that size.

> We’ve made Beeper free to use.

> Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday.

Really have to wonder what their play here is. What did they think would happen?

Isn't it always going to be a cat and mouse game with Apple? Who would want to use a messaging service that works some days but not others, much less pay for it?

It seems clear to me that Beeper is playing a game of chicken with Apple. If Apple continues to cut off Beeper's access, it makes an antitrust argument stronger (a la https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/06/eus-imessage-antitrust-invest...)

In the event Apple loses in Europe, I wonder what would happen. Would they really open up iMessage worldwide? Just in Europe? Shut it down there altogether since WhatsApp is already so popular there anyway, and their US market is bigger?

And what does this do for Beeper, anyway? If they open it up, wouldn't Google and Samsung just integrate it into their first party messaging clients?

It seems as precarious a position as Trillian was back in the day: only usable if the source protocols don't shut them out, but only valuable if those protocols don't open up completely. The moment either happens, they die.

Whatever legislation they face, they will implement it in the most hostile way towards non-Apple services/users/companies.

See how they implement off-App Store payments in the Netherlands and/or South Korea.

Apple is not giving up on iMessage. And, given the legislation becomes to cumbersome to deal with, they will withdraw from countries - they threatened to withdraw iMessage from the UK already.

The EU is already becoming a second-class market for technology companies (see Meta's Threads, and many more will follow).

Yep, also the EU has already dropped their iMessage thing

The Beeper vs Apple battle is already getting the attention of US legislators

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/10/senator-warren-calls-out-a...

There's something funny about Warren posting on Twitter while shouting about antitrust. I really wish government wouldn't make public announcements on closed platforms.

-----

That aside, it seems like an easy way around that would just be for Apple to adopt RCS in addition to iMessage.

Let's not turn mountains into molehills here, Twitter isn't really closed, it's just authwalled. So, burner email is all you need to read all the tweets, errr, X's?, that you want.

Also, far simpler to take care of beeper, just make all the message bubbles the same color. They'd lose their entire userbase if that happened.

It's viewable via Nitter: https://nitter.net/SenWarren/status/1733956234200445130

But I agree with the earlier point, that it is a closed platform. If you want to respond, I thought it requires a phone number now in addition to email? It used to at least. And if Twitter doesn't like you, why is your ability to communicate with an official regulated by this private company? And Nitter is likely to get shutdown by Twitter any moment now in the same way as Apple is trying to shutdown Beeper.

> I really wish government wouldn't make public announcements on closed platforms.

Unlike Apple, the government has to meet the people where they are.

Apple needs better critics.

Senator Warren would be a lot more effective if she or her staff understood how technology actually works. Senator Markey is another person who cares about this stuff but is also incompetent to regulate it.

I don't think it's just a matter of not understanding technology, but not having any sway in politics. Most of their peers care more about personal brands and culture wars and virtue signaling than doing the boring day to day task of regulating minituae for consumers.

People like Warren and Bernie are like the determined sergeants in the trenches, while most of Congress is busy grandstanding and trying to become the next Napoleons or Trump.

They just don't care to actually do anything useful, instead focusing on optics and pork barrels and revolving doors.

Most voters couldn’t care less about Apple’s iMessage antitrust concerns. Even within the realm of antitrust questions it’s an extremely low priority.

Yeah, good point, lol.

Let's see... abortion, school shootings, jobs, climate change, blue bubbles...?

Well, you can't pass legislation to shut down the school shootings factory or invade climate change's homeland. However, Europe has shown us that tying your economy's profitability to a basis of digital standards can easily compel more open behavior.

Given that Apple is quite literally the Largest Company, they're somewhere on that list. Maybe not next to abortions and climate change, but Apple antitrust is an inevitability unless they get smaller or the economy gets bigger.

> If Apple continues to cut off Beeper's access, it makes an antitrust argument stronger

I'm not sure why everyone thinks it is an antitrust issue when it isn't. There is no legal obligation to support your services and software on third party platforms.

I'd argue that's not the right framing of the issue. Taking active steps to prevent your services from being used on competing platforms is more than merely "not supporting" them.

Apple has always made services primarily for the users of their hardware. They are a hardware company that makes their own software and services. The hardware purchase funds the software development.

Who decides which platforms get support, if it's not the company making and supporting the service? When BBM was popular, I know a lot of people without Blackberries would have liked to use it, but Blackberry didn't offer it, and no one was threatening legal action against them (that I know of). I don't see how this situation is any different.

There are a lot of exclusive services out there, which are locked to specific platforms. Affording legal protection to anyone who hacks their way into a system, and telling the company they can't do anything about it, would create chaos in the tech world. There might be some cool projects, but business models would fall apart, companies would fail, security would be worse than it already is, and I'd question why anyone would try and start something new when they wouldn't be allowed to control it in a way to ensure profitability. Having everything free and open is great, but at some point these services need to be paid for.

> Who decides which platforms get support

The developer of the software supporting those platforms. In this case, Beeper.

I suppose if Apple wants to say certain users are not allowed to access iMessage unless they've bought an iPhone that's fair. (Maybe you could argue its anticompetitive to bundle services together like that, but I won't assert that point here.) But if that's all this was about then I ought to be able to buy an iPhone, import the access token from that into Beeper on my Android, stuff the iPhone in a drawer, and go about my business. The problem is that Apple wants to dictate not only who has access to iMessage servers, but also how they're allowed to access it. And that is unacceptable in my opinion.

"Security" is a poor excuse. If server side software has to rely on trusting the client then it was never secure in the first place. And if client side software wants to "secure" itself against the person who owns it... that's a form of "security" I could do without.

it would be incredibly easy for apple to frame this as a security issue, because, even in my mind, it is. I pay for apple devices because I trust apple with my data. I do not trust most companies with my data. I trust my data to only flow through Apple's servers, and to get a clear indication when my data is _not_ flowing through apple's servers (e.g. green bubbles). A company bypassing this causing messages to show up blue when they are in fact traveling outside of Apple's control is a security risk (to me). Clearly if it's e2e encrypted that's not the case, but that's not what apple is going to argue. They're going to argue exactly what I just did. And I honestly agree with them. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't need to allow other companies onto the platform, just that BLUE BUBBLES mean something to apple customers and bypassing that is something that apple needs to block.

Apple really needs to get that RCS implementation rolled out though. Wonder if it's still going to be green bubbles or something else.

I think this pypush method uses Apple servers. I think the key aspect was the author figuring out how submit public keys and request public keys for other Apple users from Apple servers. From that point it seems to be as secure as public key cryptography.

https://jjtech.dev/reverse-engineering/imessage-explained/

i mean... will the court understand that? Or will they understand the argument I framed (however dumb it is)? I think apple would easily be able to convince the court that anything exiting their servers is less secure, or gives the appearance of lower security, to their customers. Anyway, apple is implementing rcs next year so hopefully none of this matters.

Antitrust is not about legal obligations though, it's about competion and user harm.

The comment from the author's original post is quite the non-answer.

"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531759

What did they think was going to happen? Who knows? But I guess they thought it was no big deal.

Not living in US so it's fun to see people poking at big corporations like the mouse-and-cat chase of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers. Unfortunately, in the end, it is usually the big companies that have both the moral and technical high grounds, just like YouTube and Reddit did.

Also funny to see HN trashes on Google for their Web Environment Integrity while Apple pulling off the biggest attestation scheme in history (they even shipped attestation in Safari for a year before anyone noticed).

the optics are already less than ideal for apple. beeper mini dismisses the any technical challenge apple may claim a hurdle to android having iMessage.

i don’t doubt this will also get shutdown in the near term, but i’m 70% confident in a surprising acquisition & continued support from apple in the longer term.

it will be hard for apple to continue to claim they are pro-user when they appear to be this hostile toward android users.

I'm 0% confident in a surprise acquisition by Apple. Beeper doesn't seem to offer anything that Apple couldn't do themselves.

With that logic you would expect Apple to never make acquisitions. They've got the money in the bank to do just about anything.

Can you show an example of an aquisition they've made to explicitly stop an external company using their APIs?

I've not heard of one, it doesn't appear to be in their playbook.

You're moving the goalposts. Parent said "Beeper doesn't seem to offer anything that Apple couldn't do themselves."

It’s the same thing. There is no reason for Apple to buy Beeper except to make them stop.

Apple doesn’t do that. It has lawyers to use.

> There is no reason for Apple to buy Beeper except to make them stop.

OP clearly was not arguing that the acquisition would be for a shutdown.

Acquisition and continued operation is a plausible (albeit unlikely) strategy that Apple could use to avoid further regulatory scrutiny while also deterring copycats.

Averageroyalty appeared to be arguing that Apple would only buy them so they wouldn’t use the API anymore. That was my read of their comment.

The OP they responded to was arguing there’s no point in Apple doing that, if they wanted an app on android they could do it themselves. They already have for Apple Music, Apple TV, and their moved to iPhone app.

I don’t think there is any level of frozen over hell where Apple would ever buy the company and let them run the service. There’s no chance they’ll ever buy the company. Even if they did, they would just shut it down for something Apple makes. Apple does not need third-party code to interface with Apple‘s own service.

I should have said it explicitly, but there was an implicit "couldn't do themselves in a reasonable amount of time".

If the rumors are true, Apple already has iMessage running on Android, they just haven't released it yet. They used to support AIM and other messaging services, so they're no stranger to cross-platform messaging apps. The could probably pull together a Beeper competitor pretty quickly.

Nobody at Apple would want to work on a second-class citizen app. That's why they'd acquire a company to do it and maintain it.

>> it will be hard for apple to continue to claim they are pro-user when they appear to be this hostile toward android users.

They are pro user - for Apple ecosystem users that is. And I’m good with that.

Disclaimer: Yup I’m an Apple user. I pay good money to keep the riffraff out - or at least ID them by not being blue.

> They are pro user - for Apple ecosystem users that is. And I’m good with that.

I don’t really agree. The interoperability impact means that I’m affected as an iPhone user too. I’m only not impacted when I communicate with other iPhone users.

And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with. Apple just knows that their lock-in is strong, and the impact is disproportionately felt by non-Apple users.

This is not the same as being “pro Apple user” IMO. They’re just able to get away with it with their own user base because they’re less aware of the impact.

Did you actually read the parent comment? They consider a worse chat experience with Android users a feature, because God forbid someone prefers Android, or shudders doesn't want to spend $1000 on a phone.

I think you and I are interpreting “riffraff” differently.

I took it to mean the myriad of SMS scams and spam that is rampant outside of iMessage, not Android users broadly.

My point was that Apple isn’t caring about their users by doing this. They’re negatively impacting my ability as an Apple user to communicate with people who prefer Android, and that is a stance that affects both parties. It’s not pro user.

I suspect we’re in violent agreement that excluding-Android-as-a-feature is not a pro-user stance.

>> consider a worse chat experience with Android users a feature

Well not really - it would be great if the sms feature set matched imessage. The main benefit to me when I see blue is that I know that person is probably at least authenticated and probably has a credit card tied to that account. That in itself seems to limit the riffraff (scammers) that want to send spam or other garbage. I see way more of that from green than I do blue.

>> And it matters to me that my choice of device impacts the users I interact with.

Interesting. How does this impact an Android user who sends text to you? To them everyone is green (or whatever color Android uses) correct?

Exactly I can’t see how this is as big an issue as they let on

I would recommend finding a friend or looking up a YT video or whatever to see what the experience is like. Theres a reason this keeps hitting the front page, and it isn’t because the current experience is good.

Any kind of multimedia is compressed behind recognition. Basic texts are fine. Send me an image, and it’ll look like it came from another era.

Acquiring Beeper would paint a giant target on the iMessage team. "Reverse engineer iMessage to make an Android app and get a payday from Apple, guaranteed!" 0% likelihood of that.

It would make more sense for Google to acquire them, and start the inevitable court fight with the best legal team money can buy instead of whatever Beeper can afford right now. But Google would probably prefer to stay out of it, so it remains a David and Goliath fight as long as possible.

For sake of argument, if they acquire the Beeper team and continue supporting it, there is no further incentive for more Beeper-like apps to emerge.

Apple would at that point have a leg to stand on when they go after non-native apps, and I think this would actually be a deterrent for copycat attempts and not something that encourages the behavior.

If Apple wanted iMessage on Android they would have done it already. There are emails from executives made public in lawsuits discussing the possibility many years ago.

It’s very clear that Apple does not want iMessage on Android.

My point was that if they chose to give in and acquire something like Beeper (presumably due to bad press, concerns about regulatory action, etc), it does not follow that this incentivizes more Beeper-like products.

Feedback for the Beeper team if they are reading: there is a non-zero amount of us that own Apple devices (like MacBooks or iPads) and not iPhones. For those it applies to, what if you leveraged the legitimate devices we do own as the spoofed devices used by Beeper Mini to register?

Don't know if that would solve the Phone Number registration part, but thought I'd throw this out there

That’s how standard Beeper does it, or at least used to do it: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/21/pebble-founder-launches-be...

Beeper cloud used the device as a relay mechanism. I'm suggesting the same on-Android-device implementation, but rather than randomly generating an apple device to send to Apple's registration servers, they use a device I legitimately own.

No relays (so preserves security) & harder for apple to identify (because to them it'd be as if I'm just using my iPad)

I believe it is possible to use your own relay with Beeper (original Beeper, not Beeper mini).

I believe that this already works. If you register your phone number to your Apple ID on an iPhone, then Beeper Mini (and/or Cloud) should be able to receive and send messages using your phone number in iMessage just as, say, your Mac can.

You can self-host this matrix bridge which is developed by beeper.

So you can host this on your mac, and then you can join that bridge using matrix.

I've used this once for whatsapp, and it worked quite well, also stuff like polls and reactions worked. Though I don't know how good the imessage bridge is feature wise.

> If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.

Presumably this would only be if Apple agreed to allow the beeper mini users by default? I appreciate Beeper's stance on all of this, and hope they can continue operating.

It’s also either naive or a troll. If that did become the handshake it would be reverse engineered and spoofed by bad actors just the same.

The point isn't to prove that it's beeper sending the message, the point is that Apple could give users an option to ignore Beeper's messages.

Either way, I doubt Apple would come to an agreement and would most likely continue to play the cat and mouse game (like they do with people who jb)

So what's the big idea? Keep playing whack-a-mole with Apple until Apple changes their TOS and sues their pants off, or until they run out of open holes? Or is there a bigger end goal?

Force Apple to either allow or implement iMessage interoperability via competitive tactics, not regulatory means.

They don't implement it exactly due to their competitive tactics...

(It was exposed in a recent courtroom hearing that Apple has seriously considered making it available on Android, but they decided that having it Apple-only is a serious benefit for them)

Of course. This now puts Apple in a prickly situation.

One which paints a negative light on Apple which of, if a crowd following gathered "why isn't there iMessage for Android?". As I see, it would result of one of the following:

- They sue and cause a backlash of Apple users.

- They do nothing, shows Apple solely interest is in itself.

- They create, happy times.

> "why isn't there iMessage for Android?"

Is there a single person in the world who didn’t already know the answer to this question?

I don't think this is painting Apple in a negative light for their actual customers, who pay them money. It's painting them in a negative light for a small segment of Android users who obviously are unlikely to switch to Apple anyway.

I disagree, I'm an Apple user and don't view this positively for them. There's a lot of narratives including better security, more interoperability, or even just a david vs goliath battle with Beeper. If it was Google proper, it might be a different story but people like to root for the small guys on the side of right.

Does this make you less likely to purchase an Apple device in the future?

TBC, I also don't necessarily view this as a positive. I just don't see it as a negative whatsoever. It would be nice to be able to chat with Android friends over iMessage, but it's not offputting at all that an outside company trying to monetize reverse-engineered "hacks" onto the protocol are getting booted.

(Yes I know it's not "hacking," but it is obviously hacky)

> Does this make you less likely to purchase an Apple device in the future?

Does for myself. Knowing that Apple has the capabilities yet not willing to implement them.

The disconnect is real. I don't own Facebook, nor use WhatsApp neither do I want to use either.

Other applications do exist but the learning curve and convincing family to use shouldn't be something I need to do. Nor how do I know they'll survive in the next five years?

Yes, RCS will happen but its long overdue.

So because of this you're more likely to purchase an Android product on your next device refresh? I don't see how that logic works out... "My family shouldn't have to use the inferior protocol, so next chance I get I'm going to switch myself to that protocol?"

Who said anything about superior or inferior.

The deciding factor is whatever device makes it easier for me to talk to my relatives will be my next device.

I currently have an iPhone XR, and I have been so frustrated with it for the past five years.

Why I've not changed device because it cost me a heck amount of money and minus my gripes is usable.

Same. iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user since 2007 and to me this just feels like bullying. I'm definitely rooting for Beeper here. And IMO this weakens Apple's security story (which was for me one of a bunch of reasons to stick with Apple).

I don't want millions of Android phones being able to spam me on iMessage, thank you very much.

Apple will need to charge a registration fee for devices that can't be strongly authenticated (no secure element) - that way legitimate use (of both Beeper and legacy non-SE devices) is possible while spam is made unprofitable.

> So what's the big idea?

It's now an ongoing PR stunt, since Eric and Brad were rewarded handsomely in attention for the first hack.

What grounds would Apple have for suing?

"No reverse engineering" is a pretty standard TOS item.

Has any of this ever been tested in court though? Also, the whole thing can be (and very well may have been) implemented using a "clean-room" process, where the Beeper app developers were never exposed to proprietary Apple code, instead working off the pypush PoC's code.

I think Beeper is intentionally aiming for (heavily publicized) litigation to set a precedent.

When did Bepper accept their TOS?

Either they're authorized to use the service and (almost certainly) signed a TOS, or they're not, in which case they're using the service unauthorized.

Not a lawyer but I don't see what else could be true here. I suppose you could say the end users are the ones violating the TOS? I don't think it'll land with any judge, "your honor we just did the reverse engineering (without signing a TOS) and sold it to our users (who did sign a TOS, but didn't reverse engineer), so we're all clean."

Authorization is the first step of setting up Beeper Mini.

During setup, Apple's servers return authorization keys for your device to use.

Seems pretty clear cut to me.

Under this logic, no hacking would ever be illegal. After all, there's obviously no way any attacker ever did anything the code actually made impossible.

Fortunately, courts aren't computers, judges aren't compilers, and legal code isn't a programming language.

Beeper Mini uses the official channels to get authorization. It's not a "hack".

Every attack ever uses something that can be described as "official channels." It's all in the code, after all. As Apple's response makes clear, this is indeed not via the official channels.

"Authorization" in the legal sense != authorization in the cryptographic sense. You can get a token and still be not legally authorized to access a system.

It's not illegal to scrape a website, even if the owners don't want it to be scraped.

Accessing a public server using the public protocol it advertises is generally allowed.

I'm not a lawyer either but I don't see what's wrong with that argument. The tool that Beeper built isn't infringing any laws, reverse engineering in this context is perfectly legal. They're not responsible for their users' use of the tools they build and their consequent violation of the TOS.

That's not generally true in practice. Especially when it is marketed to end users as a TOS-violating product and doubly so when it was originally a commercialized product.

TOSes are not legally binding so who cares?

What is up with this meme around here? Of course terms of service are legally binding. They're a contract.

It is possible to put unenforceable terms in a TOS, but it's simply untrue that "TOSes are not legally binding."

What do you think is the distinction between a legally binding contract and a TOS?

You say that, but what is Apple going to sue Beeper for? Tortious interference? That seems a stretch.

In a similar vein: has any maker of web scraping tools been sued by a website? I couldn't find anything.

Reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed.

Also, breaking the TOS is usually not illegal. TOS of a random company is not the law, otherwise you would get into trouble non-stop from random websites and apps making you "agree" to things.

> Reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed.

In Apple's iMessage TOS? I don't find that likely but open to being wrong.

> Also, breaking the TOS is usually not illegal

In general, contracts are legally binding, therefore breaking them is illegal. Sometimes contracts include clauses that can't be legally binding, but I don't think a TOS forbidding this type of behavior would be questionable in the slightest. Apple obviously has no obligation to allow anyone to use its platform as a backend for their own (previously commercialized) product.

> In Apple's iMessage TOS? I don't find that likely but open to being wrong.

In EU law. No contract or license may restrict your right to reverse engineer or decompile for the purpose of interoperability or building an alternative implementation.

In US law as well fwiw.

At least in US law, that's overridable by EULAs, TOS, T&C's, etc: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/What-were-the-5N_SjNVpRTOJr...

Not quite a carte blanche protection in the EU, either.

Can you sue someone for violating TOS? It's not illegal, and Apple doesn't have any damages.

Terms of Service are just... the terms you need to follow in exchange for service. If you violate the terms, you get cut off from service... which they already did

Yes, breach of contract, especially when you’re circumventing controls specifically designed to prevent the thing you’re doing.

