I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the Beeper offices over the past few weeks. I've had a hard time guessing their intent.
To some extent all of this Beeper Mini stuff seems to be almost an elaborate marketing stunt. I don't say that to diminish the impressive work of the team of anything like that, but it seems self-evident that Apple would hate this and I've been a bit surprised by the tone of the company throughout the past few weeks. The tone feels a bit like they've been surprised by Apple's response?
With all of that said, I'm kind of selfishly happy they seem to be returning their focus to Beeper Cloud. I've been a very happy user of it for a while now and I don't particularly care about the iMessage functionality.
I'm very impressed with what they've been able to achieve and overcome when taking on Apple here, and I'm really interested in where they'll go next.
The goal I see here is to get media[1] and regulator[2][3] attention on this issue, and to get Apple to clearly state their (anti-consumer) position. I'm sure Apple employees in every level and department have lost sleep over this.
I don't think their expressed surprise is legitimate, but is instead a rhetorical choice to make Apple seem unreasonable.
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/beeper-mini-brings-imessage...
[2]: https://www.threads.net/@jolingkent/post/C0-zKSPrizx
[3]: https://www.droid-life.com/2023/12/18/lawmakers-suggest-doj-...
You think Apple employees have lost sleep over this? I seriously doubt it…
Employees, no. Executives, absolutely.
Beeper put them between a rock and a hard place, where any action other than accepting Beeper would solicit regulatory action. This in fact ended up happening.
Furthermore, I bet Beeper was outright hoping for a lawsuit from Apple, which would put up a well-publicized fight over adversarial interoperability that could yield to a disastrous legal precedent not just for Apple but other companies.
Apple knows this and that's why they haven't sued them (or DMCA'd any repos).
I hate to be the one to bursts bubbles, but there’s no cause of action here under the current legislation. None.
That is unless we’re talking about Beeper being the defendant.
They have incurred criminal liability by violating the CFAA and committing computer trespass and civil liability by violating the the OS license agreement and ToS that both prohibit reverse engineering (yes that supersedes DMCA exception) not to mention the general copyright violations of reselling Apple’s IP for $2/mo (pypush isn’t without proprietary Apple code).
CCIPS would have a field day with this and if by some weird “blow up in your face fashion” they get their hands on the referral after the antitrust division of the DOJ is done shrugging at it, Beeper might get more than they bargained for.
The only thing that could actually affect Apple in this, is if legislators pass new bills. The problem however is that this would have cascading effects across the industry, if not the economy as a whole, because there’s no way to legislate this in such a way that it would only affect Apple and Apple alone.
Anything short of that makes for a fun fantasy that I’m sure some people will get off on, but a fantasy nonetheless.
This has been my gut feeling about the entire thing and I don't understand so much about:
a) How Beeper thought they had a business model here
b) How so many HN readers can justify flagrant misuse of private API's and servers as some sort of liberatory move
Apple's iMessage service is a privately owned, privately hosted, closed source protocol and always has been. You are not allowed to use it without an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac and you never have been allowed to use it otherwise. That's just... what it is. You can dislike that, you can think it's anti-competitive and you might even have a case for it, I guess we'll see, but insofar as I can see it:
iMessage is a closed source, walled garden, private protocol Apple uses to permit a higher tier of text messaging for owners of iDevices. There is no reason at all to think you're entitled to access that service without using the aforementioned devices, and there's even less reason to be surprised in the slightest that, when a company was offering services to bypass those requirements and use the API without meeting Apple's requirements, that Apple would shut that shit right down.
What about for those who do own an Apple device and thus paid the "tax" to use iMessage, but want/need to use it on unapproved devices out of convenience? The argument would be very different if Apple merely restricted the service to Apple IDs associated to a valid Apple device purchase, but that's not what they're doing. They're clearly not making the cost/resource usage argument otherwise it would be trivial for them to implement such a restriction.
Would you also apply that argument to Microsoft Office files? Microsoft would sure love it if it would be forbidden to create/edit such files in anything but Microsoft software. Would you also want LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Apple's very own Pages/Numbers/Keynote to not be able to read such files?
You'd probably be told no, that you can only access it via Apple's devices. Your options there are to access it via approved devices or use a different service. You cannot arbitrarily bypass requirements to use it how you want to use it and expect Apple to just organizationally shrug their shoulders.
That's correct. They only want their hardware and software on all ends of this traffic. That is not inherently unreasonable or anti-competitive and is likely spelled out in the terms of service.
I think it would be a bad decision on the part of Microsoft to attempt that, as the file formats are already supported by other software and artificially restricting them to only Microsoft apps would only serve to drive users to Libre/Open office, but ultimately having proprietary file formats that are crypto-graphically secured is also not without precedence and also not inherently anti-competitive. At my current employer we sell specialized software for maintaining machinery, and our files are locked right down because that's how we make our money: the ability to open, save, and utilize our files is our entire business model so you're damn right it's secured. That's not anti-competitive either: if you don't like how we do our business, you are free to use a competitor's product. What you're not free to do is crack open our software and use it anyway.
