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Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

Eric's not an idiot, so I'm thoroughly confused by what he was hoping to accomplish, here.

Setting the ball in motion to set a precedent I'm guessing.

Everything that has transpired over the last few weeks strengthens the narrative for an anti trust case and hopefully makes an illustrative case in favour for adversarial interop (w.r.t megacorps).

That itself protects an untold amount of OSS projects that have been victims to billion dollar megacorp legal threats and bullying.

Idk how these things work but I hope Eric and the beeper team take Apple to the cleaners and get enough to retire a thousand times over.

I doubt Beeper will ever see any legal action (or settlement for that matter) directly with Apple from this. I do think it will be a strongly referenced bullet point as regulators look towards something like the DMA for the US or other corps challenge Apple though.

That is my thought as well. This was a winning scenario for Beeper because either the iMessage integration kept working, or Apple forced its own hand on very directly locking down messaging to the devices it sells.

> or Apple forced its own hand on very directly locking down messaging to the devices it sells

But that’s not really any different? Even if they hadn’t technically implemented it that way that is the intended way the service is supposed to be used. Locked to Apple devices.

It's a bit like being in an HOA where you think the president would tell you to take your specific flag down vs putting up a flag and having them tell you to take it down. Regardless of whether the flag is actually right or wrong in the law (or should/shouldn't be) nobody can take the HOA to court about it because they think the HOA intends for such a flag to be taken down... but they can easily bring it up if it's something the HOA has explicitly done and explicitly messaged about.

I don’t understand this at all. Messaging is not locked down on Apple devices. You can message with android just fine via sms, and you can install dozens of other messaging solutions.

Why does having specific Apple only features outside of the core message set mean it’s now locked down?

There is no judge on the planet who will take the position that a 3rd party is allowed to circumvent a service’s security controls and TOS to build a monetized product using a backend that neither they nor their users pay for.

Absolutely zero chance.

Imagine reverse engineering AWS keys, using AWS services for free, reselling them, and then trying to sue AWS when they fix the security hole.

Maybe lack of imagination?

There are handsomely VC funded successful startups that do exactly this in banking, for example Teller:

https://jobs.lever.co/teller/ebf503af-bb82-49fb-97bd-6d9bcbb...

This is not “exactly this.”

Teller is giving users additional access modalities to services they’re already separately “paying for.” The directly analogous format would be if Teller was allowing you to store your money at Bank of America but Teller was preventing BOA from collecting revenue from you.

No. It's like if teller allowed you to make a boa account as well. As if this one small feature makes it some egregious criminal activity.

Many beeper mini users already have apple devices + Eric in his post said he's willing to pay some reasonable fee.

Nobody pays for iMessage directly.

Nobody pays for bank accounts directly either.

Oh Eric said he’s willing to pay? Guess that counts as a deal then!

However, there is every chance that circumventing a service's security controls is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

That's something I've been wondering about myself. People have run afoul of the CFAA with less egregious actions than these. I guess the Beeper guys talked to their lawyer at least, before taking this course of action.

This type of project is protected from CFAA by Van Buren. AFAIK the only untested precedent is ToS violation.

People have been complaining about the defacto Apple "phone class" they have created with messaging for years.

This threw it back up into the light a little more by not just complaining but trying to do something about it.

someone had to do it. i thank him for his service.

Do what?

Break into iMessage to free Android users from the oppression of… I don’t know.

This has all been weirdly performative.

Call Apple's bullshit and prove that there is technically no reason why iMessage can't work on Android. The only reason it doesn't work is because Apple doesn't want it to, not that it's technically impossible or has security concerns.

Considering the media coverage and that there are now bipartisan calls for an antitrust investigation I think they've succeeded very well.

> The only reason it doesn't work is because Apple doesn't want it to

How many people thought otherwise? If they thought about it at all? I feel like HN users vastly overestimate the amount of thought the average user puts into things like this.

I can assure you the vast majority thought that the problem was with Android phones.

Apple really pushes the snake-oil that locking out Beeper is because of security and not vendor lock-in & business interests. They wouldn't do so if nobody believed it.

Among non-technical lay people, the perception is Android can't interoperate with iPhones due to inferior technology. (For example, people call low resolution photos android photos. They don't realize photos sent over sms were downscaled by the protocol, they assume it was taken in that low resolution format to begin with)

Suddenly being able to text androids without issue made it clear to everyone it's a policy-limitation, not a technological limitation

I suspect they were hoping it would be harder for Apple to close the workarounds, so they'd have a unique position in the marketplace for a little while longer than they did.

Probably decent marketing... how many people didn't know beeper existed before this?

I think this whole saga is stupid, but you’re absolutely right. I had never heard of them before.

Maybe they did get some users out of this who will use the non-iMessage parts of the service that already existed.

However while I now know who they are might view of them is also tainted a bit because they made (what I see as) bad decisions. So at least in my case I’m not sure it’s that beneficial to them.

This is a bad precedent giving ammunition for the next antitrust lawsuits so I guess that could be one of the goals.

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