I suspect the end-game of Beeper is to explicitly set a legal precedent or at the very least a highly publicized fight over adversarial interoperability, something no other company dared to do (because most tech companies nowadays themselves make money out of interoperability restrictions).

I assume there's some very rich benefactor behind it that is willing to fund it.

> Android and iPhone customers desperately want to be able to chat together with high quality images/video, encryption, emojis, typing status, read receipts, and all modern chat features.

There are numerous chat apps with those features, so I can’t see why people were “desperate” about it at all. Better yet, those existing chat apps aren’t likely to stop working tomorrow.

> iPhone customers desperately want to be able to chat together

is also laughably false lol. iPhone users just want android users to get an iphone.

...in the US.

The rest of the world uses Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal.

This blue/green bubble SMS but not SMS -thing is a 100% an American issue.

It's really not an American issue. It's an immature people issue. I've yet to meet anyone who actually cares about whether their messages show up as blue or green when they send them. My social network (in the US) is about 50/50 for Android and iPhone users, and we have a variety of group threads that have both types of phones in them.

The only people that care are:

- Maybe some children

- Some immature adults

- A lot of people who have never used an iPhone and don't even know what the blue/green bubble is but whine about it anyways.

100%. It's nice to have the typing status, delivered/read status, higher quality of pictures, etc. But I could care less what color it is, and group conversations with SMS/MMS work pretty darn well. I would like a desktop SMS/MMS/iMessage client for my Linux desktop though without having to run a Mac.

If you think that SMS/MMS group conversations "work pretty darn well" you really should try something made in the 2000's instead.

The amount of features you get for groups in Telegram for example is galaxies ahead of SMS groups.

What I mean is I'm not constantly fighting to keep messages under a certain size, getting message rejections, weird formatting, or even annoying tapback quotes anymore: basic functionality is all I care about and working fine. Plus I can send funny GIFs back and forth! I have used Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, etc and they're "nice" and have lots of emotes, but I don't really care too much as long as basic functionality is good.

Android user here who is a member of a group that is all iphone. Those users don't care about the color of the bubble. What thy care about is that if I am in the group, they lose functionality that they are accustomed to. The big ones that I hear about are adding/removing users and high quality media sharing. Not to mention the janky handling of message reactions that seem to always suck for one side or the other.

The problem is that having just one non-iphone user in the mix causes imessage to drop to SMS, taking them back a decade in functionality.

And yes, some of them do complain about it vocally. Maybe they're immature, I don't know. But it's an annoying bit of social friction, and I'm sure many android users have caved to the pressure to "upgrade" to an iphone.

This is the same with my wife. She didn't care about what phones anyone had, she just found that her group chats with iPhone friends (when she had Android) were janky, as you describe. She doesn't care about apps or phones, but we got her an iPhone because she wants her chats to work well.

Ye you are probably right that I am american-centric in my perspective. Only one that really matters in tech tho.

Percentage share of iphones are rising in korea and japan tho for similar reasons though.

> iPhone users just want android users to get an iphone.

That's what Apple wants. So they maintain arbitrary limitations to incentivize their customers to also want it.

"Android? You're buying it wrong"

It’s false based on what? Your own anecdotal experience? I have a friend group that has iPhones and Androids. We went on vacation and had to jump through so many hoops just to share our pictures. We don’t care what devices everybody uses, because why the heck should that matter?

The fact that it can be simple to share high fidelity pictures and videos, but it isn’t just because Apple wants their walled garden benefits nobody but Apple. So your claim that this is laughably false is easily refuted by my anecdotal evidence.

People that are friends or family with differing devices do exist. I know, it’s shocking. And it would be nice to have something as simple as messaging just work without all these stupid UX downgrades for no reason at all.

Curious. In Europe, I never know if my friends are using Android or iPhone. My gf has iPhone and we never had any issue sharing pictures and videos- we both use Whatsapp (never heard of iMessage outside of this absurd "green bubble" thing that happens in the US) and Google Photos.

Nobody I know in the US uses WhatsApp. This has been repeated ad nauseam in other comments. I don’t know why this is, but in the US people tend to use the default message apps on their phones to text each other.

The only other app that I’ve seen used in several places is GroupMe, but that’s typically reserved for large groups (more than 10 people or so) that may include people you’re not friends with, but more acquaintances. So it’s been used for school classes, community groups, and things like that.

Me and my friends don’t care about green vs blue bubbles or any of that garbage. We just want to be able to communicate over the paid cellular plan that we already have. What happens in Europe has no bearing on this. All I pointed out by my comment above is that this is a problem and there are people that would like a solution.

And, not that this matters, I’m writing this on my iPhone. But, this is still an annoying problem to me because much of my family and some of my friends use android. Apple degrades my experience with family and friends for no technical reason. The only reason they do this, presumably, is to retain a large market share and promote some stupid “exclusivity” ideal that appeals to some people.

> Nobody I know in the US uses WhatsApp

> this is a problem and there are people that would like a solution

The solution is literally downloading a free app and encouraging others to do the same.

> this is still an annoying problem to me because much of my family and some of my friends use android

Then why don't you start using Whatsapp with them? It's not like in Europe we were born with it, at some point someone told us "you are on Whatsapp, right? I'll message you there" and we downloaded the damn thing. Is it an internet connection issue? (In the sense that you need to always be able to fallback seamlessly to SMSes because the connection is spotty?)

>The solution is literally downloading a free app and encouraging others to do the same.

Absolutely not. I'll never touch whatsapp with a ten thousand foot pole. If you aren't tired of facebook ruining people's lives then I don't know what to tell you, but frankly most people who pay attention are sick of FB controlling the planet.

How about instead, you use apps that don't sell your information to literally anyone who will give them a dollar? Like Apple's iMessage.

This attitude is exactly what I was talking about!

american iphone users just want others to be iphone users

I was making fun of you. That seems to have gone right over your head. Here, I'll put it in your perspective. Facebook users (you, a whatsapp user) just want others to use facebook (spyware).

Read the username. I am not the whatsapp user lol.

Btw, Poe's law, and you are absolutely right about Europe lol. Thank you for making my point.

> I'll never touch whatsapp with a ten thousand foot pole.

Then use Signal.

I was one of the first users of signal when it first released, over a decade ago. I could not, and still can not, get others to use it. We're long past that. The choices are Google's spyware, Facebook's spyware, or Apple's locked down ecosystem, which has been proven to not be spyware (fbi requests and all that). I think I'll take the latter.

Nobody is doing that. Doesn’t matter what i do. In Europe you have a mess of country codes and to be charged fees by network provider based on the countries you’re talking to. In the US that has literally never been an issue. We never put the country code in because we’re in the same country. Lol.

Country codes or roaming fees have nothing to do with it. The reason we use Whatsapp is simply to avoid SMS/ MMS (I might have sent one MMS in my life, back in 2008) and network charges for phone calls/ video calls. Basically most of our phone communication activity is over ip, with the only exception of a minority of classic phone calls (as they tend to have better quality).

> Nobody is doing that. Doesn’t matter what I do.

Lol. Of course it matters: if you do it, by definition someone is doing it.

The technie vs normie divide exemplified right here in these comments.

You don't hear iPhone users begging their friends to get on signal unless they are discussing drugs or sensitive topics. You hear android users ask iphone users to install wtv app all the time.

And I am talking about anecdotes here, but there are well-document events (some that happened this year) that do emphasize what I am saying. I won't share them though because you know... jobs... and that they should be obvious if you are following this conversation over the past decade. What I will say tho is that only one company wants (wants being generous) the other to change their messaging.

> The fact that it can be simple to share high fidelity pictures and videos, but it isn’t just because Apple wants their walled garden benefits nobody but Apple

Irrelevant. iPhone users mostly just want android users to get iphones. Doesn't matter why.

I didn’t mention this, because it doesn’t matter. I use an iPhone. I’m writing this on an iPhone. I use a MacBook. Why the heck should I care about my friends and family paying some “Apple status” fee to get an iPhone just so I can share pictures and videos with them?

> iPhone users mostly just want android users to get iphones. Doesn't matter why.

This is anecdotal. Where is the data proclaiming this? I’ve never personally met somebody that cares what brand of phone you have.

And I guess it should also be said, I don’t use drugs or anything. I just want to be able to message friends and family without pointless restrictions. I don’t know where you’re getting these ideas from.

> Why the heck should I care about my friends and family paying some “Apple status” fee to get an iPhone just so I can share pictures and videos with them?

You might not. It is clear that the majority of iphone users don't care that android users keep complaining about green vs blue bubbles.

> Where is the data proclaiming this?

Use the mobile app usage data repository that your company provides or wtv data subscription (Bloomberg, data.ai, etc) that your company provides. After looking at aggregate, segment by iOS vs android. Hell, if you work in the mobile app space, you already know just how difficult it is to get iOS users to shift away from the apple default.

> I don’t know where you’re getting these ideas from.

like i said, techie vs normie divide. Funny you keep mentioning anecdotes when we can clearly look at the market forces. Apple isn't being pressured to change anything because their users just find it easier for others to switch to iPhone.

As others have remarked, my perspective is US-centric.

> I’ve never personally met somebody that cares what brand of phone you have.

This is incorrect, or you don't meet many people. They exist.

It's not hard "just because Apple wants their walled garden benefits nobody but Apple". It's hard because SMS does not and cannot support those features.

If you want group picture sharing, just pick a chat protocol that actually supports that, rather than bitching at Apple over what SMS, a protocol they have zero control over, can and can't do.

Apple is not deliberately degrading the experience for SMS users, or refusing to allow sharing high-quality videos and photos with SMS users. That's like saying Apple is discriminating against your grandmother by not letting you video call her landline phone from 1985.

Apple supporting RCS should fix this, hopefully.

>The fact that it can be simple to share high fidelity pictures and videos, but it isn’t just because Apple...

It's literally as simple as installing a cross-platform app. Apple is not stopping you from doing that.

And using a third party app/protocol is pretty much the only way right now. Even most Android users don't use RCS among themselves, because only newer phones have it enabled by default and it only works in some apps.

Yes, because Apple has very successfully manipulated iPhone users into thinking this. It's both impressive and depressing how effectively Apple has achieved this marketing goal.

doesn't matter why

Facts. US iPhone users are so incredibly entitled, the suggestion that they're going to move to a third party app to accommodate Android users is laughable.

I am surprised my statement was so controversial tbh. It is exceedingly obvious if you talk to hot women lol, and they are pretty much are what determines how mainstream people are going to talk to each other.

No we don’t! Consider this. I want to send a picture to my friend. If iPhone, I can iMessage it to them easy, no compression and fully encrypted. If android, I can text them but MMS will degrade the quality. I can send it over instagram or Snapchat but that will also degrade the quality. I can send it through google photos but wait!! That also degrades the quality. Not to mention none of these methods are e2ee. The only lossless option is email. No one in college is emailing me photos btw. So if they don’t have an iPhone generally I’m out of luck

None of the existing chat apps have established themselves as viable alternatives

Meta has trashed their privacy image so FB Messenger/WhatsApp non-starters for lots of Americans. Signal, telegram don't have enough PR, 90% of Americans have never heard of them. Kik was popular but died due to their financial trouble. Discord/Groupme have found success by marketing themselves towards particular niches, but people don't really think of them as general-purpose messaging apps

I'm curious why privacy issues of WhatsApp and Facebook are only a concern for Americans. Does the rest of the world know that WhatsApp has been owned by Facebook for 10 years?

Americans use Facebook, Google, etc. as much as anyone else. Claiming that the mythical “privacy” is a meaningful factor in iMessage’s adoption over Facebook properties is delusional.

This is some ways like Youtube and adblock. Apple is completely within their right to try to kick Beeper to the curb but I also enjoy watching a scrappy company like Beeper try to circumvent Apple's attempts to shut them out.

Because of how likely it is to be killed though I don't think I shall be adopting it personally.

As far as I understand, in order to talk to Apple iMessage services/backend (and all auth pieces) you need a "legit" Apple ID and legit Apple hardware model #s / serial #s

If you don't have that, how are they able to get auth tokens / send messages around without basically "exploiting a hidden hack that might get patched"?

The hackintosh community has tools to generate those #s. e.g. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Post-Install/universal/i...

But why is it Apple's responsibility to accept a non-legit/unknown serial #?

> But why is it Apple's responsibility to accept a non-legit/unknown serial #?

I don’t think anyone is arguing that it’s Apple’s responsibility to accept fake serial numbers.

The serial number is an implementation detail and not the core issue, which is Apple’s intentional degradation of the non-iMessage experience, and their stance against interoperability.

If this was all about security, they could accept something other than an Apple serial #, and provide a UX that makes it clear the user is interacting with a non-Apple user. This would address most spam/abuse issues.

But we know that this is about lock-in and not security.

> I don’t think anyone is arguing that it’s Apple’s responsibility to accept fake serial numbers.

Can we confirm if that's what is happening here or not? How else is Beeper Mini able to work given Apple's requirement "iMessage auth + read/write requires valid_serial_number"?

The “How Beeper Mini Works” post from a few days ago doesn’t mention the serial number, so I don’t know.

But whether this is happening or not is immaterial to the broader philosophical issues being raised.

For sake of argument, let’s say they’re faking a serial number to make the app work. How does that change the impact of Apple’s anti-interoperability stance?

Again, if the real issue is security, nothing stops Apple from providing a secure alternative. And again, this takes us back to: this isn’t about security.

It’s not, and they don’t. This is a cat and mouse game. Apple is free to block these and people are free to keep trying to get around it. Everyone should be acting in good faith

> It’s not, and they don’t.

> they don't

They (Apple) don't accept requests without a valid serial #, but Beeper Mini is working (for users without iDevices), so there's some kind of exploit, no?

AFAIK they are using a reverse-engineered Apple binary that does the real iMessage - and since Apple doesn't update apps outside of iOS updates, Apple can't, in theory, patch it without also breaking iMessage on older iPhones.

I'd have assumed there'd be something more going on in iMessage, like each device has a private key that needs to sign the messages, and Apple can ban any private keys that leak -- but in theory couldn't they even be prevented from leaking by secure enclave?

I'm just speculating on what would have made sense, but I'm guessing that's not how it's working since Beeper Mini exists. It begs the question: why isn't that the way they do it?

Messages has existed longer than the Secure Enclave has.

Secure Enclave doesn't have to exist for the rest of the system to work as I described. (And once Secure Enclave does exist, it can be used to further secure the private keys generated after that date.)

Without Secure Enclave, remote parties (the servers) can't know where the key material came from. I'm assuming because old devices pre-SEP have to be supported, Beeper is exploiting this since there's no required residency or provenance attestation for the keys.

The Intel Management Engine has existed since 2008. Did Apple laptops/desktops avoid this for significantly longer than that?

You're asking why cryptographic attestation isn't a requirement to use a service that still supports >10-year old x86 Macs?

Yeah? Asymmetric cryptography has been around a lot longer than a decade.

That's the foundation of attestation, not attestation itself. Macs did not ship with a TPM, and had no facilities for hardware chain-of-trust until the T2 chip in 2017.

But you don't have to have everything in place to do the basics. Use private keys stored normally on the device. If they get stolen or leaked, brick iMessage on those devices and show a message saying, "Your system has been compromised and can't use iMessage until you visit an Apple Store or call 1-800-..." Then just hand out a new private key at the store or over the phone with little friction, but track which customers are given new keys and how often. If there's a trend of someone receiving a bunch of new keys, investigate them before issuing more.

Or just allow a user to obtain a new private key via their iCloud account and associate the key with that account so that it can't be used to send messages unless you're signed into that account.

Newer devices that can protect their keys don't need that, and you phase the old process out over time.

Oh, so what you're saying is equivalent to "Apple should have cryptographically signed serial numbers/UUIDs, instead of accepting user-generated values"

But they already have a record of which serial numbers were actually sold (at least since some point), signing a device token/private key would be redundant and allowing user-generated serials to sign in with degraded trust is a policy choice.

Got it. Well that makes sense for older devices.

Maybe they generate legit-looking fake device serial numbers, that just happen to match real devices most of the time?

How does Apple not know a database of real serial #s that match products it has sold? Why would an API that goes to the lengths of expecting a serial # not validate and instead accept a fake "real-looking" serial # instead of a known- matched-in-the-database real serial #?

Well, Apple does not actually know which serial numbers have been sold. You can still buy Apple products outside of an Apple store, and even at an Apple Store, knowing which serials are sold is logistically difficult.

They could probably implement a process at Apple stores but to do it for third party stores would be more difficult. To avoid simply adding a step for a user to claim a serial number as sold when they set up their Hackintosh or HackiPhone (can we coin this?), you'd probably need a way to authenticate as the store when you mark one off. But there's nothing stopping stores who have excess inventory from selling it off at cost or even a discount when a particular product isn't doing well- and at that point those purchasers will need to be able to mark off serial numbers when they sell those devices.

It's not impossible but it's not terribly likely, at least any time soon.

> Well, Apple does not actually know which serial numbers have been sold.

What about "serial numbers manufactured?"

I'm going to guess "Beeper Mini stealing manufactured-but-not-yet-sold serial #s for themselves" will be shut down super quickly. If you are a user who finally gets a device with a serial # "stolen" by Beeper Mini... that seems like bad luck/bad user experience?

That kind of collision is very unlikely to happen.

It is comparable to someone stealing your Windows license key by guessing randomly.

More on collision: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23253149/

Are Apple device serial numbers hashes, though? Suppose you look through a factory-packed box of iPhones, the kind that Apple resellers get delivered, would their serial numbers not be sequential or at least numerically close to one another?

I wonder why Apple lawyers don't go after Beeper with the CFAA?

Maybe they will… but, also, I bet they can change their systems faster than the court system.

> CFAA

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)

It would be a mis-use of the act.

That's not quite correct. You need a binary blob that's generated by some kernel level stuff I don't fully understand.

The whole green bubble thing with Android SMS on iPhone is a problem, but the solution is to get everyone to use a different chat app. Apple will never give this up.

Google could be leading that charge and providing a world beating chat app that works across all phones and all desktop devices. They have every reason to provide the best chat app in the world and yank iPhone users over to it. Instead they have given up on chat. The Google Hangouts/Meet chat situation is a disaster on iPhone and on desktop. They don't even try. It's proof that they are lost.

> The whole green bubble thing with Android SMS on iPhone is a problem, but the solution is to get everyone to use a different chat app. Apple will never give this up.

There are so many competitors in this space, you really can't claim it's for lack of trying.

Defaults are powerful, especially for Apple users.

It's not just that defaults are powerful, it's the network effects. When WhatsApp was purchased by Facebook, there was a strong movement in Europe to move to other messengers. But it never really got off the ground because everyone is on WhatsApp. Trying to live without WhatsApp in some European countries only leads to social isolation (a bit like trying to live without iMessage in the US).

> but the solution is to get everyone to use a different chat app

And how do you do that?

Google could just leverage the very popular Gmail app and start piping people into chat from there. They don't even try. Their Hangouts/Meet app on iPhone is a withered husk.

> Google could be leading that charge and providing a world beating chat app that works across all phones and all desktop devices.

The tried, many times. Google Talk, Hangouts, YouTube Chat, Allo, Google Chat and probably others that I missed.

RCS may be their most successful attempt yet in the US by hijacking SMS which I guess is fairly popular.

props to these guys for intentionally getting into a cat and mouse game with apple over this.

surely there's security implications to all this, if you've got a chat app where there's some internal belief that it can only run on certain platforms, also controlled by your company, there may be some assumptions made about how things work... can't help but imagine beeper itself opens up more vectors for stuff like the recently-in-the-news push notification mass surveillance

i have been wondering if theres other outcomes i'm missing between the two obvious results: 1) a more tightly controlled, locked-down iMessage ecosystem 2) some kind of explicitly supported third-party api

3) loss of access to tools that worked for the hackintosh community. But who cares about the true hackers here?

I'm always a proponent of rooting for the underdog. But, in this scenario I am finding it hard to justify doing so. Beeper isn't doing this for some mystical enthusiasm for hacking and exploiting or sticking it to the man. It's motives are purely incentivized by profit which makes it hard to for me to root for. If this were a small time hobbyist providing a solution for an existing problem, sure I'm all game for that.

Relying on the assumption of an “authorized client” is fundamentally not a reliable security or anti-spam mechanism, as this Beeper saga demonstrates. A curious 16 year old casually figured out how to make a client be “authorized”, and a motivated party just demonstrated basic interference from Apple can’t stop it from continuing to practice guerrilla interoperability. Apple might be able to sue Beeper out of existence, but lets not pretend this approach is any meaningful defense against spam.

Do we know that beeper wasn’t cut off by e.g. an automated spam algorithm?

I saw lots of technical discussion in previous threads that stated that they were using the same faked hardware ID for all messages… that would seem an obvious red flag.

I'm dying to know the technical details, but I wouldn't advise Beeper to disclose because it will just make it easier for Apple to block them.

