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...)
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/10/senator-warren-calls-out-a...
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That aside, it seems like an easy way around that would just be for Apple to adopt RCS in addition to iMessage.
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.
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.
Unlike Apple, the government has to meet the people where they are.
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.
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.
Let's see... abortion, school shootings, jobs, climate change, blue bubbles...?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple really needs to get that RCS implementation rolled out though. Wonder if it's still going to be green bubbles or something else.
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.
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).