Beeper Cloud was running for years before, and Apple released a statement at the time they blocked Beeper Mini. This was not automated.

Beeper Cloud was running on actual Apple hardware until October 2023, which is when they switched to the software emulation approach that Beeper Mini is also employing.

Yes, but if Apple's complaint is truly about security then they should have blocked it even harder before, because the cloud version wasn't E2EE. Their behavior reveals that security is not their real concern here.

Structurally, the cloud version was you logging into your iMessage account on a friend's computer. How could Apple possibly prevent that?

I think it actually makes a pretty strong case for Apple opening up a better interface that lets people achieve the same outcome they clearly desire so much, they'd even compromise their own security to achieve it.

Apple had plenty of ways to detect a datacenter full of Mac minis logging into iMessage accounts from all over the world, multiple on each machine, with custom software automating message sending, which I believe is even open source so Apple could look at it.

The only thing this really demonstrates is that non-update-able software DRM doesn't work and Apple didn't introduce a robust hardware attestation mechanism early enough.

> Relying on the assumption of an “authorized client” is fundamentally not a reliable security or anti-spam mechanism, as this Beeper saga demonstrates.

That's fundamentally false given how Apple is a hardware company, and going forward they can ship a cryptographically secure hardware attestation mechanism. The issue is simply that older Apple devices were shipped without this capability, and Apple doesn't want to break them to prohibit Beeper.

But make no mistake, in a few years when those older devices are fully deprecated, there is nothing preventing Apple from shipping essentially uncrackable hardware attestation.

Happy user of normal Beeper, have no skin in this particular game though.

Still, I'm glad they brought it back, and hope will continue this route.

Anything that helps break the high walls of that garden.

Why are people obsessed with “breaking into” Apple’s walled garden? There are already secure cross platform messaging services like Signal or WhatsApp that has feature parity with iMessage. This is a solved problem that doesn’t need another solution.

US Americans love iMessage, nobody knows why.

Lots of Americans have iPhones, iMessage is the default messaging on the platform, and it's actually quite a good messaging system.

Holdover of them being obsessed with SMS for some reason too.

I remember having to pay 20c per SMS and 50c per MMS before IMs on phones became a thing. Wasn't hard for literally everyone to want to change to the first available client which for most people was WhatsApp, 2 years before iMessage was even released. Guess messaging was so cheap in the US that they didn't have a good enough reason to hop on the IM train for years.

Some people are finding themselves excluded from their social group because of platform choice - basically not being able to use iMessage (sometimes) means people don't want you in the group chat (because mixing iMessage and SMS messages makes a bad experience.)

It is incredibly difficult to get a social group to change messaging platforms, especially if that social group's shared interest isn't "using a good messaging platform"

The easiest solution is to conform to the existing messaging platform in the group. In the case of a bunch of iOS users, that might mean leaving Android for iOS. People don't want to do this (For a variety of reasons.) So being able to participate as a first-world-citizen of the platform has its appeal.

He mentioned their reason in the blog — that Messages is the default messaging app on iPhone and that it is also not a replaceable default.

tl;dr

Most people in the US use iPhones. They also like to use the default messaging app, which most of the time is iMessage. Some people like to use Android phones (privacy, cost, freedom), but still want to message their peers who use the Apple-only iMessage.

This is the best and most concise summary on the thread.

The equivalent would be if Microsoft, when they had the largest market share of email clients in the US in the late 1990s with Outlook Express (OE), decided to make it so OE-sent group rich text emails with attachments could only be received by other OE users, whereas non-OE users only received plain text emails with image thumbnails and downscaled video attachments. People would have lots of good reasons to use a different email client, like forthcoming Thunderbird, Gmail, or Apple Mail clients. But they'd find they couldn't communicate well with Microsoft OE users.

If Microsoft had made this change early enough and also made it so non-OE responses were color coded with a green background to indicate they are "lesser emails," we'd be in a world of Microsoft Outlook Express users would wonder why everyone doesn't just switch to Windows (the majority OS, at that moment) to make everyone's lives easier. And friends/family would exclude non-Windows users from an email thread as not to "degrade" the thread.

Communication via text with friends and family should be an open standard. Barring the availability of such a standard (e.g. RCS), at a minimum, the chat clients to communicate with friends and family should be x-platform (like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and LINE all manage to be).

Ergo iMessage should, at least, have an Android app, even if such an app requires an Apple ID.

Because its the Hacker ethos. People need to be able to modify any software to suit their requirements and not have to blindly follow the prescription of a company whose interests may not align with yours.

Why are Apple users so upset about this? It's almost as if they don't want interoperability with Android users. And please spare me the spam excuse.

Why do android users want something they have everything else ahead? I don’t want interoperability. If I did I’d use the other messaging apps that are far beyond apple’s. The only value I see is stubbornness with older family as many see iPhones as a simpler device

I'm going to go with a combination of Stockholm syndrome, crabs in a bucket and snobbery. Apple users like to think they're in a special little club.

Speaking as one Apple user, I don’t think of myself in a special club - I just like that my shit works. What I don’t understand is why Android users are so vested in ruining it for me.

Can’t have nice things.

Why would it ruin it for you?

The guy you replied to made an honest mistake, he forgot to include 'smugness'.

Spam. And you knew that.

> From what we can tell, Beeper Mini was the fastest growing paid Android application launch in history. In the first 48 hours, it was downloaded by more than 100,000 people.

These numbers seem very low. I would have expected numbers in the millions.

Every consumer facing tech company with a paid product (physical or digital) I've worked at had Android as <10% of conversions. This includes just retail browsing from their phone shopping. Android users make no one money

Unless they're trying to join iOS group messages I guess

Our conversion from download to paid subscription is hovering around 50% fwiw

congrats eric, that's HUGE! A real pain point y'all are solving - long live Beeper!

Really shows to me why so many developers end up focusing so much more on the iOS versions of their apps. I would have expected the same.

I don't believe for one microsecond that those numbers would qualify as the "fastest growing paid Android application launch in history". I do believe that their numbers are that low - I don't know a single person who would pay to... what, have text messages appear in a different colour on other peoples' phones?

Edit, forget what I said. I missed the keyword 'paid'.

Threads earlier this year apparently got 70 million user signed up the first 48h. I would assume this leads to at least >1m Android users?

First example I came to think about, might be much better examples out there. Regardless, something with "more than 100,000 people" in 48h is probably not the fastest growing Android app.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/07/tech/meta-social-media-do...

Note: "paid."

If it was a free app sure, but in the paid category those numbers drop quite a bit.

The funniest outcome with this whole “Apple vs. Beeper” saga would be if Apple said, “Fine use the iMessage protocol. We won’t break interoperability and you can even have full feature parity…

BUT… Any messages sent this way will still show up as the dreaded “Green Bubble”.

(I hope Eric and the Beeper team can pull through!)

If the green bubble (or teal bubble or whatever) works with iMessage, I will be happy. It's about the functionality, not the status symbol.

For many people, it is about not looking like a brokie to their peers, and that's what apple counts on.

Messages sent via SMS or iMessage already look identical to the recipient, the only distinguishing feature is a small header at the top of the conversation that says either "Text message" or "iMessage".

SMS doesn't support emoji reactions, read receipts, typing indicators, high quality pictures/video, or groupchats over 10 people. These are deal-breaker for anyone that texts regularly

I really want to use this but it just seems unrealistic. I don't want to start new iMessage group chats with friends, explain to them how it's possible, only for it to break 3 days later. I knew this would happen the first time which is why I didn't subscribe. And now I don't want to create an Apple ID only to have it banned and messages lost.

I love that you're pursuing this and taking on Apple, but at the same time your marketing has felt misleading and you've put a lot of users at risk by listing on the Play Store with a subscription model.

> Beeper Mini made communication between Android and iPhone users more secure. That is a fact.

It seemed like it would make spam and scamming over iMessage worse. At least it requires an Apple Id now.

It was possible to send automated iMessage messages from Macs forever, and it's not exactly impossible to jailbreak iPhones, either.

Isn't this a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or other US laws? Doesn't the fact they are trying to make money off of this negate any ethical hacker arguments?

Beeper doesn't "hack" anything though, it uses the exact same authorization mechanism as a real iOS device and grants the user access to no more than a real device would.

I agree that the CFAA can be abused to try and prosecute this (as well as the DMCA), and I suspect Beeper is intentionally hoping for (heavily publicized) litigation to settle this once and for all and set a precedent.

> it uses the exact same authorization mechanism as a real iOS device and grants the user access to no more than a real device would.

And a hacker that social engineers someone's bank password is entering just like the account owner would. "Hacking" doesn't have to involve exploiting a technical vulnerability. It's just unauthorized system access, regardless of methodology

Yeah, I am not expecting this to be a protracted game of cat and mouse. Apple will just sue them in the end; that'll put a REAL quick stop to this.

I wish things had more interoperability, but Apple is under no obligation to implement it or be okay with it. And honestly, I believe them when they say that this is a security/privacy risk; even if it does serve their anticompetitive tendencies.

Tech journalists have noted that this kind of reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is specifically covered (allowed) by applicable laws. I’m not well versed in the related laws, but it at least seems on the surface that lawsuits may not be the end here.

If it’s a security issue, that’s on Apple’s architecture. They can cat and mouse this, but the more times they catch the mouse, the worse this looks for Apple because it effectively means that iMessage was never secure to begin with. Only time will tell how effectively they can address this.

Sue them on what grounds?

And what if Beeper open sources their client? How is Apple going to stop that?

Why would they not just shut it down if Apple asks, wouldn't that just do the same thing (beeper users can't send messages)

I'm guessing they think Apple might consider an opt-out (or more likely opt-in) setting to allow messages from other platforms.

Beeper on main(ish)stream media.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/12/11/apple-shutters-new-app...

This clearly isn't going to be solved through technical means. It makes me wonder - if Apple were to stop obstructing interoperability, how much the resulting market for competition to iMessage and other parts of the walled garden be worth? A couple billion dollars? With today's valuations, probably closer to trillions.

Why then VCs aren't willing to spend a fraction of that - say a couple billion - to invest into a crack team of lawyers and sue the shit out of Apple over this issue? When at least one side of the suit is a corporation, my understanding is that American justice system is basically the game of who can outspend whom. Surely enough VCs could outspend Apple on this while still securing some probable profit in the end?

Why is this not happening?

So much of the current tech companies derive at least part of their profits out of restricted interoperability. A legal precedent allowing adversarial interoperability would be the death of any "engagement"-based business model, aka most of tech nowadays. Alternatively clients would pop up left and right that will strip out all the "engagement" nonsense (as well as the spyware/malware), and those will no longer be stoppable by legal trolling.

Such a move would completely kill off VC's (already sick) golden goose. They would lose more than what they'd win.

In some countries it's already legal to reverse engineer software for the purpose of interoperability.

> "We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage."

They never addressed that part of Apple's statement. I don't see how they can survive without doing so.

Without phone number registration working isn't this far less useful?

Surprised this doesn't have more upvotes, without phone number registration Beeper Mini isn't actually back.

Time should be well spent by creating meaningful apps that can solve world hunger, poverty, water shortages and all that shit. All this circus for a blue bubble is just so hard to comprehend.

If we’re going to solve all hunger, poverty, water shortages and all that shit before we ever do anything more, then we’ll never do anything more.

>...that can solve world hunger, poverty, water...

Ah, but no profit there. Not being cynical, have witnessed ngo's first hand in war zones.

I’m really curious how this is possible.

Why wouldn’t every iMessage sent be tied to an Apple ID?

If Beeper can do this, wouldn’t that mean anyone else with the same technique could basically spam iMessage users across the world?

A friend of mine got her Apple ID compromised years ago and cloud sync brought back the spam that the attacker was sending. iMessage spam is not new - whether it will increase remains to be seen.

It just seems like an insane way to set things up. I must be missing something because Apple is not usually a crazy company.

Over or under on 24 hours until they are "not back" again?

It's interesting to see how polarizing this topic is. I'm curious if people are just reacting according to the "party line" so to speak, ie based on whether they are iPhone or Android users.

We can do a poll to confirm this without revealing your phone preference.

Just respond with "Affirmative" if you are an iPhone user and dont like this OR you're an Android users and like this. Likewise, respond with "Negative" if you're in the opposite camp.

I think you are mixing up what you are calling “the party line” with a mixture of - people cheering for the world they want (EU yet again forces a US company to change behaviour), and people who view the chances of this (at best interpretation legally grey) gamble working without that as extremely unlikely.

It's not really that simple. I'm an iPhone use, who thinks Android is kinda pointless, but I don't understand why Apple hasn't opened up the iMessage protocols years ago, or at the very least made their own Android application

Try as you may, you will not escape the village

https://youtu.be/op7IgFbT8l0?t=194

Final result: Apple releases official iMessage client for android, but messages sent from it show up with a little green android icon in the corner. :)

iMessage is possibly the most effective vendor lock-in I've ever personally experienced. I resent it, but I don't have time to fight it. Maybe 1 of the 20 people I regularly text with use Android. The amount of video/photo sharing my wife and other family members have done throughout the years is via iMessage is downright incredible.

Doesn’t this push traffic that didn’t pay Apple through Apple’s infrastructure? These guys should know better than to waste dev hours on a business problem. Apple isn’t going to allow this. No amount of shady spoofing or reverse engineering will change that. If you want to send an iMessage just get an iPhone. Pretty basic requirements.

There is no doubt that Google will refund every single customer that asks (they are way more flexible about refunds than Apple - I've known people who were able to get substantial amount of IAPs from games refunded just because they didn't like the results they got). I suspect those refunds will be net negative for Beeper.

One thing I’m not seeing discussed in the battle of client apps, is that Apple is still paying to run the backend servers. Considering the ubiquity of iMessage, this ain’t cheap.

When Beeper charges customers subscriptions for the client app, do they kick back any money to Apple who provides server side support for iMessage?

> The underlying connection method is open source, for anyone to review.

SSPL sure isn't open source and I'm certainly not reviewing this. At best it's source available. I'm all for separating the meaning of the term from OSI's opinions but this usage misses the mark.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.

Man, what an absolute waste of engineering talent.

I don't understand those in this thread celebrating the "hacker spirit." The real "hacker spirit" would be something like, I don't know, building a better alternative to iMessage. This is just a game of whack-a-mole, destined to lose.

Making a competitive alternative to iMessage is a game of whack-a-mole that you will always lose, too. Apple would never give a third-party the same level of control they have to integrate with iOS.

So, Beeper's approach here at least makes sense to me. They aren't representing the "hacker spirit" like Torvalds or Stallman, but they are highlighting how arbitrary some software limitations can be. Their efforts here, wasted or not, will be cited when iMessage finds itself in court next time. And to Beeper, a company founded on the idea of unifying all messaging clients, that may be a worthwhile business investment.

iMessage isn't dominant because it's "better". It's dominant because it's the default. Doesn't matter how good a chat app is, iMessage users aren't going to switch

This is subtle and much bigger issue than it looks. Marketing people have a real issue with the inability for a single messaging solution, and paying the Apple tax. And unless you did not realize, marketing kind of run/control a lot, far more than it appears.

Who gives marketing their phone number? Email or bust.

Why do you think two factor authentication with phones got so popular? To get your phone number!

Totally tangental but now that iPhone users are using RCS the chances of successfully sending them a message feels like its dropped by half to me-- that is about half the time my messages aren't getting through, to multiple individuals.

iPhone is not using RCS yet. It has only been announced, to be launched some time in 2024. See eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2023/11/17/appl...

Weird, I'm getting the RCS bits in Android from some iPhone people. I don't think they're using a different messenger than iMessage.

I wonder how far I would have to dig before I found the way Google is funding Beeper Mini. They are a sacrificial lamb, getting lead to slaughter so Google can ask EU regulators to stop Apple’s anti-competitive actions.

Considering beeper is coming after Google's closed chat networks too, I doubt it.

If nothing else it’s a fun game of cat and mouse in the most David vs Goliath way possible, to mix metaphors.

Is it likely that Apple just has an engineer working on reverse engineering Beeper to find and patch the latest method?

Living in the country where absolutely no one uses iMessage, the whole kerfuffle about the colour of the message bubble leaves me completely flabbergasted.

I mean, probably the curvature of the Earth is involved, but from here this looks like a very small hill to die on.

It's not the color of the message, for me. If an Apple user sends me a video it comes through as an extremely low resolution and highly compressed video. Look at the unwanted grackles at my mom's bird feeder: https://i.imgur.com/7gBt22i.png

Fantastic, right?

Because it's sent as MMS. Apple implementing RCS next year will mitigate that.

RCS lacks end to end encryption.

iMessage is not about the color of the bubble. While the color is what's most noticeable to the end user, a non-iMessage chat means:

  1. Unable to rename group chats
  2. Photo sharing quality is lowered  
  3. Video sharing quality is abysmal
  4. Messages traverse carrier networks in plain-text
  5. Loss of undo send and delete
  6. Loss of inline replies
  7. Loss of typing indicators and read-receipts (if enabled)

Just to name a few.

I won't doubt the fact that you know that other cross-platform messaging apps exist.

My mom, in her 70s, barely gets iMessage -- half the time I receive "text" messages from her as an email! Throwing in Whatsapp or Telegram would just confuse her.

My grandma in her late 80s managed to learn a non-iMessage messaging app just fine, and she’s the most active one in my family group. If grandmas all over the world can use something else, your mom can, too. I’m sure she wasn’t born with the ability to use iMessage.

I'm just going to say that everyone's parents have different abilities. She can quilt like crazy, but the phone isn't her thing.

I’d add that photo and video sharing might not be free as even today it depends on your carrier plan.

… So it’s an extremely useful signal to tell you to use a different messaging app with this person. Glad we sorted that out!

Me too. But rather than the colour of the bubble, what leaves me flabbergasted is the fact that there is a country where people seem to associate a stigma to owning a phone of a brand perceived as being "less luxurious", and even take some pleasure in inflicting some annoyance on those in the outgroup. And all this because, hear, iMessage is the default app. Not because of some choice, or because alternatives aren't available. No, because default.

"Moat" is SV buzzword that means monopoly as a goal. These people want to own the thing and not let anyone benefit from it other than themselves.

The fact that Beeper Mini is possible in the first place categorically proves Apple is making a decision here to restrict interoperability. If we have regulators for anything it should be for things like this. At Apple's scale it is completely unacceptable behaviour.

The whole iMessage things lost me as a 23 year customer of Apple. I just don't care about them anymore because they clearly don't care about their customers. Plus they've release the same goddamn phone for the last decade. Tim Cook has been coasting on Job's legacy and times almost up for them being on top.

At some point, Apple is just going to send them a cease and desist.

fwiw, updating the existing app didn't work. I had to uninstall/reinstall. After authenticating with Apple vis Beeper Mini, my iPhone says a "Mac now has access to iMessage." (via https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/beeper-mini-is-back-in-ope...)

Got myself a apple ID for fun but cannot sign in, as SMS second factor fails in Beeper Mini. Wonder if they found another way again to detect the 'fraud'.

You're way ahead of me then. Out of curiosity I tried to register a new Apple ID to use with the updated app and the registration page throws 400 at me no matter what I input.

I get why many people might want this, but open standards are the way to go, and this seems to be playing into the hands of proprietary in some ways.

Beeper's ultimate goal is to promote the Matrix protocol, and bridge proprietary networks to the open protocol

I like that this is happening, because Apple will want to prevent it from being possible, and they'll dig their own regulatory grave doing it.

> We—of course—expected a response. What we didn’t expect was 1984-esque doublespeak. The statement is complete FUD. Beeper Mini made communication between Android and iPhone users more secure. That is a fact.

Is it? Their argument about a potential increase in spam (by removing the existing annoyance barrier of signing up to iMessage with a phone number before getting full access) is valid. And from their perspective, a third party app could be doing anything with the messages once unecrypted, despite Beeper's claims to the contrary.

Don't get me wrong, it's obvious Apple went looking for the first 'valid' reason to kill Beeper Mini. I also own a ~~Beepberry~~ Beepy, so I am a fan. But this isn't FUD at all, this is a potential risk to their userbases' privacy (as well as their bottom line).

Was really hoping to read about what Apple changed to break things, even if they won't explain how they worked around it

Beeper has caught a ton of media attention in recent weeks but I truly do not understand it. The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones. If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp. How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party interop app?

> If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp.

People in America don't use WhatsApp. There's no reason for me to switch when none of my friends/family/contacts have it.

> How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party interop app?

Enough that people don't date people who use Android

SMS is fundamentally insecure. I don’t want to use WhatsApp.

It's a USA thing. No ones uses WhatsApp. Everyone has an iPhone. If you're using Android everyone knows it and they'll shame you for it.

I tell you what, if you're a young person you can be publicly shamed for having the wrong color bubble, or outcast by being excluded from a group chat. To you and I that probably doesn't make sense, but for a big portion of the young, phone using population being unable to participate in the iMessage ecosystem is a huge deal socially. You are essentially excluded from the friend group, you're excluded from conversations, and it carries over into real life because you've been excluded and that carries an impact -- you're an outcast. It doesn't have to be rational to be true.

Being excluded from a group chat has a huge social impact for younger people.

Those young people are probably doing themselves a favor by disassociating from peers who are shallow and prejudiced enough to exclude someone for, of all things, not using a specific (proprietary!) chat app.

Oh come on, are you claiming you don't have arbitrary actions/clothing/language that you treat as a status signal amongst your in group? Have you forgotten what it was like to be a teenager?

I've experienced this first hand, even as an adult (well 20 something). I'd be left out of group chats because MMS breaks everything. I'd even missed events because it was all planned in the group chat, and assumed someone would mention it in person to me.

If you are a young person you can be publicly shamed for literally anything. If not this then a million other things.

> The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones.

It's not that simple, you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation.

We should whine about (communication) interoperability, it's critically important for everyone. Purposefully or negligently creating incompatibilities is anticompetitive and generally toxic.

> you get discriminated against for having a different color bubble and using up people's SMS allocation

It's really not about either. It's about UX. SMS and MMS message UX is terrible.

You're obviously not a teenager desperately trying to fit in.

That's a symptom of the bad UX.

So many reasons not to use SMS: No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries), no read receipts, no presence notifications, no typing notifications, no encryption in transit or rest, no escaping group chat spam... that's just the high points.

All those real-time features are antipatterns that do nothing but create anxiety and a false sense of urgency. We use Slack at work, and the typing indicators/presence detection/etc. drive me (and many others) downright insane.

I agree that encryption in transit and rest are important, but there are open and verified solutions like Signal. It seems like extremely poor security hygiene to take Apple's word that their closed-source chat service is actually secure as they claim for it to be.

> All those real-time features are antipatterns that do nothing but create anxiety and a false sense of urgency. We use Slack at work...

...and I use other apps to keep in touch with family in different time zones. For me knowing somebody is online in real time is quite comforting. Knowing they got my message and then that they read it, even if they don't reply, is also useful.

I see your point but there is valid usage outside of a corporate setting.

> No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries)

Long time ago when I was actually sending SMS messages to real people, then-current phones had a "delivery notifications" setting you had to turn on. Then you would receive a notification when your message has been delivered.

I don’t really understand the long-term purpose of Beeper. Apple has already announced RCS, which will fix most complaints about text messaging interoperability.

There is still the question of encryption, which Beeper is strongly pushing, however Apple has announced it wants to develop an RCS encryption standard, so it sounds like it will be solved at some point in the next few years.

At that point, all Beeper becomes is a service to turn a green bubble blue.

Group messages. RCS doesn't have a good solution for this.

>At that point, all Beeper becomes is a service to turn a green bubble blue.

This is a bigger deal than encryption itself to most people using Beeper. Beeper requires you to divulge your Apple ID password to Beeper anyways, so arguing for security is quite strange. People literally just want blue bubbles on their Android — that’s the main appeal.

At what point does Apple start a lawsuit? I hope they don't, but I can't see them ignoring this.

What grounds can they sue them on?

That it's a proprietary system and Beeper reverse engineered it

I'm glad that at least you need an Apple ID for this to work. Apple probably closed the spam hole.

Tried to use the app. 2FA error, and can't connect to iMessage, so I can't use the app :|.

An update fixed everything.

I just wish Apple to get into another anti-trust case, ideally by the EU, over this.

Just got a notification that it's working again and I could log in

Is it possible to install macos in a virtual machine and use iMessages?

not anymore

Yes it is. Hackintosh users have no problem using iMessage or FaceTime.

Crazy that Apple gets to ship a proprietary messaging app as the default

Apple is lucky that iMessage usage in EU is irrelevant.

Otherwise this kind of thing would have been regulated already.

See what's happening to Safari on iOS. Took a long time if you ask me.

Google does it too, with their proprietary messaging app that extends the RCS protocol.

What's proprietary about SMS?

What’s the over/under on how long before Apple blocks it again?

I would give it up to 48 hours. It's important for Apple to architect their fix carefully so that they don't break the world for legitimate users.

For my part, I had fun using Beeper Mini last week while it lasted but I cancelled my subscription and I'm likely not going to use it again due to the risk of incoming messages getting dropped on the floor when Apple blocks it again.

Sprinkle some seasoning on these guys, cus they're cooked.

There is no path forward for integrating with Apple unless Apple opens up imessage. Fat chance. These guys took years and years and years to switch to a non-idiotic charging port! :(

I wonder how viable their business is without imessage integration. They are still aiming for all-in-one chat app - but that's not new and has been done at least a dozen times before.

How is this VC scalable?

Interestingly, in the groupchat I'm in (N=67, mostly software engineers in the Bay Area), I've noticed a high correlation between people taking Pro-Beeper and Pro-Palestine stances, and those taking Pro-Apple and Pro-Israel stances

This would be for socioeconomic factors but it maps to my experience.

Downvoters are simply butthurt that others are noticing this connection. Getting downvoted here is evidence that you’re speaking truth to (apple) power

There ARE alternatives, as posters have noted. In an iMessage to an Android user, I shared some information. Android user said that I could share the info with third user if I were on WhatsApp, but I choose not to use apps owned by companies built upon surveillance capitalism, and soon, using customer data to train AI. (Which may include Apple). Hmmmmmmm.

Guess what? Signal locks out non-Signal users, WhatsApp locks out non-WhatsApp users (AFAICT, I don’t use others, and Signal is refusing to work on my systems for reasons I don’t know, and I can actually live well without it)

The bubble with bright white text on a bright green background hurts only ME, the Apple user with old eyes, and I have offered old Apple gear to friends so we can FaceTime, a nifty way to reuse rather than recycle gear.

As an Apple customer, I applaud their tenacity. Every time Beeper's protocol hacks are fixed, Messages gets more secure.

By what metric? Arguably, users are less secure since "fixing" Messages (i.e. breaking Beeper) means Apple and Android users lose a secure communication channel.

Beeper isn't "hacking" Messages... they've implemented the protocol.

I don't think the parent is that concerned with Android <-> Apple communications with that statement.

Reverse-engineering a closed protocol and distributing an Apple Binary (IIRC correctly) are a bit more than just "implementing a protocol."

> Reverse-engineering a closed protocol and distributing an Apple Binary (IIRC correctly) are a bit more than just "implementing a protocol."

Reverse-engineering the protocol was the first step to implementing it. The point is that there was no vulnerability exploited in the protocol - it's as secure as it ever was.

I don't think they are shipping an Apple binary. Can you provide a source for that?

> Arguably, users are less secure since "fixing" Messages (i.e. breaking Beeper) means Apple and Android users lose a secure communication channel.

If you hack a secure communications channel so that unauthorized client software/hardware can pretend to be authorized software/hardware, how does that make the channel more secure?

> If you hack a secure communications channel so that unauthorized client software/hardware can pretend to be authorized software/hardware, how does that make the channel more secure?

How does it make more insecure? It doesnt, security should be accomplished by the protocol, messages themselves not by blockong access to a communication channel. Otherwise its just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

To lose something you'd have to have had it to begin with. Users aren't gaining an additional secure messaging channel would be a more accurate description.

I personally won't waste my time trying to be an early adopter of this. I suspect the upcoming RCS support will be the only "apple native" way to have non-shit tier messaging between android and iOS, and Apple will keep breaking Beeper if they can.

I was using Beeper Mini a few days ago, so not sure what you mean by "had to have it to begin with." I did!

My partner and I were finally able to move off Messenger... for a day.

Beeper is not exploiting any kind of vulnerability. The user is voluntarily providing their Apple ID credentials (or doing the SMS verification process to prove ownership of their number), just like they would on an iPhone.

how is it legal to use private apis of another company in your product? does it not count as cyber attack or potential dos?

Oh yeah because this went so well last time.

It took them what, a lazy few days to kill it off last time, bets on about the same, along with a “don’t make me do this again” warning?

No, it's not. I don't get the 2FA code. It never worked before for me. Never worked with Beeper proper either.

Do you get 2FA codes when logging in from am actual Apple device? Because it might be an issue with how your apple account is set up to do 2FA that has nothing to do with beeper

Yes, I do. I only have issues with Beeper and Beeper Mini. In fact, months ago, when I tried to set up Beeper, my Apple ID got into an "account lock" endless loop for over a month - every few minutes, I would get a popup that my account is locked, I go through the unlocking process, and a few minutes later, the whole thing repeats meanwhile asking me to rest my password.

In the past, I tried creating an app password as well, but it didn't work either. Now, it fails to create an app password, but you still can't log in with an app password.

Anyone got a referral code?

I'm surprised people are defending these guys. This is paid-for illegal breaking into systems.

I got my first iMessage spam from an email address ever. I wonder if this whole thing is related..

Honestly, I just want the ability to add and remove Android users from group chats without having to start an entirely new thread. If RCS fixes this, then I'll be thrilled.

Wild the Apple pundits who were weirdly angry about this app acting completely disgusted someone would do this. So strange to see that attitude from the Apple community when some of us are old enough to remember when Apple wasn't in a position of power and we absolutely relied on these sort of projects to exist and work in a Windows dominant world.

Apple/Google/Microsoft/Amazon do a lot of extremely petty things that should disgust us and give us a glimpse at how this pettiness and adversarial conduct might escalate in a GAI world:

- Amazon does not carry Google branded products. ([edit] they do now once again, whew!)

- Search in GMail is nearly completely broken when you have too many messages, yet Google (ostensibly a search company) can't deliver good email search at scale so they don't bother.

- Apple allows lots of customization of push notifications and notification behavior (lock screen, badge icons, etc., etc.) yet does not simply let the user turn off push notifications that are advertisements or promotions.

- Google does not let parents choose third party whitelist "experts" for kids content recommendations. The status quo is that most kids either have parents who spend hours curating or they get to watch all the generative content garbage that Youtube hosts.

- Google Maps contains significant glitches and confusing navigation suggestions even though there must be terabytes of data showing that they routinely result in wrong turns and rerouting.

These are all examples of market failures that are fostered/continued by various anticompetitive aspects of the markets these firms operate in.

Not sure why anyone would expect Apple to allow Beeper Mini when clearly iMessage is meant to secure a competitive advantage at the expense of apple customers convenience and freedom.

> - Amazon does not carry Google branded products

What do you mean? I just searched on Amazon UK and can easily buy Pixels, Home Nest etc.

Ahh they seem to have become available again. That's a step in the right direction.

How can this be taken seriously when basic facts are wrong. Go on Amazon and check for Google products.

Apple has no way of telling you what an advertisement or promotion is, and it’s inherently subjective.

As noted in the comment, Google products are once again available on Amazon. They were removed for several years not long ago.

Ads are subjective? Apple has many criteria for rejecting app store submissions, why not add "misleading push message content not labeled as advertising"

An app can send anything via APNS. Apple cannot know at the time of submission. As Android has it, they could introduce something like Notification Channels in the next iOS which you can then turn off individually but they haven't yet.

> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

From (section 4.5.4 of) the App Store Review Guidelines. GP is incorrect on many points.

Is there a way to report apps that violate this?

edit: nm, their help page explains it.

how long will it last this time?

should've stayed dead

How is it better than, e.g. Whatsapp ?

They sure are trying hard to get sued.

I suspect they are hoping for it and have a rich benefactor who's willing to see this fight to the very end, in hopes of setting a precedent.

Lmao Apple.

Time for the EU to step in. They don't get everything done but they certainly force a lot more out of companies than other organisations.

Maybe this came up in the earlier threads (announcement, outage) so I apologize if it's been discussed ...

This project is fantastic. The hacker spirit is in full force, and I love a good David and Goliath story. However, all the comments about demanding interoperability and protocols keep confusing me -- I don't consider APNS a protocol (like TCP anyways), it's also not incidental, extra header space to stuff data into in an existing message being transported (ala early SMS), and it's not an open relay for everybody to use. It's Apple's private message delivery system!

Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products?

I'm not licking boots over here, just genuinely curious. I wouldn't want to set up a mail server and then foot the bill and assume liability for whatever the hell goes through it from random people on the internet.

And trust me, I'm all for civil disobedience and sticking it to the man with clever technical solutions, but given the (probable) massive costs of operating APNS, Apple's got every right in the world to close any gaps in their system and keep kicking Beeper out.. and Beeper can keep trying to get back in.. but I just can't wrap my head around making the assumption that APNS access is somehow a fundamental right that we're all being denied.

> Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products?

Network effects.

This would be "enticed", not "entitled". What a user is entitled for is listed in the ToS; who did not accept them, is not entitled. Not necessarily forbidden or blocked, but any bets and guarantees are off.

If many people around you are participating in something but you're left out because of your phone OS choice, you do still feel entitled to participate in that by whatever means necessary. It's about the social aspects more than anything else. See other comments here for people apparently getting shamed and left out of group chats for having wrong color bubbles.

Remember Clubhouse, and how it was iOS-only when it was actually popular for a month? I felt entitled to build an unofficial Android app for it because so many people were on there doing interesting things, and so many other people were complaining loudly about it being iOS-only.

FOMO is a powerful force.

Uhhhh, what does APNS have to do with any of this?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but people want iMessage to be an open protocol. You're talking about APNS, the "apple push notification service", which is something completely different than what beeper is doing and what folks are asking for. The message schema, format, types, encoding, max length, delivery guarantees, etc, like jabber/xmpp [1]. Push notifications are sent for iMessage, but that isn't what people want to be turned into an open protocol

[1] https://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc6120.html

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/how-imessage-sends-...

https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

APNs is used as the backbone of iMessage, it's not an optional component. It is not just used for the push notifications you see on your phone, but for the actual delivery of the messages.

> Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products?

Vertical tying.

Apparently, blue bubble envy is a thing people have. The beeper home page mentions blue bubbles 9 times (and not being a green bubble twice). WSJ reported in August that 87% of teens have an iPhone so anybody with an android or a green bubble therefore stands out and is a loser.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/why-teens-hate-androi...

It’s not just about that. I want to be able to use my Apple message id on other devices.

I want to be able to send messages from Signal to WhatsApp! Alas, I am not entitled to that.

What? That’s not even the same thing. I can install signal on all my devices. I can’t do the same with messages. It’s about device vendor lock in.

I think people wouldn't mind the green bubble if it had a good contrast ratio.

My son had an Android phone. I don't think anyone considered him to be a loser, but he did get very sick of everyone why he had a green bubble.

I have a green bubble because I don't want to live in a walled garden. I'd like to think there are still youth social circles where that'd get you clout.

I'm shocked your son and his friends were using iMessage, even in the US. My teens are using Snapchat/IG/TikTok mostly for messaging.

iMessage or SMS is exclusively how they communicate with their parents.

On the Beeper website it sayss they use "blue bubble" to refer to iMessage.

Selfishly I'm most excited about this project as a demonstration that secure and reliable communication across platforms is pretty straightforward. The only blocker is that Apple doesn't want it to exist.

If Apple were truly acting in their users best interest, they would want their users to have encrypted and fast communication with all devices, through an open protocol or otherwise.

And yes, iOS allows 3rd party apps but not nearly with enough permissions to act as a full Messages+iMessage alternative.

Don't WhatsApp and Signal already do exactly that?

> And yes, iOS allows 3rd party apps but not nearly with enough permissions to act as a full Messages+iMessage alternative.

Not an Apple user, but I imagine even though there's some allowances for third party messaging, there's a lot of holes. For instance, what happens if I ask Siri to send a message to a specific contact from my Apple Watch. Will it send it over Signal if I've added a Signal address to their contact card and went the mile to set that as the default messaging app for that user? Curious.

While I don't mix text and voice control that often myself, it appears to be fully supported: https://faq.whatsapp.com/1803878309981730/?locale=sv_SE&cms_... as for what actions an app supports, that appears to vary based on what the developer included.

But do you have to say "Send a WhatsApp message to X" or does it work with "send a message to X"?

> If Apple were truly acting in their users best interest, they would want their users to have encrypted and fast communication with all devices, through an open protocol or otherwise.

yeah that protocol exists. it’s called RCS and it is coming to ios soon. imo apple is allowed to gate imessage behind ios-only if RCS support is a thing

RCS has no end-to-end encryption in the standard, though. That's a non-standard google messages extension. I think a better example would be the cross-device messengers like signal/whatsapp/etc.

Google is slacking here and I hope Apple's involvement in RCS will help to move this forward. Samsung Messages also does not support Google's E2EE even though it supports RCS and pretty much all of the user-facing features Google Messages provides. Based on Google's whitepaper [1] about their E2EE support, I imagine it's because of the identity service they use for key exchange being centralized and internal (when really the identity service a contact uses should be an RCS capability in the extended contact system [RCS terminology here], and they should interoperate).

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf

I believe encryption is not in the RCS spec yet.

> The only blocker is that Apple doesn't want it to exist.

This is my main source of excitement around this project. The existence of this project shows that there is no technical reason it can't exist. So, what is the reason it doesn't exist? Exactly what you said: Apple thinks it is in its best interest not to.

That couldn't possibly have ever been in doubt, though.

There’s also the fact that iMessages have a cost to them. An individual message might not amount to much, but millions of them? Apple is hosting the computing to manage the delivery of iMessages. Should they provide that free of charge to the world out of the goodness of their heart?

As of iOS 6.1 (2013), Apple said APNS had delivered over 4 trillion notifications already. A 2018 paper [0] claimed (with an admittedly-small sample size) that people receive on average 56 notifications a day (delivered, not necessarily interacted with). It's almost 2024. Even going off those old numbers, assuming 2 billion active devices [1], APNS would be delivering close to 41 TRILLION messages a year, and likely growing.

That's a lot of pepperoni, guys. Expensive pepperoni. Just some food for thought.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3229434.3229445 [0]

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1383887/number-of-apple-... [1]

> Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products?

I hereby demand that Google stop making changes to YouTube that prevent ad blockers from working.

Or more to the point, I should have the right to sell hacked access to Microsoft's Office 365 servers to end users and Microsoft must not take any action that interferes in those user's access.

That's reasonable, right?

I hereby demand that Apple stop supporting email interoperability with non iCloud users. The current situation, where the iCloud email users enjoy first class communication with gmail users, is tantamount to theft.

That’s reasonable, of course.

That does not seem like it follow from the person you are replying to's examples. Pretty much nothing is about removing functionality?

What does that have to do with a company's right to control access to the services it runs?

I am an Apple user. I've owned more iPhones and MacBooks than I can remember.

I am the one who foots the bill for iMessage and APNS.

I want to be able to message my friends with Androids with the same ease as I do my friends with iPhones.

I also would like to be able to access my messages when I run Asahi Linux on my MacBook.

Use Signal. Get your friends to do so. What you are describing is a multi-platform ecosystem so don't rely on one of the platform vendors to enable something for everyone else.

Or better, use matrix/element if you can (the backbone technology of Beeper). It's an open protocol not beholden to one central server (Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord) that could go out of business, get bought, or change their usage policy at any time.

Yep, its really a lose-lose for everyone except Apple. Apple could even release a client that doesn't allow Android<->Android iMessage and I doubt many Android users would care. Personally, I just want a decent messaging experience and I would be willing to jump through the extra hoop of downloading another app even if my iPhone using contacts aren't willing to.

> It's Apple's private message delivery system!

In the US, where democratic principles govern and capitalism drives the economy, the regulation of corporations emerges as a necessary practice. This approach rests on the understanding that while corporations are essential for economic growth, they must operate within a framework that prioritizes the public's interest.

In a democracy, every entity, including corporations, should answer to the people. Corporations wield significant influence and power, and without oversight, this power could be used in ways that harm the broader society.

Corporations should reflect the values of the society in which they operate and not undermine social, environmental, and ethical standards set by the democratically elected government. Regulation of corporations is not about impeding economic growth but about guiding it in a direction that is beneficial for all members of society.

This is a wonderful speech full of noble platitudes. None of this actually answers the question of why Apple (or really anyone) should let anyone have free and open access to something they paid and keep paying a lot to create, deploy, maintain, and iterate on. It’s their stuff, not the public’s. Nobody should expect corporations to be charities.

Or, to expand a bit:

If Apple should be expected to open up iMessage, then why shouldn't Facebook be expected to allow interoperability with Messenger, and Telegram and Signal forced to open those up, too?

Or, if you wish to take it a slightly different way: Why shouldn't the New York Times be expected to give everyone a copy of their paper for free? Information and good journalism are a public good, after all.

Why shouldn't pharmaceutical companies be expected to make all life-saving medications available for free?

Why shouldn't ISPs be expected to make Internet access available to all for free?

I mean, we could structure our society so that everything wasn't arbitrarily gated but that would be gasp socialism.

Also, Telegram and Signal are already open and can be bridged from anything to anything so yeah, we should force Messenger and Imessage to accept, at a minimum, bridging as well.

To be honest, I personally agree that we should be forcing at least some of these things for the common good (and, to the extent necessary, funding them with significantly-more-progressive taxes). My point is primarily that it's not particularly logical to single out Apple for this treatment if that's your principle.

Good to know about Telegram and Signal—I don't use or know much about them. IMNSHO, my argument still holds even removing them from the equation.

We force companies to incur costs for the public's benefit all the time. In special cases we even require them to serve loss generating customers as a condition of operation. No one is forced to operate a power company, but if you do you are bound to provide power to customers regardless of their individual profitability. Similarly, dominant vertically-integrated messaging systems could be required to provide interoperability at a reasonable charge (or even no charge!). Apple could then decide whether or not they want to operate a system under those terms.

OK! Let's assume you've built a water delivery system, a series of pipes. You attach anyone who buys a licensed faucet, and collect a modest monthly payment, as a typical utility would do. You use these funds to cover the operation costs of the pipe system.

Your pipes use a standard threaded connector.

If somebody attaches to your pipes without buying your licensed faucet and without paying, just due to the interoperability of threaded pipes, do you have the right to disconnect them, and rework your pipe connectors in a way that prevents unpaid connections in the future? If not, why?

Any sane company with the goal of making money from operating a service would just meter water from a device they own and charge a reasonable fee. Most of the people complaining would be completely fine with Apple charging a reasonable fee for Android access to iMessage. A system like yours would only make sense if your goals had nothing to do with covering the costs of operating the service, and were instead growing and maintaining your licensed faucet marketshare. Some people might think that isn't in the public's benefit and want to change the law. In the case of water services we already have, and the licensed faucet scheme would likely be illegal basically everywhere in the US.

At my last house, we had a private well and, later, a private company laid water pipes in the street and offered for us to connect to them via their own meter. I don't think anything was illegal about that company offering for me to rent a meter from them for the ~$10/mo connection [aka "meter rental"] fee, and use whatever mix of water that I wanted from their metered source or my own well, provided I had a backflow preventer to prevent any of my well water from entering their metered water lines.

If someone chooses not to rent an Orange water meter, they can't have Orange water. That seems like a choice that Orange can make. Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.

> Changing Orange to Apple and water meter to smartphone messaging, I don't see any inherent reason why the rules should be different.

Their choice of what water meter to use is completely transparent to you provided it works properly. It has no effect on how you use the service or any other aspect of your life. This is obviously not true of phones. The bundling of separate product categories is what makes the situation different, the same way that bundling water service with the arbitrary requirement of a "licensed faucet" would likely be illegal many places.

It's my understanding that in the European Union, the new Digital Markets regulations will require interoperability. It's still not 100% what it will cover, but it could become a requirement.

As far as I could find, the text suggests that only applies to market giants (i.e. Meta with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger). iMessage is not even breaking the top 5 in the EU. It's not even in the top 5 world wide, and even in the US it's only somewhere in position 4 or 5. If they go for absolute numbers (i.e. X million users) instead of market share that might be different, but it's unlikely to really be relevant to the EU considering from a user's perspective it's already interoperable (messages sent on one device end up on the other device, even if it's technically a mix of SMS, MMS and iMessage - that part is not really relevant).

I think the only source of all this iMessage this that and the other comes from parts of American society where they value the color of a chat bubble. Ironically that value has nothing to do with iMessage and just to do with "this persion I am chatting with can afford an iPhone", which in turn is what people appear to value.

In countries where iMessage is not really used, it doesn't matter at all. I would be surprised if most users would even know about different chat bubble colours and what they mean.

It's already been made public that iMessage will not (currently) be covered under this.

iMessage is pretty much dead in the EU though so I doubt the EU regulators will ask for interoperability.

You could say the same thing about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_(software)

Samba is a protocol, Microsoft doesn't have any costs associated with more users of it. GP is asking about APNS, which involves Apple servers and therefore costs Apple to handle more requests, however minimal per individual request/message

Support costs for Microsoft definitely go up.

Explain your perspective on this. Here is a probing question.

How does support costs for Microsoft go up when I communicate from my linux workstation to my linux server using SMB implemented by Samba.

I think Samba was my first introduction to the idea that using a non-official/reverse-engineered implementation of something to piggyback into a closed ecosystem may not actually be preferable to either shunning that ecosystem entirely, or just buying into it. I loved it in concept, but in practice not so much.

>Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products?

Because I want to talk to my friends without being locked into Apple's ecosystem. Simple as that, I don't need any other reason.

This language about "entitlement" feels like when Google complains about people using adblockers on YT - I don't care because they're both $2T corporations, and the only "entitlement" I see is the way Apple and Google think they're entitled to my money and my data.

> Because I want to talk to my friends without being locked into Apple's ecosystem. Simple as that, I don't need any other reason.

You can't do that now with SMS and a plethora of other messaging apps?

I think the "send my grandmother non-pixelated photos of my kid using the default messaging app" is a fair ask.

She doesn’t have an email address? You’re not in a walled garden, just self host it and send her a link.

You're really suggesting that Android users go back to 1996 just to talk to their friends and relatives who use iPhones?

Sure, I can print and mail her the picture, too - the point is convenience. Sometimes, people want to send photos back and forth, too, so asking the technical user of the two to setup a host isn't a solution.

(But I'm guessing you already knew that)

Yes! All I hear when entitlement comes up is "Why do you feel entitled to text message your iPhone friends if you don't use an iPhone?"

because there IS an open SMS standard, and Apple has hijacked all their phones to use iMessage in it's closed ecosystem, saying to the rest of the world: "Go Fork Yourselves".

So, right back at ya, Apple. If you cannot make it by distinguishing your products on their MERITS vs the amount of lock-in you can generate, I feel no reason to help protect your brand, or access to it

Why are you entitled to use Apple's messaging servers without paying for access?

People are willing to pay but Apple won't take their money.

Is this an answer to my question? I’m allowed to add more load and increase your infrastructure costs just because you won’t take my money in the way I want you to?

The argument is that iMessage is a de facto monopoly utility and should be operated accordingly.

Apple hijacked SMS. You can't CHOOSE to send SMS. If your phone is tied to a computer for a shared imessage account, if you're outside with your phone alone (while computer is online) the phone cannot receive text messages. (The sender ios device presumes 'success' in sending the message because it is received by the computer. It does not have the ability to send just sms).

So, i'm all for anything that shakes up messaging and maybe returns some of it to users.

you can choose; there's an option buried in settings somewhere

But, there's no ability on a per-message basis. If they have their phone set up with iMessage, I cannot just send them an SMS if they lose their data connection.

I mean you can literally just set the iMessage toggle to 'Off' on your phone

It's not even buried. Settings -> Messages -> iMessage == Off

But, that party uses imessage for some things. I want to be able to send them an SMS.

How would that be done?

> You can't CHOOSE to send SMS

You can turn off iMessage and force sms unless you are referring to something else.

You can also press and hold the send button to swap over to SMS.

This isn't true. That ability is no longer there.

That's on the receiver party. I'm the sender using an iOS device. I can't CHOOSE to send an SMS if they have iMessage on.

That’s entirely incorrect.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201349

This isn't related to the ability to just send someone an SMS if they're using imessage.

> It's Apple's private message delivery system!

It's not!

> Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.

I think you misunderstand that quote. Prior versions of Beeper Cloud hosted Mac Minis in data centers and used genuine Apple hardware and software to automate iMessage in order to function.

This quote simply says that Beeper Cloud is using the same direct implementation of iMessage that Beeper Mini does. It does not indicate that Beeper Cloud & Mini do not communicate with Apple's servers (they do).

It's the same as XMPP/etc vs proprietary chat protocols.

"Slack chat is only for Slack customers."

"Google chat is only for Google customers."

And so on.

Well....if you say it is, then it is.

But the supporters of interoperability would like to...interoperate. So non-Apply customers can send messages to Apple customers and vice versa.

> Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products?

I'm only speaking for myself here, but I don't look at it as "being entitled to use Apple's services". I look at it as closed, non-interoperable systems as being fundamentally bad for people and for the internet. I hesitate to call them immoral, but I feel like I could argue that competently as well, if pushed to do so.

So if Apple isn't willing to allow interoperability with their messaging service that is used by hundreds of millions (billions?) of people, then I support every effort to "sneak in" and make that happen anyway. And if that means using some Apple service that isn't intended for use outside the Apple ecosystem, that's just how it has to be.

On the other hand, I would frankly just prefer that non-interoperable systems die, instead, and be replaced by functionally equivalent, but more open, systems. So I am also uncomfortable with Beeper Mini pushing more people into Apple's closed ecosystem, even if overall (in the short term, at least) it will mean a better, more secure experience for both iOS and Android users. (It's gross that Apple talks about the security and privacy afforded to users of their products, but at the same time forces their own iPhone users to send unencrypted SMS/MMS messages to anyone who doesn't have an iPhone, because keeping non-iPhone users off iMessage is a competitive advantage for them.)

I’m a former Android fanatic turned iPhone user. I still own Android devices, but my primary device is an iPhone. I haven’t had something excite me as much as this Beeper Mini situation in years—I love that they’re doing this.

One of the things that got me to switch to the iPhone a few years ago was the fact that it seemed Apple was actually doing a lot of the right things when it came to privacy and security. Obviously, I was still pretty skeptical of them, but compared to Google, Apple’s track record seemed a bit more trustworthy.

The way Apple tries to lock you in though while stifling competition is extremely disappointing. They’re on the wrong side of history.

>They're on the wrong side of history.

Say that to their market cap. Seems a lot of people appreciate what comes with that drawback. Revealed preferences can be a sonuvabitch.

yep. And GP themself is an example of why this works. Their practices sold an iphone and converted a fanatic Android user!

I will say that to their market cap. Such an insane capitalization on digital sales can only be achieved by extinguishing the alternatives your platform can host. It's a regressive featureset that can (apparently) only be reversed through legislative demands a-la Digital Market Act.

Many, many companies have had huge market caps while funding anti-humanist or exploitative processes. Given Apple's scale you almost have to assume that they're abusing something lucrative.

> Such an insane capitalization on digital sales...

Apple's market cap is built on something like 80% hardware sales by revenue.

Yep, this is an unpopular HN opinion, but I actually like Apple's walled garden. It's safe, it's friendly and I don't have to worry.

This is in fact the most popular HN opinion that always comes up on every Apple thread.

SMS is spammy enough -- I don't want to see spam via iMessage. These third-party clients make spam much more viable.

I love open standards, open source, whatever, but I want some things in my life to just work well without caring about the details. My phone is one of those things.

> it seemed Apple was actually doing the a lot of the right things when it came to privacy and security

Isn't this one of them?

A security hole existed that permitted Beeper to pretend to be your Apple device. In this case, it was being used for non-nefarious purposes, but that doesn't mean everyone would. Apple's fixing that hole seems in-line with your desired "privacy and security".

> Isn't this one of them?

I don’t believe so. Beeper Mini uses Apple’s protocols the same way the native iMessage uses it; they didn’t exploit a security hole (unless you classify the device faking part as a security hole—I don’t). They maintain the E2EE flow.

This is incorrect. They're using a legacy, less secure protocol - not in the sense of encryption, but in the sense of the need to generate auth tokens per user.

The protocol's implementation is intended to verify you're connecting a device Apple built, with stuff like secure enclave and end-to-end encryption as known quantities. With Beeper, you have to give your Apple ID to a third-party app, which they then proxy through a server of some kind (https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/beeper-mini-is-back-in-ope...; "signing in with our Apple ID generated an Apple prompt that noted our ID was being used to sign in with a device “near Los Angeles, CA” (where we are not located.)")

I don't see how you could describe that as anything other than a security hole.

> With Beeper, you have to give your Apple ID to a third-party app, which they then proxy through a server of some kind (https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/beeper-mini-is-back-in-ope... "signing in with our Apple ID generated an Apple prompt that noted our ID was being used to sign in with a device “near Los Angeles, CA” (where we are not located.)")

I think they have another primary product of the same name that operates this way, but Beeper Mini never sends your credentials off anywhere other than Apple’s servers [0][1].

[0]: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

[1]: https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

My link is specifically talking about Mini; they indicate this behavior was on "the updated version of Beeper Mini".

From your first link:

> To work around this limitation, we built Beeper Push Notification service (BPNs). BPNs connects to Apple’s servers on your behalf when Beeper Mini Android app isn’t running. We can do this while preserving user privacy thanks to Apple separating the credentials needed to connect to APNs to send and receive content (the “push” credentials) and the keys needed to encrypt and decrypt messages (the “identity” keys). Push credentials can be shared securely with the Beeper Push Notification service, and BPNs can connect to APNs on your behalf. Whenever BPNs receives an encrypted message that it won’t be able to decrypt, it simply disconnects from APNs and sends an FCM push notification to wake up the Android app, which then connects to APNs, downloads, decrypts and processes the incoming message. BPNs can only tell when a new message is waiting for you - it does not have credentials to see or do anything else.

Bepper still connects on your behalf to run notifications while the app is not running.

I know that HN is not one homogeneous opinion, but it always comes up in these Apple threads that all this device attestation and secure enclave stuff is unambiguously good because Apple does it, but when it comes to TPM key escrow or Web Environment Integrity suddenly everyone is up in arms about how it's a total violation of a user's freedoms to do what they want with their device.

You shouldn't defend something that's inherently consumer hostile just because it happens to be for something you like.

I'm OK with titrating skepticism on a proposal based on the motivations of the proposer.

To Godwin a bit, I'd treat "we should make the trains to Auschwitz run more on time" differently depending on if it's being proposed by the German government in 1942 or the Polish government in 2023.

It can be both a security issue and something that doesn't optimize user freedom.

> A security hole existed that permitted Beeper to pretend to be your Apple device.

_An_ Apple device. Not _your_ Apple device.

"Hey, I'm /u/ceejayoz's new iPhone! Bwahahahahahaha. Ahem. I promise I'm really the iMessage client you're expecting. Start sending me a copy of all their potentially sensitive messages."

Again, how do we not classify that as a security issue?

Because the user explicitly authorized the app by logging in with their own credentials and has the keys.

So wait, if I send people messages from a different number and say I'm /u/ceejayoz's new number, they will believe me?

What is stopping me from buying a second-hand old iPhone and doing this without Beeper?

> What is stopping me from buying a second-hand old iPhone and doing this without Beeper?

In that scenario, you're still using the official client, which Apple presumably knows isn't silently siphoning messages off to somewhere else. You're on official hardware with an official client.

Sorry, I misunderstood the previous comment. I thought you were worried about other people pretending to be you to your friends to trick them.

Is what you are asking this?

1. I install Beeper.

2. I log in to Beeper with my Apple ID, for the explicit purpose of accessing my own iMessage data.

3. ...

4. Gah! How could Beeper access my iMessage data even though I installed and authorized it just so it could access my iMessage data?

5. "Gah! Beeper was hacked/compromised/deliberately siphoning off Apple ID credentials into a log/error reporting/bad actor's database and now millions of people have had their sensitive texts and other iCloud data exposed."

Facebook and LinkedIn used to try to get people to hand over their email credentials so they could "help you find your friends on Facebook"; people were correctly skeptical then. Giving my Apple ID to a third-party seems insane, given what can be done with it, and I'd imagine Apple sees it the same way.

> Giving my Apple ID to a third-party seems insane

That's fair. You'd be happy to learn that literally no one is forcing you to hand over your Apple ID to Beeper. Your approach is very good for your account safety, but you don't need to keep other people safe from themselves.

Do you have similar concerns when people use non-Google-approved email clients to use Gmail, or alternative YouTube clients, or Signal/Telegram forks?

Perhaps you think HN should ban alternative clients or weird web browsers too. Too bad a lot of people think interoperating clients are important or we would be left with the Web Integrity crap to "keep us safe".

> Do you have similar concerns when people use non-Google-approved email clients to use Gmail.

If they ask for credentials, absolutely. Google has both an OAuth flow and the ability to generate app-specific passwords (which correctly have very limited abilities) so I never have to pass over the real creds.

I have never given my Gmail credentials to Apple, but I get my mail just fine.

Google requires you to register an application and get it approved to log in with OAuth, you can't just use it with arbitrary callback URLs. Why should I need to ask Google permission to use my own data, or ask for Google's permission to allow other apps to use my data?

If the Beeper service is totally fine, and you mind their auth methodology, perhaps you should complain about Apple not providing better iMessage auth options.

Instead, you complain about users being able to give their own data to an app they chose to install.

> Google requires you to register an application and get it approved to log in with OAuth, you can't just use it with arbitrary callback URLs. Why should I need to ask Google permission to use my own data, or ask for Google's permission to allow other apps to use my data?

I specifically mentioned the other approach; if your email client doesn't implement the OAuth style approach, you can generate an app password. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

If you’re referring to the history, then it cannot talk to the iCloud keychain, and even if it could, it would require your credentials. Same thing if you are just talking about incoming messages, they need your credentials. If they have those you’re already fucked. And also, they could just have taken an iPhone and log in there with your credentials.

It's understandable Apple doesn't want third-party apps proxying Apple ID credentials. Ever.

It isn’t proxying afaik, it is calling the Apple servers directly. The only thing getting to Beeper servers (and that can be disabled) is an IDS key without its matching decryption key, for Beeper to be able to see if messages are coming to signal the phone (which has the encryption key but is not connected continuously) to fetch it and show the notification.

At the very least, it's being proxied through the third-party Beeper app, which Apple has no reason to trust. (Nor the Android device it's running on.)

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/beeper-mini-is-back-in-ope... appears to indicate more than that, though.

> In tests, signing in with our Apple ID generated an Apple prompt that noted our ID was being used to sign in with a device “near Los Angeles, CA” (where we are not located.)

> The way Apple tries to lock you in though while stifling competition is extremely disappointing. They’re on the wrong side of history.

Fascinating that you say this when you literally switched to iPhone yourself.

How is it fascinating? Apple exerts pressure on customers to buy their products, and then further pressures to keep them integrated with Apple's ecosystem. Here, a customer gave in to the first pressure and is disappointed by the artificial friction Apple uses to upsell their customers.

So... are we shocked that iPhone customers don't de-facto agree with everything Apple does? Or the fact that OP would be willing to criticize something they paid for and supposedly identify with?

It's really not fascinating at all. It reads like a perfectly level-headed and candid criticism of an ecosystem by someone who isn't invested in the success of one particular company. It's almost too lucid for HN.

> while stifling competition

How? Lock-in, sure - but unless you do a lot of market gerrymandering (which Epic tried but got laughed out of court), how does anything apple do stop people competing?

It’s not e.g. paying google large sums of money to avoid making its own competitor. Being big isn’t itself anticompetitive.

And on this exact topic - there is a whole ecosystem of messaging apps that exists. They just have to build their own userbase.

If you want privacy a de-googled android phone is far better than apple.

I believe this to be true, but to be honest, back when I made the switch, I was also considering the convenience factor.

Yes, but a truly de-googled Android phone is a huge pain. Many apps rely on play services, and the open source alternatives still don't fully work.

I've been using LineageOS with microg for over 2 years without much pain, other than initial setup.

Apples response:

> These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.

Didn’t it recently come to light that apple have been “exposing” that metadata to government agencies for years? Maybe they should stop exposing metadata rather than blaming others for replicating their implementation!

How does a 3rd party implementing their API mean there will be “unwanted messages, spam and phishing attacks”? Are they accusing the 3rd party of doing that, or do they believe 3rd party software is inherently inferior to their own (which constantly needs security updates).

Because by abusing an older style auth method, they skip a lot of the checks required to start iMessaging people currently.

This methodology can be abused by SMS scammers, phishers, etc to easily target the iMessage network that users may often feel has a higher default level of trust.

You can't imagine how exposing a new, automatable interface might increase spam?

I have a feeling they're not going to stop being a thorn in Apple's side for quite a while...

They're either going to keep getting their access cut, or sued into bankruptcy. You can't really piggyback off another companies service in violation of their TOS without things working out poorly for you IMO.

Yeah, not the point. The point is to prove that it's possible and relatively simple, and the only reason Apple operates this way is to lock people into the ecosystem.

Is that really an unknown that anyone required proof of?

> and the only reason Apple operates this way is to lock people into the ecosystem.

Honest question: is there anyone who doesn't already think that? Even at, like, a legislative level?

Apple is pushing the whole security/privacy narrative and yet people are guzzling it even here, so I'd argue yes.

It's probably my favorite part of HN, at this point. The reaction from people the other day when Google/Apple admit to cooperating with FIVE-EYES was priceless.

Expect another one of those once it gets revealed that marketing/analytics providers (whose spyware litters every single mainstream website & app) are also compromised by intelligence agencies.

There are systems designed to be federated, like email, mastodon, matrix and SMS/RCS.

Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, and iMessage are examples of services which were designed to be run by one company as part of their product. They _might_ have certain SDKs to extend that service (like bots for slack, or app extensions in iMessage) - but generally they aren't excited to shoulder the additional cost and support headaches of third parties using their infrastructure or arbitrarily interacting with the official software clients.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "ecosystem" - I'd argue the first set form ecosystems, while the second set form products.

Thats the entire point of the Apple ecosystem. They want to control the entire user experience end to end, and it is why many people like Apple products so much.

> Thats the entire point of the Apple ecosystem. They want to control the entire user experience end to end

I don't doubt that.

> and it is why many people like Apple products so much.

No. People like the quality and the refinement and polish. In most cases those things to not require (as much of) a closed ecosystem. Beeper is proof of that.

The quality and refinement comes from the control. They don’t ever have to support a device they didn’t make themselves.

I have seen this argument so many times and it has never made sense to me. There is so much quality software that is free and open and interoperable. It is more than possible to be both open in nature and of high quality, to me that is indisputable. Apple obviously has a financial incentive to be locked down, they're not locked down out of any sort of necessity or as a concession for the sake of quality.

In the case of Beeper Mini, the proof is in the pudding. You have evidence right in front of your face that an Android client for iMessage is possible, because one now exists. Does your iPhone suddenly feel lower quality to you?

> You have evidence right in front of your face that an Android client for iMessage is possible, because one now exists.

Sure, but I'm not the one who has to handle customer service for it.

Apple can have a test suite that encompasses every possible supported device (and OS combination). That's much tougher if they want to support Android.

> Does your iPhone suddenly feel lower quality to you?

No, but that's missing the point. If Beeper catches on, and all my Android friends install it, and some of my messages start getting lost, delayed, what have you, that's when I'd start to feel it.

> some of my messages start getting lost, delayed, what have you, that's when I'd start to feel it.

Then you can blame their phone... just like you would now if your SMS messages to them were getting lost.

If the iMessages fail, and give me the "try as SMS instead", I'm likely to blame iMessage.

> If Beeper catches on, and all my Android friends install it, and some of my messages start getting lost, delayed, what have you, that's when I'd start to feel it.

You realize that's been Apple's fault right, intentionally breaking Beeper?

> You realize that's been Apple's fault right, intentionally breaking Beeper?

Sure, it's impossible that Beeper's app or services could ever just malfunction on their own. The first bug-free app!

Oops, meant this to be a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38603599

Same answer either way; Beeper could break things in a way that results in delivery failures, and Apple could be blamed.

Apple doesn't need to provide support for Android if they simply open their protocol and let whoever develops the Android client take care of that, as evidenced by Beeper Mini.

> If Beeper catches on, and all my Android friends install it, and some of my messages start getting lost, delayed, what have you, that's when I'd start to feel it.

In that case, you might be shocked to learn that before Beeper Mini you simply couldn't send iMessages to Android devices at all. Imagine that, ALL of your iMessages to them getting dropped and having to go through SMS instead...

> Apple doesn't need to provide support for Android if they simply open their protocol and let whoever develops the Android client take care of that, as evidenced by Beeper Mini.

Now they have to support an open standard/protocol, though. That's not negligible effort.

> In that case, you might be shocked to learn that before Beeper Mini you simply couldn't send iMessages to Android devices at all. Imagine that, ALL of your iMessages to them getting dropped and having to go through SMS instead...

But that's seamless; I've never had to wait or make that choice.

When there's some kind of iMessage failure, though, they sit around and don't send, until I get a delivery failure and "send as SMS" as the fallback. This is rare, but extremely annoying. Adding third-party services into the mix doesn't seem like it's going to reduce these instances.

> Now they have to support an open standard/protocol, though. That's not negligible effort.

Evidently not, given the existence of Beeper Mini without intervention on their part. In fact, they're actively spending effort on breaking a working implementation that took them no effort. And either way, they have trillions of dollars and some of the brightest people in tech under their belt. If your argument is that they're not capable of making that protocol work, you're wrong.

>But that's seamless; I've never had to wait or make that choice.

It's seamlessly giving you less functionality, sure. This is not a matter of opinion: Being able to send iMessages to Android users is a feature that iPhones currently do not have at all. Apple is choosing to not give you that functionality when they could be. With something like Beeper Mini, you as an iPhone user gain more functionality by being able to send iMessages to some Android users. Even if it fails sometimes, it is still functionality that simply did not exist at all before. This is only beneficial to you as an iPhone user because you now have functionality that you did not before. I don't know if that can be phrased any more directly.

> Evidently not, given the existence of Beeper Mini without intervention on their part.

Leaving a hole open is not anywhere near the same thing as formally supporting a public protocol.

> In fact, they're actively spending effort on breaking a working implementation that took them no effort.

They're spending effort fixing a security hole in an internal protocol.

> Being able to send iMessages to Android users is a feature that iPhones currently do not have at all.

That's like saying Toyota doesn't offer "driving a Ford" as a feature. I don't give a shit? Sending an SMS to Android users is fine.

> They're spending effort fixing a security hole in an internal protocol.

Then they're spending effort regardless, and your argument was that they shouldn't spend effort at all. If that is the case then it would be better spent opening the protocol in the first place.

> That's like saying Toyota doesn't offer "driving a Ford" as a feature.

Fun hyperbole, but no, there's an obvious difference and this is a reach.

> I don't give a shit? Sending an SMS to Android users is fine.

Good for you, but it's obvious that a lot of people do care. Look around in this very thread, even. Apple users complain that things like group chats and read receipts don't work with Android users. The whole fickle green bubble thing originates from this. Plenty of people do care about this functionality and are happy that this exists, iPhone users included. And if you don't care, then why would you be so insistent about not wanting it added?

> Then they're spending effort regardless...

They must fix security holes. They don't have to make internal protocols public. These are not comparable investments of time, either.

Counterpoint: AirPods can connect to any Bluetooth compatible device, yet the experience with an iPhone is still magical.

That doesn't seem like a comparable scenario; Apple implements the Bluetooth standard (along with a bunch of others), which is defined by industry groups.

In this case, it's not a standard.

The relevant example here is that Apple supports the lowest common denominator standard: SMS. iMessage is what makes the experience "magical" on iPhones.

The total failure of any open messaging standard to capture the market seems to imply to me that control is actually pretty important to the experience of using the service!

It merely implies that being closed is more profitable, not that it is critical to the experience.

I actually like the walled garden, things “just work” in here…

I also have devices outside of the the walled garden but they take a bit more effort as far as initial set up and upkeep, things I’m willing to do but average Joe just wanting his tech to do what he tells it to do might not have the patience for.

I would say people like the marketing. The average consumer gives no shits about product quality (see: the race to the bottom in basically every industry). But Apple has somehow convinced people that they are cool, so people buy their products.

Apple is often less shitty than the alternative. Yes, the standards have dropped, but the competition has too, so the status quo stands. It's not just marketing.

> But Apple has somehow convinced people that they are cool, so people buy their products.

That "somehow" is pretty easy to explain. Apple creates innovative products - the iPod, iPhone and AirPods were all the first-of-their-kind products - and especially, it creates long lasting products, both in terms of build quality and support.

Good luck getting security updates (including drivers) for your 5 year old typical Windows laptop (or getting a modern OS running on it, see the issue with TPM requirements). Apple, on average, supports a device for ~6 years, and up to 9 years (!) for mobile devices [2].

Meanwhile, you're lucky if your Windows or Android device even lasts that long physically.

On top of that, the battery lifetimes for Apple devices are insane compared to the competition - a feat that neither Windows nor Android can achieve as they lack the complete control over the entire stack, from CPU design over firmware over hardware to the OS and user-space libraries, that Apple has.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/some-macs-are-gettin...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iPhone_models

Not for sure where the claim of Windows machines lasting less than Apple products comes from. Before Windows 11, you could easily be running Windows 10 on a 10-15 year old computer.

> Not for sure where the claim of Windows machines lasting less than Apple products comes from.

I'm talking about the entire stack including drivers. Microsoft is left at the mercy of vendors here.

Additionally, I have yet to see a Windows laptop that doesn't develop cracks, broken hinges and whatnot after 2-3 years of use.

Never seen a thinkpad, I see. I still use an x61t that's in perfect condition.

> The average consumer gives no shits about product quality

It's exactly this sort of contemptuous attitude that "techies" have towards "average users" that enabled Apple to become the most valuable company in history.

> it is why many people like Apple products so much

and it's why (well one very big reason why) I hate Apple products, and avoid them.

Unfortunately we're heavily in the minority. The vast majority of people won't do this.

I wonder how many of the people complaining about the Apple ecosystem are doing so using a Google browser on a Google operating system running on a Google hardware device and found this site using the Google search engine and signed up using a Google Mail mail address and do work using Google's office suite and are listening to a video or music on Google's video sharing platform in the background as they type.

Firefox, Graphene, Pixel, DDG, Proton, MS365, Rumble.

1/7 isn't bad, I guess.

> They want to control the entire user experience end to end, and it is why many people like Apple products so much.

Totally. But in a messaging app context, that doesn't apply or even make sense. They could just release an iMessage app for Android and keep the experience exactly the same for their iPhone users.

Nobody is locked into Apple products because of iMessage.

Apple disagrees

https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-confirms-imessage-locks-...

Most iPhones are not purchased by parents for kids. You’re fixated on this but it’s a footnote for why people buy iPhones.

You said nobody, I provided evidence that "nobody" is false.

Me buying an iPhone for my kids doesn’t make me locked into the platform. I just want my kids on the same platform as I am.

Where is the lock in?

What is the reason you want your kids on the same platform?

Is it perhaps because it's easier to message them, do photo sharing/albums, see their location, have airtags work on both? At least for a sizable group my extended family included it's a lock-in for iPhones (or a very strong social disincentive to switch).

Yes exactly - it’s the whole Apple experience. If iMessage started working on android it would remove one reason to get my kid an iPhone. I still have 20 more.

I don't think that list of reasons are long, for me personally iMessage is the reason I'm not switching to Android alone. For others, it might take more but once you start to remove reasons, switching can be based on competitive reasons instead of lockin, ie iPhones are better devices than Pixels and worth the premium vs today I have to get an iPhone because I want to use the dominant communication tool to talk to family.

Maybe true, but 87% of teens self-reported owning an iPhone [1]. The blue-bubble effect is real, and this cohort is facing enormous pressure to use iMessage specifically. I wouldn't call it a footnote, personally.

1: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/04/04/iphone-is-still-t...

iMessage is one of the primary reasons I will not buy an Android phone.

I don’t think anyone thinks it’s impossible for apple, or even relatively difficult for them. I also don’t think anyone doesn’t understand that they try to lock people into their ecosystem. Not my favorite choice of theirs, but largely a business choice they’ve decided to make.

As is their right?

Just like it's our right to run software on my device that sends packets of a certain format to a certain server.

The amount of corporate bootlickers who wish to surrender that right is staggering though.

It’s completely our right to send those packets, but that fact is completely disconnected to anything anyone is talking about here.

Because it’s also their right not to respond to those packets?

It's their right to not respond, but people here seem to be mad at Beeper for producing software which sends packets that Apple servers want to respond to.

> lock people into the ecosystem.

Other messaging services are available on iOS. In much if the world, iMessage is barely used. This is not lock-in, at all.

If anything, this is lock-out - it's a service that Apple provides to its customers and they don't want 3rd party clients and/or non-customers using the service.

Running the iMessage service for a billion iPhone users can't be cheap. Opening up the API and running it for the entire rest of the world for free is a non-starter.

No company on earth is that generous, let alone Apple.

Then how does WhatsApp run their service for free across multiple platforms?

Facebook mines the metadata to increase revenue received through advertising.

It’s not free, the end user just isn’t paying in monetary currency.

> Then how does WhatsApp run their service for free across multiple platforms?

FWIW, this is always a good question to ask yourself when considering using a service... they are getting paid for it one way or another.

The last year it was independent, WhatsApp lost nearly $140M (on a much smaller userbase than it has today)

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...

Why does it have to be free? Aren't beeper showing that there is a market of users who would pay to be able to use imessage from non-apple hardware?

Seriously, Apple would make absolute bank selling this exact service, even if it was restricted to blue bubbles, reactions, and high-quality media.

That's exactly what the announced RCS support for iOS provides. Just not the blue color of iMessage.

No, Apple won't be charging for that service.

Isn't RCS hosted by the carriers rather than Apple?

Yes, it's basically an SMS replacement, with at least as much carrier control.

It is actually more often than not hosted by Google

Why should Apple be bullied to enter a market they clearly have no interest in?

Apple's message is clear: if you want iMessage, get an Apple device. And I fail to understand how "access to iMessage" should be considered a public good that Apple must be forced to allow others access to, there's nothing special about it, there's plenty of different services providing the same experience, anyone can launch an iMessage competitor.

> there's nothing special about it, there's plenty of different services providing the same experience, anyone can launch an iMessage competitor.

There very evidently is something special about it. It comes from Apple, so it enjoys the advantages of their closed ecosystem and Apple can get away with offering an inferior product.

Apple has no interest in a market they control which has interested customers. Apple should be bullied into it because any other option is an utter failure of capitalism.

Apple does not "get away" with offering an inferior product. Any other messenger can be installed on Apple's devices and the OS does not penalize the user in any way for choosing e.g. WhatsApp over iMessage.

> Apple should be bullied into it because any other option is an utter failure of capitalism.

This is an extreme hyperbole, capitalism isn't going to fail because some people think less of "green bubble folks". Also, that scheme failed in any other market than the US. US folks engaging in bullying because of some messenger preferences does not mean you get to dictate the market, and if it does, please provide me some information about that law from which you derive that justification.

Seems like an expensive way to tell us all something we've known since the iphone was released.

> Yeah, not the point. The point is to prove that it's possible and relatively simple, and the only reason Apple operates this way is to lock people into the ecosystem.

Is that the point? Everybody already knew that Apple's messaging strategy was a business calculation based around lock in.

Beeper also presents itself as a company, so I'm not sure how releasing software that annoys Apple just to make a point could possibly help their bottom line. If that was the goal, they should've released the code as an anonymous open source project rather than painting a huge target on their own backs.

Except what they are doing is specifically legal under the DMCA, and protected under the EU SDA. Under the EU SDA, Apple might even have to assist them.

>sued into bankruptcy

Good luck with that. I'd like to see this play out in court with a technically inclined judge. Be careful what you wish for.

I assume there's some very rich benefactor behind it that is willing to fund it.

Yes, this is like a picture perfect case for interoperability.

There’s no piggybacking. Beeper’s messages never hit Apple servers.

They only thorn they're creating for Apple is forcing them to do anticompetitive things while they're being investigated for anticompetitive practices in places like the EU.

In terms of technical problems, Apple will likely be able to keep up their end of the arms race with less than 1/2 of a single developer's time. The cost to continue patching Beeper out of their systems will be a fraction of a rounding error for them financially.

I doubt that this can be done that easily without recklessly endangering the experience of their 1+ billion users.

Beeper on the other hand has far fewer users, who by now likely expect a bad experience. Beeper can be way more agile.

Apple doesn't need to break backward compatibility to block Beeper, they just need a way to fingerprint traffic from Beeper which is going to be trivial unless Beeper finds a 100% on-device solution.

Even then, it'll still be pretty easy because Apple has trillions of interactions with Apple devices to analyze and compare against Beeper.

How are they funding development?

Stuff like this feels petty by all parties.

Use an app that’s already universal if users are so desperate.

Playing whack a mole back and forth over a chat app as if it’s some high minded fight for speech when countless options exist is melodrama for the sake of melodrama and engagement farming

Beeper real goal is like everyone else in tech; get rich. It found the perfect marketing meme, the old David and Goliath story, to piggyback its business goals on.

I had to purchase an iPhone solely to use iMessage. Believe me, I would have loved to use any other internet-based chat app. But I just can't move my entire social circle to a different app. The network effects and friction are too high.

The only thing end users really have control over is their own client. I don't know if they'll succeed in the long run, but I'm really rooting for beeper

Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device? That sounds just comically bad. Where is that? USA? I just checked, the iPhone market share appears to be around 57% in the USA, which is sure a lot, but still it means that every second person does not have the ability to use this app. So how comes it ends up being inconvenient for normal people, and not for iPhone users? Weird.

Seriously, I'm struggling to imagine that. It suddenly reminds me of when Microsoft had to offer users to choose something other than IE because of anti-monopoly legislation. What you are telling me about iPhones sounds way, way worse than that. After all, it's not like people had to use IE before that, they just didn't know better. There was no network effect and vendor-lock with IE.

Also, what's even so special about this app? I maybe could understand that, if it was unique. But come one, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, plain old SMS after all… And I'm not even talking about older VoIP/messengers (Skype, Jabber), community-centered apps (Discord, Slack, MS Teams) or some fringe messengers nobody uses even though they are clearly better than everything else (Matrix). By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols…

Do you hear yourself? Using using an iPhone for communication is perfectly normal. I’m at a top 10 (biggest in terms of number of students) university in the US and I can confidently tell you the overwhelming majority of people carries iPhones. The 57% statistic use site probably skewed toward the older demographic, where older people are more likely to use flip phones and androids. I would if I knew that strange if I wasn’t a part of group chat just because I have an android. Technical users like the increased privacy and security, while more regular users like the extra features. They’re just isn’t an argument to be made for having androids in group chats. And no, nobody is using signal or telegram or WhatsApp in college

Honest question, does anybody ever consider that excluding non-iPhone users from a group chat is a dick move?

How hard it is to install a cross-platform app? Some of these apps also work in a web browser on any OS, which is a nice advantage over iMessage.

I will place a bet with you, if you like, that will be very easy for you to win if you're correct in your comment.

The bet goes something like this: Pick a group chat you're in of 10 or more real-life acquaintances who all currently only use a single messaging platform, and convince them all to move the group chat entirely to a different messaging platform, and delete the old group chat.

It doesn't matter which messaging platform you're moving to, any will do, and as you mention there's many to pick from -- some of which are probably better and more feature complete than the one your group chat is currently using.

> Are you saying everyone in your social circle willingly vendor-locks themselves by using an app that is available only on a specific device?

The problem is this isn't how a non-technical audience views the problem. To them, they get a fully featured chat (rich media, reactions, hi def photos, etc) with most of their social circle. They don't have to install anything, they don't have to sign up for anything, they don't even have to remember different credentials, it just works. Best of all, it just works across their ipads and macs, too.

Sure, it doesn't work for a portion of their friends, but from their perspective, their friends are the weird ones: why wouldn't you switch to a phone that has a "better" experience like this?

> By no means there is a shortage of messaging apps and protocols

This is a bug, not a feature, in a world where there's no common clients that work across all those ecosystems. You go back to 2008ish and you have half a dozen clients that speak Jabber or XMPP. You can sign into GTalk or Facebook Messenger or (gods forbid) Yahoo Messenger all from the same application, and it all mostly works. Now you have a zillion apps and a zillion logins and some of them have nice features and some don't, but without interop, there's an upper limit to the number of chat apps people are willing to maintain to just talk to other people.

Especially when, for Apple users, the best one is already on their device.

But those effects are not universal.

Not everyone is locked into iMessage.

Of course you’ve hardly been forced into hard labor in the gulag.

Can we use government for something more universal than saving you from your social groups choices?

It might be a controversial topic, but this post had some oddly rapid upvotes for HN.

I'm trying to understand what the target of this hacky iMessage spin-off of Beeper is. The whole idea of subscription-based monetization. Rather no way of Apple not patching quickly, dealing with this as soon as it raises attention.

But maybe that was the intent of a hack they found? A clever marketing strategy, to gain some rapid traction with the controversy, highlighting their project?

For me, it's less about craving a specific service, and more about watching tech drama and idealism at war.

I saw the announcement on Twitter and came over here to talk about it. People are really excited about Beeper.

I’m not excited about beeper but am excited about the drama around beeper!

Gatekeeping iMessage has become one of the most despised facets of Apple's many gatekeeping techniques, primarily because of widespread bullying.

Bingo. I was excluded from a group chat of ~15 people because I was the only one without iMessage.

Eventually they included me. I showed one of them the chat in Google Messages and he was amazed at how nice it looked, since Android supports Apple reactions. They're also jealous of all the emojis I can react with (and I admit I do it just to rub it in their face).

Apple is writing their own death sentence here. Beeper Mini's case will definitely be used against them when their anti-monopoly case inevitably comes about:

1. Forcing a monopoly when they force-migrated their users to iMessage

2. Maintaining said monopoly by keeping third parties out

Best thing they could do is put third party clients into a MFI like program and loads of red tape.

Why do you think an anti-monopoly case will ever come? Europe has dropped it, and US pretty much everyone in power (and all their families/friends) is an iphone user. They're probably completely unaware that there's a problem, and even if made aware they have positive vibes for Big Gray

The EU hasn't dropped it. The consultation period is still ongoing, the news was that the EU is only tending towards not regulating iMessage, but it is not set in stone yet:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/imessage-will-reportedly-g...

It is very much possible that the current kerfuffle has some bearing on future regulation.

That said, iMessage is not really big in Europe, Whatsapp is, so it's more interesting for the EU to regulate that.

A case against a monopoly with a minority market share. Good luck with that!

As far as I know, Apple has the majority of the market in the US where iMessage matters most.

Even if you limit it to the US, they have 56% which is only a very small majority. Are you trying to argue that that 44% of users not on iOS can’t message others because of that terrible Apple monopoly? Frankly, that’s just ridiculous and your fantasy case is so hopelessly going nowhere nobody is going to even start it.

1. No one is "force-migrated to iMessage". Have you never used an iPhone before?

2. Requiring an application made by the company to access the servers owned by a company has never in history been called a monopoly before. The precedent that'd set would be pretty laughable. It'd basically make it law that everyone has free access to private servers of any company if they can reverse engineer the protocol. You could say goodbye to anti-cheat systems that block third party clients from online games.

These Beeper folk sound a bit entitled. As was repeatedly mentioned in the other thread [1], building production applications on top of an undocumented and unsupported (in terms of backwards compatability, etc) API is a nightmare that should be avoided. Apple has every right to change their API, if they do Beeper will go down, and Beeper will blame Apple. I understand Apple's incentives to not want to be in this situation.

I don't buy their "Beeper unequivocally makes things secure story" either. For one, I do not want to have my Apple ID login routed through a third party. I trust an established, trillion dollar company far more with that sensitive info than I do a fast-moving, eager-to-break-things startup. And the list goes on.

It's an impressive engineering effort, but I really don't believe they're entitled to parasite off the undocumented iMessage API.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38574888

I think they are rightly calling out that iMessage as part of Apple's moat building is both bad for their customers and people their customers interact with. And while I agree with you, and I won't be using the service, I think from their POV it is the correct messaging.

> Apple's moat building is both bad for their customers and people their customers interact with

I bought into the ecosystem exactly because of the quality and functionality of iMessage. There's absolutely no spam, everything works and the ecosystem is tight-knit.

But other side of the Apple reality is your then stuck when all your other relatives use Android.

I am then forced to use some $app, persuade my contacts to use said app. Defeating the point of iMessage when I just want native support all around.

Something that Apple had never implemented anywhere else and for which it could decades ago.

I wouldn't switch to an Android because the feature became available.

If all your contacts use Apple Devices, sure go nuts. But when others don't iMessage becomes unpractical.

But hey, vendor device lock-in money is very nice. It's unfortunate that they don't water the lawns of the walled-garden nor restock the bird feeder. We are expected to do that ourselves using a wooden ladder with missing prongs.

You aren’t though because sms exists as fallback.

Group chat SMS doesn’t work globally the same way as it apparently works in the USA.

(This is one of the reasons why WhatsApp is big in the rest of the world)

> I bought into the ecosystem exactly because of the quality and functionality of iMessage. There's absolutely no spam

I’m glad I bought into the ecosystem for other reasons, as I definitely receive occasional iMessage spam. It’s about as frequent as WhatsApp spam.

I think it's valid feedback from Beeper, but to insinuate that this gives them to right to force Apple to run their reverse-engineered access is where things go a bit too far for me. Apple's customers are not Beeper's customers. They have completely different incentives.

I guess the approach is to try and force Apple's hand or push some legislation for interoperability, but Apple is working on RCS so it's not like they've been completely ignoring criticism...

Apple's RCS implementation is meaningless unless they cut out the blue/green bubble shit.

It will be far from meaningless if I can send a high resolution image easily to a groupchat containing a mix of android and ios users.

Sure, but if Beeper keeps working, likely some free alternative isn't far behind, and if that means your messages don't come up as blue, that will be everyone's preference.

"Meaningless" isn't accurate at this point. Media doesn't get nearly as severely downgraded (if at all), so the user experience of using an RCS chat is better than SMS/MMS.

There are still disparities, though, that should be presented. There's no standardized end-to-end encryption yet for RCS (although it could be argued Google's protocol is a de facto standard), and Apple has indicated it will be implementing RCS as the standard dictates, i.e. with no E2E encryption. Using blue bubble to indicate E2E encrypted and green to indicate otherwise is a reasonable UX choice.

After Apple implements E2E encryption over RCS via whatever standard (which can be reasonably inferred as their intention from their announcements), if the delineation for green-vs-blue is still iMessage/not-iMessage (rather than E2E vs not-E2E), then I think "meaningless" applies. But we're not there yet.

The colors of the bubbles are the least important aspect of this

As long as Apple keeps encouraging their users to be shitty to Android users, I'd say it's important.

"Encouraging shittiness" because they're pointing out a lack of feature parity with a color seems like a stretch. Google has done the same exact thing by pushing a number of chat apps in their ecosystem, the only difference is that Apple has succeeded.

It's not a stretch at all. They are well aware of the weird culty green bubble clique attitudes. And there are plenty of things they could do to allow imessage on Android. And even if they still didn't want to do that, they didn't need to choose an entirely different color for non imessage messages, they could be more subtle in alerting iphone users the other person in the convo has less features available to them. Much of the time it isn't even relevant.

Apple is at a scale in smartphone dominance that they're anticompetitive. There are only two vendors. They control everything about one of the most essential functional pieces of modern society.

A smartphone is essential. Apple and Google tax 30%, control when and how software can be deployed, control browser tech (Apple), prevent web downloads of executable software (Apple) or scare and confuse you about it (Google). They control the payment rails and increasingly enforce using their identity and customer management, so they can sink more claws into business and innovation. They're partnering with governments to be authoritative identify providers. They're usurping payment rails to become the entire payment ecosystem of the future.

The devices are user unfriendly. Can't repair them, can't use third party components, can't replace the battery. Unofficial pieces break core features due to unnecessary cryptographic locks. Updates obsolete old hardware.

Nevermind the petty bullshit about green and blue bubbles giving children (and even adults) fear about their image and reputation. Being bullied for not buying the latest and greatest.

This is scary shit and we're letting them do this.

Nevermind all the fluff of them owning movie studios and music and the arts to keep eyeballs locked.

Car companies wish they had it this good. They'd love to charge you for third party accessories, or to charge McDonalds a fee every time they drive you there. That's essentially the deal Apple and Google are getting.

This is all at once worse than Standard Oil, and comes with heavy Orwellian vibes.

We need more than two vendors, and we need different companies to own different parts of the stack. As it stands, these two companies own everyone and everything these people touch.

I had started writing basically this and stopped because you did a much better job. Thanks for taking the time to articulate this.

I want to add a subtle but important part: outside of the tech community, almost nobody knows this problem exists. If you try to explain it their eyes glaze over. Normies with iPhones, if they think anything, think iMessage is "texting". Blue bubbles mean they can see when you're typing and can send reactions, green bubbles mean you can't because you're on Android (or, "Samsung"). None of them think of iMessage as a "chat application" on par with WhatsApp... it's texting.

And all the government officials we wish would step in are included in this lot. They all have iPhones and they love them. iPhone is synonymous with 'smartphone' in common discourse and Apple is happy to trade brand dilution for that kind of "default" brand status.

And, as you eloquently point out, we could break the world trying to loosen Apple's grip on texting, only to find that we just transferred some of their power to Google, which isn't much better.

As a Google Android user using a Google Pixel and Google's RCS on Google Fi, the messaging system is a total clusterfuck. There's no way to reliably send or receive messages, and sometimes my images will be degraded silently, group messages to other Fi users often don't work before several retries, reactions are totally hit and miss...

IMessage is a much much much better experience. It's not at all bad for their customers. It's a huge plus of that system over Android and other platforms that still try to piggyback off SMS or haphazardly support RCS.

GNU Jami or similar messaging systems are the solution, not some proprietary vendor locking solution.

That sounds like an uphill battle, lol. Signal came and went, WhatsApp and WeChat and Line dominate in much of the world, even email these days is mostly proprietary webmail. I think the average person will always prefer ease of use over openness or security.

Olvid [0,1] seems interesting too.

[0]: https://olvid.io

[1]: https://github.com/olvid-io/olvid-android

When did HN get so anti-consumer, anti-hacker, anti-freedom, pro-proprietary?

Them taking the fight with Apple should be applauded. A walled down proprietary message platform only a few can use is stupid to fight in favor of.

There is nothing quite as hard as making a man understand something that his paycheck depends on him not understanding.

I think we can commend their efforts and call out their entitled messaging at the same time. These are not mutually exclusive.

When the VC money got tangled in the roots.

It isn’t anti-freedom and pro-proprietary to have a view on what you think the law says and what you think Apple’s right to respond is.

The original kid who reversed: Great hacking, I think we can all applaud. This is a for-profit (VC funded?) company charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for (and using apple binary blobs?).

If they used the protocol they reverse engineered on their own servers that’d be completely different. But that wouldn’t be profitable for them.

> charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for

Apple is free to charge for them. In fact, I think it would be the best outcome and a mitigation to the upcoming spam onslaught now that the protocol has been documented.

> But that wouldn’t be profitable for them.

Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create (since Apple is more than capable of building an Android iMessage client)? Isn't that the whole point of a competitive market?

Apple does charge for access to their servers. Or are you saying they’re free to pick another business model?

It currently doesn't because Beeper Mini users are able to get access without paying. This should change, if anything just to make the upcoming onslaught of spam unprofitable.

> Apple is free to charge for them

But I don’t think anyone disagrees that Apple is (currently) free _not_ to charge for them.

> Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create

I’d say ethically no - not a problem - up _until_ the point where they are actively, continuously using resources of that manufacturer. Legally? If you or your customers have agreed to a TOS then that’s probably bad either way.

Nobody would care about (or be interested in) beeper if they were running their own servers.

A walled down proprietary messaging platform is so common as to be unremarkable. Google has probably 5 in the works right now. Meta has a few, and there’s dozens of others to choose from.

It was really cool news when they reverse engineered the API. It was less cool when they sold paid access to this unofficial API. Beeper is barely pro-consumer because again, they’re charging for something open sourced by a 16yo kid which has no official support.

The green bubble blue bubble story is really tired. Yea it’s real, but it’s not a technical problem it’s a social problem. Haven’t we learned that you can’t out-hacker a social problem?

> The green bubble blue bubble story is really tired. Yea it’s real, but it’s not a technical problem it’s a social problem.

It's both. For example, Apple degrades the experience for "green bubbles" even though it doesn't need to. That's not, strictly speaking, a social problem.

Apple doesn't degrade the experience, that's a carrier limitation when sending SMS and MMS messages to anyone even other iPhone users.

E.g. MMS messages generally have to fit within 300-600KB so they are horribly, horribly compressed. https://m.gsmarena.com/glossary.php3?term=mms

Is this paid? I thought it was free.

As for beeper cloud, I’m a paying customer to Apple and I just want to use my damn chat app on desktop that I pay for.

It’s paid. It’s cheap ($2/mo?) but it’s a subscription.

Yea, i actually disagree with that. Generally i'm in favor of Beeper Mini if can be used by people who already pay Apple (like i want my Android tablet to have my iPhone iMessage or w/e), but odd to me that they're charging monthly for a service they don't host.

Put a tiny flat rate on the app for the work that they crated and call it a day.

Hackers do things because they can. Apple is entitled to gatekeep their own technology until it is regulated as a utility. To me the anti-hacker spirit is a company thinking just because they did something they subjectively think is good that Apple is then obligated to keep it running.

In what world is Apple obligated to keep a service running which allows unauthorized security related behavior? Such a hole in a service is usually called a security vulnerability and is patched away asap.

Hacker news is the public arm of a hyper capitalist venture capitalist clan.

It never has and never will be a ‘free spirited hacker place’ despite the name.

If through magic they were able to make a replacement that didn't utilize Apple's servers/resources (e.g. Point-2-Point), I think you'd find the attitude different.

The inherent problem right now is that they want to create a commercial product using another company's servers/APIs without that company's permission, ultimately leaving Apple picking up the bill (inc. additional support ticket volume, like when iMessage gets locked on a given AppleId).

Is iMessage part of Apple's moat? Absolutely. Is it good for consumers for iMessage to have a hardware lock? No. But even if that is true, this seems like something regulators should be involved in solving.

Plus there is nothing anti-proprietary or pro-freedom that Beeper Mini is doing.

Pro-Apple

People tasted the fruit in Apple's garden noticed that it tasted really good. So good in fact that it made them go "Is this walled garden actually that much of a bad thing? Because man, I do love eating this fruit."

Beeper is trying to build a business based on unauthorized use of another company's servers. Apple customer's pay the Apple premium for their phones and get iMessage at no charge for the life of the device. Beeper charges its customers for a service that is paid for by Apple. How is that ok?

>> "only a few can use"

There are about 1.5 billion iPhone users in the world.

As far as proprietary services, the world is full of them. Google, Meta, X, Instagram, .... Apple built a service to provide advanced messaging services to their many customers. It comes with the phone. Should Apple be required to freely give iPhone cameras to people who don't buy their phone? How about the Touch ID module?

There are plenty of cross platform messaging apps available on iOS. The only thing that could be considered anti-competitive is the inability to change the default messaging app on iOS. Apple has fixed this for some of the other built-in apps, but not messaging yet. I would agree that that should be fixed. However, Beeper is not offering an alternative messaging platform, they are selling access to Apple's platform.

You think an E2E encryption messenger is best served by a proprietary, single vendor implementation, with the added bonus of being able to subvert the client at any moment for individual devices?

There are some very weird takes around security on this to somehow twist it into an "Apple good" scenario. No, like literally every other time in history, closed & controlled does not make it more secure.

Isn't Whatsapp a proprietary, single vendor implementation? Isn't Signal a single vendor implementation? I'm confused on your point.

Like Signal?

To my knowledge, you can't make a 3rd party Signal client and connect it to the official Signal instances.

> you can't make a 3rd party Signal client and connect it to the official Signal instances.

The Signal guy doesn't want you to do that (just like Apple), but it's absolutely possible. It's in fact much easier than in the iMessage scenario since all the client sources are available.

Giving your Apple ID to a third party is an incredibly bad idea for your security, full stop. Do not ever do this. Any argument that this helps user security because your messages are now E2E is completely undermined by the risk to your identity for literally all of Apple's other services, and that someone could now impersonate you in Messages. But it'd be encrypted!

Of course, if you're on Android -- which you would be to use this service -- then maybe you don't even have any other Apple services (I don't). So this is not a problem.

In fact, can't I not just create an new Apple ID specifically for this?

And if you're using this in place of SMS, having a single bad guy be able to read your messages is still better than having all the bad guys be able to read them.

No. Apple given their scale and position in the market should be forced to operate and interoperate with an open standard for messaging. iMessage should no longer allowed to be proprietary and stay part of Apple.

> Apple given their scale and position in the market should be forced to operate and interoperate with an open standard for messaging.

You mean like SMS and MMS right now, and RCS next year? https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/

This is one of those technically correct comments, but missing the point. We're probably too old for this but the green message bubble vs blue message bubble is an actual thing that many people care about.

I have two kids in high-school who insist it's not a thing. I've seen their text chains, and they're all standards-based (green) because their friends have both.

This isn't to say there aren't toxic cliques whose alpha-teen leaders insist on certain brands of phones, clothing, ebikes, etc., but just that the flames of this particular media panic are actively fanned by Google and Samsung PR.

It seems like to me that whether it's real or not, removing the potential for it to be used in a bad way is a good thing.

Someone in a recent thread said that they performed an informal survey of their friends and family, and there was unanimous agreement that each person would be much less interested in dating someone with green bubble text messages, because this indicates that there's likely to be a poor culture fit between themselves and the other person.

To me, this provides an excellent argument for using Android devices if you are single and looking to start a long term relationship. Through one tiny choice, you get some of the most elitist, opinionated, and disagreeable people to voluntarily exclude themselves as potential dates, with no hard feelings on either side. It's a far better filter than most stuff you could put in a dating profile.

I would argue that claim (if not complete bullshit) said infinitely more about them, their family and friends. You are taking “these people owning an iphone are psychopaths” as “all people owning an iphone are psychopaths”.

This candy fell into the mud. Therefore I will never eat candy again because they are all muddy.

I think you misunderstood, I by no means think that all iPhone owners are psychopaths. I'm not even opposed to owning an iPhone. I'm just making the case that if there are a significant number of people who will cut you out of their lives for using an Android, that's a really good argument for using an Android, because it's rare to find a way to get terrible people to voluntarily cut ties with you with no further repercussions.

No, we mean cutting out that blue/green bubble shit to drive wedges between users.

If RCS goes live on all Apple devices in all jurisdictions and that solves the problem then great!

It still won't solve the root of the issue. Android bubbles will still be green.

Why stop there? Why not force every iOS app to support running on android?

Because it's possible for competitors to build replacements for the rest of the apps.

It's possible for competitors to build replacements for iMessage, too. In fact, in many parts of the world, those competing apps are more popular than iMessage. You can go to the app store right now and install these competing apps, usually for free.

There is an obvious technical difference between a protocol like iMessage and the software stack required to run apps. Beeper Mini has shown with tangible proof that an iMessage client on Android exists. Nobody to my knowledge has been able to emulate arbitrary iPhone apps on Android (if they have then let me know, that sounds like an incredible project and I would be fascinated to see how it works).

There have been attempts

https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/IEmu

If the only thing Beeper does is continue to make Apple look anti-competitive, they've succeeded as far as I'm concerned.

I'm deep into the Apple ecosystem and don't see myself getting out anytime soon. But I think their stance on iMessage sucks, even while understanding the strategic reasons they're doing it.

I don't see this as "leeching off an undocumented API" as much as demonstrating that iMessage is already in a state that allows 3rd parties to interact with it, documented or not. Every time Beeper starts working again, it shines a light on the fact that iMessage was never so locked down to begin with. It also puts pressure on Apple to answer the growing # of their own customers who are frustrated by the limits. These are good things, IMO.

Apple may have every right, but that doesn't make their stance good for the ecosystem or good for consumers. This is pretty clearly about forcing people to switch ecosystems and not about security. If security was the only issue, Apple could easily provide supported iMessage APIs that make it clear that the other user is not a verified Apple user, while still allowing interoperability.

Imitating a first-party user isn't the same as being a third-party user.

What's anti-competitive with what Apple does with iMessage? iMessage's lack of popularity everywhere else in the world is proof that competition is able to flourish. Apple is under no obligation to make an Android app, and it's silly to pretend not making an app for another platform is somehow anti-competetive.

The market simply chosing a preference is not anti-competive. iPhone and iMessage is able to compete on it's own merits without competition being artificially hindered.

If I have a computer that's technically capable to interoperate and talk with someone else's computer, why should we intentionally restrict that ability?

The answer isn't to say that in other locations we have a different gatekeeper so all is well, the answer should be that Apple's gatekeeping should be broken, and then other gatekeepers' gatekeeping should be broken too.

We should all have one messaging client that can seamlessly use all the major protocols and services - in fact like we used to have over a decade ago.

We do: SMS

It's just worse than the alternative that Apple provides for its own ecosystem of users. Any Apple user is free to opt for that more universal system if they want.

Well, Beeper has proven that we now have another one: iMessage.

Why not use the more modern, featureful & secure option instead of antiquated SMS? Why are you still defending corporate greed at the expense of user experience?

I pay Apple to manage my mobile device experience. That is literally why they demand and receive a premium over the alternatives. Why do you think Apple customers are some helpless and ignorant victim, and not people specifically placing their bets with a company that has delivered exceptional products at the expense of rather fringe philosophical views on "openness?" I don't care about "openness" nor taking down "corporate greed" in this context, I care about having a great experience using my own mobile device.

FWIW there was an era where I felt differently. I was very active in the early Android jailbreak community. It was fun and the freedom has benefits, but those are benefits that I've deliberately chosen to give up for the benefits of the other end of the spectrum. I wasn't tricked into giving them up and neither was anyone else: people are paying Apple for the experience Apple is trusted to deliver. The reason people trust them is because they deliver it. It's super simple.

> I pay Apple to manage my mobile device experience

> I care about having a great experience using my own mobile device.

But you can still do that - I don't see how Beeper changes that? As a happy Apple user you don't need to use Beeper, though might still get benefit from it if your Android-using friends can now use the same messaging app you do.

I trust Apple to make that determination, not someone reverse engineering Apple's APIs.

But how does someone else's API reverse-engineering affect you? You don't have to use Beeper (and don't need to).

I have no clue, I'm not an engineer at Apple, that's why I trust them to make that determination (and again, not Beeper).

There's plenty of cross-platform messaging apps available. There's a plethora of ways those two computers an interoperate, all the way down to the lowest-common denominator of SMS (and soon to be, RCS, which Apple took their time on). They all work great. Many of them dominate as a third party options on both iPhone and Android across the world.

> why should we intentionally restrict that ability

I don't believe software and hardware companies should be under obligation to support things they don't want to. Users can decide on whether the products meet their needs and decide whether they work for them or not.

If Apple had implemented RCS sooner, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation. While a lot of emphasis has been placed on the desirability of the blue bubble, I think it’s important to focus on why: interoperability is artificially bad, and basic things like sending a photo or video are broken in 2023.

Apple made the decision to blend iMessage seamlessly into the phone’s default messaging experience, and with the power of that default, they’ve weaponized the intentional interoperability failure.

Should they be under some obligation to support things they don’t want to? As a product manager, I say that depends on what their customers want out of the devices they’re buying. Apple does owe their users something here, and it’s reasonable to expect that a new device purchased in 2023 is capable of sending a quality photo to other devices. Regardless of obligation, I also think they deserve every bit of anger and bad press they get for the way they’ve played this.

It’s smart business, but that’s not the same thing as good for consumers.

> should be under obligation to support things they don't want to

Nobody is asking them to support anything though - Beeper developed their client on their own and isn't asking Apple anything. Apple is in fact spending extra resources to break interoperability, where as they could just do nothing.

When you have market power, your behavior has to be held to a higher standard. Apple has huge amounts of market power in the US cell phone market. It is totally clear to any reasonable observer that they are using that market power to dissuade people from purchasing Android devices via the green bubble system.

"Making a product that people like and use" is abusing market power?

How does Apple abuse this power in the US but not EU with no differences in the product?

> "Making a product that people like and use" is abusing market power?

This is a very one-sided framing of the situation and leaves out quite a few factors.

People aren’t just buying Apple products because they like them. They’re being forced to buy Apple products to stay in the “in” group. They face exclusion by peers due to Apple’s dominance in the geo and in certain demographics.

As I understand it, iMessage is not dominant in the EU, so the market conditions are quite unlike each other.

> They’re being forced to buy Apple products to stay in the “in” group. They face exclusion by peers due to Apple’s dominance in the geo and in certain demographics

So, uh, factors that have zero to do with Apple are evidence that it is… abusing… the… market…?

Are you auditioning for Apples’ defence team or something?

> So, uh, factors that have zero to do with Apple are evidence that it is… abusing… the… market…?

How does this have zero to do with Apple? It has everything to do with Apple, because it’s ultimately their product decisions driving user behavior.

Had they implemented support for RCS by now, this conversation wouldn’t be happening. They made the explicit choice to capitalize on their poor interoperability and decided to claim it’s for security reasons, which is pretty obviously bullshit.

> iMessage's lack of popularity everywhere else in the world is proof that competition is able to flourish.

I truly do not understand the reasoning behind this. A product doesn’t need to be popular world-wide for behavior to be anti-competitive. The reality is that the US market is heavily impacted, and the fact that this isn’t true in other geos has nothing to do with the impact here.

> Apple is under no obligation to make an Android app, and it's silly to pretend not making an app for another platform is somehow anti-competetive.

I think that framing this only as an obligation for Apple to make an android app is unnecessarily narrow.

There are many ways this could be solved:

- By not artificially degrading the non-iMessage experience

- By not want until 2024 to implement support for RCS

- By opening up APIs with appropriate restrictions to be consumed by other apps - the thing they do for most other native phone capabilities

Building a first party app is just one of a large number of possibilities that are less broken than the status quo.

RCS will help this. They’re embarrassingly and/or intentionally late to the party.

Someone "hacking"[0] into my bank account shines a light on the fact that my bank wasn't so locked down to begin with, but I still don't want people doing it.

Keep in mind, iMessage also relies on a server component. It's not some peer-to-peer protocol. Apple has to pay for the costs of sending messages, high resolution videos and photos, audio recordings, and supporting iMessage apps[1]. You can argue that this is included in the price of the iPhone/iPad/Mac but obviously is not for random android devices. Personally it doesn't bother me if Apple has to just eat the costs, but it is a cost, and probably a not insubstantial one.

[0] Social Engineering.

[1] Ok how many people actually use these? Still, they are part of iMessage.

That's a strange argument... It sounds like you're making the claim that every single chat application should be mandatory legally required to have completely open APIs for any clone that wants to pop up and get access to their network.

What chat apps using a centralized server owned by a single company have open APIs that let anyone use them?

I don’t believe every chat application should be required to have completely open APIs. Key factors in my mind:

- iMessage isn’t a chat app. It’s the default experience for sending the equivalent of text messages from the Apple ecosystem. They’ve blended the experiences such that it’s not fair to compare it to a traditional chat app

- 3rd party chat apps are cross platform. The only reason Beeper exists is because there is no first party option to interact with iMessage chats outside of the ecosystem. This is not the case for actual “chat apps”, and the non-existence of APIs takes on lesser relevance

- On blending the two, what's the issue here? Automatically upgrading SMS messages to go over data connections instead of SMS systems seems like a pure upgrade?

- 3rd party chat apps are cross platform because they're funded by alternative methods, usually by selling your personal information, though sometimes also by sales of other products within the app (like on LINE). Apple funds its chat app through phone sales.

Apple has always been anticompetitive to an extent that would make Bill Gates blush, at least as far back as I can remember. They are one of the most toxic tech companies in that regard. I hope that they are forced to open their walled gardens (app lockdowns in particular), but I have no doubt they'll find another way to be anticompetitive. It's just in their company culture.

Devil’s advocate: does Beeper opens up iMessage to spam bots?

This is addressed in the announcement, beeper is happy to add a pager emoji to the message metadata to allow for identification.

Spam bots can already use the Mac version of iMessage. I doubt Beeper will change spam levels for iMesssage users.

Your Apple ID login is not routed through a third party when you use Beeper Mini. You don't have to input your Apple ID at all.

Edit: Should have read this new post more closely. They are now requiring an Apple ID, when they weren't before.

> Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID.

They are not entitled at all, they are filling a void in the market that Apple doesn't want filled. As I understand it this is explicitly legal under the DMCA and the EU DSA,

Anyone have some detail on the copyright law connection here?

Copyright law is often abused to prevent adversarial interoperability, so it's relevant, even if it might not actually apply.

DMCA allows reverse engineering for interoperability. I'd say it's relevant.

> Apple has every right to change their API, if they do Beeper will go down, and Beeper will blame Apple.

They can blame whomever they want, what difference does it really make.

> For one, I do not want to have my Apple ID login routed through a third party.

As long as you don't use the service, then you're fine. I don't see why you should even care if other people want to use this service.

I don't know where you're getting "entitled" from. They clearly don't care what Apple does, they have plans and designs to work around it.

Beeper isn't "blaming" Apple for being Apple. They're saying that Apple is full of shit when they claim that Beeper hurts the security and privacy of their users.

edit: guess I was wrong

Bad news! This is now Beeper mini works now _according to the very article to which your comment is attached_.

The part that's wild to me is that Beeper is collecting revenue from their users for this.

Apple doesn't charge for iMessage, and instead that service is funded by device purchases. Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices to help them parasitize the infrastructure of the service, and instead of contributing to Apple's operational expenses, they're pocketing the money.

There's no scenario where this stands, even if iMessage came to non-Apple devices Apple is probably going to charge users if they're not buying Apple devices (I can't imagine it being an ad-driven service).

The marginal cost of an extra user on the APNS server is extremely small. Hell I bet the overall barrage of spam push notifications across the iOS landscape causes orders of magnitude more load than Beeper users, and Apple doesn't complain (despite push spam being against the App Store rules).

Of course, Apple is welcome to start charging a reasonable fee for the service.

Asking a million people to pay $0.01 per month is a small marginal cost. Asking one company to pay $0.01 for each of a million users per month is not a small marginal cost.

- Stealing is wrong

"I'm only stealing fractions of pennies at a time! That's why it's not stealing!"

That was the point I wanted to make. I don’t see Apple letting Beeper make money off of a service they don’t run. If the app was open sourced and free then Apple wouldn't really be able to stop it. Apple can definitely sue them as a business, though.

> Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices

Do you have numbers for that? Sure, some of the users haven't purchased devices, but many of them have an apple device or two and just want access to the network across all the devices they use.

The way I see it Beeper are deliberately poking the bear. They knew Apple would block their implementation (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had this replacement ready to go). You don’t have to trust them, if you don’t want to use the service then don’t.

They’re highlighting the closed nature of Apple’s messaging system more effectively than anyone has in a long time. I support them in doing that.

Only question is what’s the endgame? It’s not like they’re going to gain meaningful followers from this. This happens every 3-5 years with something Apple does and all that happens is Apple hardens even more, the little guy gets some press for a month and then disappears into the ethers

The context is a little different, with the EU looking into whether iMessage is anticompetitive and should be opened up:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-argues-imessa...

I imagine Beeper is providing exhibits A and B for any such court case, should it happen. And they get some good brand publicity along the way.

The EU has already decided the iMessage is not a gatekeeper.

They are absolutely getting followers from this. You're talking about them now, whereas hardly anyone was a week ago.

> They’re highlighting the closed nature of Apple’s messaging system more effectively than anyone has in a long time. I support them in doing that.

Every major chat app is closed though? For example, I use LINE regularly, there's no way to access that chat system through anything but LINE apps.

LINE doesn’t come pre installed on your phone and automatically enable when you message certain people, though.

Sure, it's strictly better... There's nothing requiring you use iMessage and you can send send SMS messages to iPhones if you choose to do so. It's a great way to secure SMS messages by default. That iMessage acts like SMS automatically is _good_ thing.

> I do not want to have my Apple ID login routed through a third party

Then don't use Beeper.

> I trust an established, trillion dollar company far more with that sensitive info than I do a fast-moving, eager-to-break-things startup. And the list goes on.

Thankfully, you don't necessarily have to trust them since the entire process runs on your device.

> I really don't believe they're entitled to parasite off the undocumented iMessage API.

Do you also believe it's "parasitism" for a tool manufacturer to create a screwdriver that fits another manufacturer's screw shapes? That's more or less exactly what's happening here - they made a tool that fits the existing proprietary API and interacts with it.

You do have to trust them - you have to trust both apple and beeper not to harvest your messages and personal/contact info.

And stupid analogies help nobody. Which part of your screwdriver is costing the original manufacturer money every time you turn a screw?

> Which part of your screwdriver is costing the original manufacturer money every time you turn a screw?

The true cost is so insignificant as to not matter. The normal iOS push notification spam uses orders of magnitude more resources than whatever Beeper uses, and yet Apple doesn't seem to mind those.

The screwdriver would cost a lot to a screw company that based its business model on being the only seller of compatible screwdrivers though, and that's why Apple is mad about this and trying to break it.

This is more like a 3rd party releasing a tool that unlocks a proprietary security shroud so you can plug in a wireless router to an ISP POP. You aren't authorized to unlock that shroud or rebroadcast that internet, just like Beeper Mini is not authorized by Apple to use their authorization-required iMessage service.

If I sold internet off that wireless router and the next OSP tech that gets into that POP (rightfully) unplugs it, why should I have any right to call my ISP and chew them out because people gave me money for that internet access?

> that unlocks a proprietary security

Beeper Mini is not "unlocking" anything more than a real iPhone does. It's not exploiting anything, it's following exactly the same protocol and registration flow as the real thing (that's why it works in the first place). No security is being broken here.

You could argue that it's using an (insignificant) amount of resources on Apple's side without having paid for it (since most users wouldn't have purchased an iOS device), but Apple can trivially mitigate that by offering an officially-supported registration flow that charges a reasonable fee.

You can't use iMessage without authenticating, and Apple didn't provide a way for Android devices to authenticate. Beeper Mini, while it may be using the APIs through a questionably obtained binary, is handling authentication for you so a non-approved device can become authorized to send/receive iMessage data. A non-authorized device is gaining access to an authorization-required service in a way the service provider is not happy about. If it isn't technically unlocking something Apple doesn't want unlocked, it's realistically gaining access to a restricted service. Just because I can make a key that unlocks my neighbors door doesn't mean I have the right to use it without his permission.

Did apple had any right to hijack sms, feels a bit entitled. When I first got an iphone I didn't really understood what was going on with me messages, and why they were different for some people. The interface is so subtle that most people think they are sending sms.

>building production applications on top of an undocumented API

Sort of like how Apple builds their apps?

I’m hoping Apple find a perm shut down solution. A proper iMessage client for android can’t come from a hack.

I do applaud them for getting a home run in PR for themselves

As an iPhone user I would love for them to do this so I can not communicate with these users. The green/blue bubble gives me an indication of the encryption being used, and presenting a blue bubble while the messages are being MITMed (how Beeper works) is something I want to be aware of.

Beeper Mini does not MITM messages. E2EE is maintained throughout. More so than iMessage actually, which sends all your encryption keys to Apple in the most common configuration (iCloud backup). Where's your concern about that?

That is not true. iMessage content is encrypted in iCloud with keys stored in your keychain only accessible to your devices. When you add a new device to your account it learns the keys from one of your existing devices and requires touch/face ID approval. In an "all devices lost" situation the keychain is backed up to iCloud but encrypted using a key stored in an HSM that requires authentication using things only you know but are never transmitted to Apple using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_protoco...

You have been misled. The truth is that the iMessage keys stored in iCloud are accessible to Apple unless you have enabled the non-default Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature. This is clearly documented by Apple themselves[1]. And even if you do enable it, your messages are still accessible to Apple in the iCloud backups of the people you are messaging, since they likely didn't enable a non-default feature like ADP. Defaults matter!

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

From that page: "For additional privacy and security, 14 data categories — including Health and passwords in iCloud Keychain — are end-to-end encrypted. Apple doesn't have the encryption keys for these categories, and we can't help you recover this data if you lose access to your account." The page goes on to list iMessage as always E2E. Other types of data like Calendar are only encrypted in transit and at rest so they can do server side processing.

You may also find their legal explanation a bit clearer: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/messages/

Specifically: "We designed iMessage to use end-to-end encryption, so there’s no way for Apple to decrypt the content of your conversations when they are in transit between devices. Attachments you send over iMessage (such as photos or videos) are encrypted so that no one but the sender and receiver(s) can access them."

> The page goes on to list iMessage as always E2E

It does no such thing. I'm sorry, Apple's wording is precise but quite confusing. The link again is: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

You are likely being misled by Apple's confusing naming. In the "Data categories and encryption" table, "Messages in iCloud" is listed as always end-to-end encrypted, with a footnote. However this is not telling you that all iMessage messages are always stored end-to-end encrypted. In fact "Messages in iCloud" refers to an optional feature of iMessage. The table is telling you that if you enable the "Messages in iCloud" feature, your messages are end-to-end encrypted. But wait, remember that footnote! Follow the footnote reference to find out that in fact, as I said, the end-to-end encryption is broken by iCloud backup unless the optional ADP is enabled. This line of the table is extremely misleading to say the least.

But what if you don't enable the "Messages in iCloud" feature? Then your iCloud backup simply includes your messages, which again are not end-to-end encrypted unless you enable the optional ADP. That's covered under the "iCloud Backup (including device and Messages backup)" line in the "Data categories and encryption" table. Note that in this table "In transit & on server" means "not end-to-end".

The other page you link states that messages are "encrypted" in iCloud backups; it does not state that they are end-to-end encrypted in iCloud backups, in contrast to the following sentence which specifically calls out end-to-end encryption. The page seems designed to mislead, but it is technically not incorrect because it does not specifically claim end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups. The iCloud documentation I linked, on the other hand, is confusing but definitive and unambiguous if carefully read.

Ah, I see where you are getting confused. Yes the Messages in iCloud encryption keys are escrowed with Apple in some cases. The keys are stored inside an HSM that requires a secret known by the user and not Apple.

The underlying process is documented in this webpage and the linked PDF https://support.apple.com/guide/security/escrow-security-for...

I know it is confusing to follow which specific Apple products each description applies to. That documentation you linked is specific to iCloud Keychain. It does not describe what Messages in iCloud does. When iCloud Backup is enabled without ADP the Messages in iCloud key is stored outside iCloud Keychain and not end-to-end encrypted. Don't believe me? Believe Apple:

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/security-of-icloud-...

> When iCloud Backup is turned on, the backup includes a copy of the Messages in iCloud encryption key so Apple can help the user recover their messages even if they have lost access to iCloud Keychain and their trusted devices.

From that page: "By default, the iCloud Backup service key is securely backed up to iCloud Hardware Security Modules in Apple data centers, and is part of the available-after-authentication data category." It is handled in the same way as the keychain, but the page I linked has a better technical description.

Let me put this issue to rest with a pair of quotes from Apple's guide for law enforcement:

   Q: Can Apple intercept customers’ communications pursuant to a Wiretap Order?  
   A: Apple can intercept customers’ email communications, upon receipt of a valid Wiretap Order. Apple cannot intercept customers’ iMessage or FaceTime communications as these communications are end-to-end encrypted.

and

   Apple does not receive or retain encryption keys for customer’s end-to-end encrypted data.

Remember this is in response to law enforcement (and by proxy the courts) and they don't get to rely on technicalities or word games about backups to not comply with a warrant. It just isn't possible.

The reality distortion field has got you good, man. I won't be responding further after this, but in one last vain attempt to get through to you let me point out that the part you quoted means the opposite of what you seem to be implying. The "available-after-authentication data category" is not end-to-end encrypted and Apple can read it without needing your password or your device. (This obviously must be true because much of the data in this category is available in the iCloud web interface from any web browser, and is not lost even if you use the password reset function in the web interface to regain access to the account without entering any previous password or using any Apple device). Just because HSMs are used in some way, that doesn't automatically make it end-to-end encrypted and doesn't mean Apple has no way to read it. In that sentence Apple is literally telling you that the iCloud backup key is not end-to-end encrypted.

As for the "guide for law enforcement", let me quote a different part that you conveniently ignored. Emphasis mine.

> I. The following information may be available from iCloud:

> [...]

> c. Email Content and Other iCloud Content, My Photo Stream, iCloud Photo Library, iCloud Drive, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, Safari Browsing History, Maps Search History, Messages, iOS Device Backups

> [...] iCloud content may include email, stored photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, Safari Browsing History, Maps Search History, Messages and iOS device backups. iOS device backups may include photos and videos in the Camera Roll, device settings, app data, iMessage, Business Chat, SMS, and MMS messages and voicemail. For data Apple can decrypt, Apple retains the encryption keys in its U.S. data centers. Apple does not receive or retain encryption keys for customer’s end-to-end encrypted data. iCloud content, as it exists in the customer’s account, may be provided in response to a search warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause, or customer consent.

Yes, Apple can and frequently does respond to warrants with decrypted iMessage data obtained from iCloud backups. This is well known, corroborated all over the internet, and not a secret. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/02/15/when-...

I'll bet you'll be confused by this sentence in the part that I just quoted: "Apple does not receive or retain encryption keys for customer’s end-to-end encrypted data." This is true! But iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted without ADP, nor are Messages in iCloud keys when stored in iCloud backups, as I have already conclusively shown. So it's irrelevant.

Beeper Mini does not MITM messages - it's a reverse engineering of how iMessage works, and runs entirely on-device, without putting messages thru Beeper's servers. It talks directly to Apple and pretends to be an iPhone.

You're thinking of Beeper Cloud, which does iMessage thru a Mac Mini in the cloud.

Even if it is done on device, the Beeper app is an effective MITM on what should be communications between official clients. It could have security issues, be logging everything to disk, or include a third party analytics SDK that is snarfing data for marketing. Like I said, if they want to flag the communications as being from an unofficial client I am ok with that.

> Beeper Mini does not MITM messages - it's a reverse engineering of how iMessage works, and runs entirely on-device, without putting messages thru Beeper's servers. It talks directly to Apple and pretends to be an iPhone.

It doesn't matter. It's closed source and not easily audited - they could easily just be doing a naive solution and piping every message back to themselves after it's decrypted by the client.

iMessage is also closed source, and iOS (as documented by Apple) backdoors the encryption in iMessage by including the cross-device “Messages in iCloud” endpoint iMessage sync keys in the non-e2ee iCloud Backup (as documented plainly in Apple’s own HT202303).

This means Apple can read the iCloud Backup contents, and Apple has the Messages in iCloud device endpoint keys, and Apple can decrypt the iMessages sent to or from the device in realtime.

iMessage is, in practical terms, not really e2ee.

It’s not fair to level these sorts of potential/speculative security concerns at Beeper Mini when iMessage’s first-party implementation has way worse problems that are actually documented.

> It’s not fair to level these sorts of potential/speculative security concerns at Beeper Mini when iMessage’s first-party implementation has way worse problems that are actually documented.

Apple has a proven track record of not handing over all your messages to russian and chinese intelligence, something that beeper is almost certainly doing (as their business model revolves entirely around MITMing your email and chat)

You sound like a fifth columnist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com