Edit: I'm being rate limited:
No, it isn't, because iMessage is not the only way to text on an iPhone. It degrades gracefully into full compliance with SMS/MMS protocols to allow it to text Androids, Blackberries, or flip phones.
No it is not, SMS/MMS is. If your iPhone is in a particularly bad data area, it will also SMS other iPhones absent it's ability to contact the iMessage service.
IT IS.
Obviously the formats have already been reverse-engineered long ago. But the world you describe and wish for, such reverse-engineering would be illegal, thus those formats would never have been reversed & implemented in third-party software.
If your client software is able to open the files then it means the key must be on the user's computer (in your application binary?) or fetched at runtime over the internet and a user can technically make their own software to obtain this key and decrypt the file.
What if the user pays for your software (and its implicit access to any online key server that serves the cryptographic keys) but instead uses their own replica that mimics this software? That's what's happening when an Apple device owner (having paid for access to iMessage) decides to use Beeper. Both you and Apple still make money in this case. Should this still be illegal?
I'm not sure what the nature of your product is, but this gets murky if your product relies on proprietary file formats or centralized services like iMessage. In this case, using a competitor would be inconvenient or might be outright impossible if everyone else is using this software and expects you to be able to open their files or interoperate with them.
Why should we allow arbitrary roadblocks to interoperability that don't accomplish anything beyond strengthening monopolies and restricting end-user choice and convenience? It would be fair if Apple argued for a reasonable fee to allow iMessage access to non-Apple-device owners but they've never made such argument.
Again, you and most critics are keeping your examples and your metaphors solely isolated to your phone, your device, your computer and this is not the case. iMessage chats are not peer-to-peer, they reside on a platform which Apple pays to host and operate. You are not just using your device, you are using their devices too via the API.
No examples put forth in your comment or other comments are grappling with this reality. The iMessage API doesn't call other Apple devices, it calls Apple's servers, and Apple owns those servers and is within their rights to dictate how they are used. Every photo sent, every live photo, video, voice message, all are hosted and archived forever until the user deletes them on Apple's servers. That in and of itself is, in my mind, justification to restrict the service's use to their own devices.
Does it matter if an Apple device user (having bought a device and paid Apple for access to iMessage servers) subsequently makes software that mimics this Apple device's interaction with the servers but runs this software on his Android device?
We'll assume it's still a single person using it, thus whether they use it on Apple or Android, the amount of messages sent shouldn't increase (they'd just be spread across the two devices) and server load should thus remain constant.
Would it be a problem? You're coming back to the idea of cost but not only are those costs negligible but Apple has never made any argument about it even though Beeper was open to paying a reasonable fee.
Should websites then also be allowed to dictate that your browser should not run an ad-blocker, should accept (and persist!) cookies and not run a VPN? I'm sure websites would indeed love that but I think we'd both agree this would be a very sad day for the internet if this became law?
I think the control stops at the protocol. Apple is welcome to change their proprietary, undocumented protocol as they see fit, but people should also be free to reverse-engineer and implement clients for it. As long as the client perfectly mimics the official one (including proving any eventual purchase, using an Apple ID associated with an Apple purchase or the serial number of an Apple device the user purchased) there should be no legal/moral reason it should be rejected.
From what I got from this news cycle, if this was the case and beeper mini just made you use your apple device's "hardware token" this would never have been an issue and apple would not have locked down their use.
The thing Apple blocked was hundreds to thousands of users using the same "hardware token" which means beeper mini, probably rightfully for UX reasons, didn't want Apple customers doing this but it would also gate a feature to only Apple device owners.
So if beeper mini had actually just used your Apple device's "hardware token" and only offered the feature to Apple device owners then likely all this never happens and Apple devices owners would in fact have the benefit.
If explicitly forbidden in the terms of service? Yes. The ToS act as your contract with Apple to make use of the service. Violation of the terms of service terminates your access to the service. If you want to stand up your own mimic'd Apple servers then you're free to do that, but you are not free, again, to change the rules set forth by Apple to use Apple's services. I don't understand why you keep returning to this question.
All sorts of websites have all sorts of requirements to use them off certain VPNs, without ad-blockers, and with cookies. Tons of websites simply stop functioning if some or any of those conditions are true for your browser.
They do.
What do you mean become law? The ability for an online service to not provide functionality if you do not concede to their requirements is so benign as to be barely worthy of note. Apple included! Apple has been "excluding" Android from iMessage since 2011!
I mean, you are! They did! And then Apple found them, and made changes to their protocol that bricked what they made. That is the most likely outcome for this and any subsequent adventures along the same path.
Because it's their platform and their right to reject it and I'm not going to rehash this point again.
But what about the companies that make the machinery that you produce software for? Shouldn't they have the right to prevent you from accessing their built hardware and force companies to get service from them directly? Obviously I don't know what your company does exactly, but it and Microsoft are both very bad examples. This is closer to a Telcom/Basic Utility law issue, imsg is used by roughly half of Americans, more than half in Europe, and is the default way to text message on this "basic utility" platform. Interoperability should be a given and it's closer to a Ma Bell situation This is starkly similar to the tweaking of antimonopoly practices that needed to be hammered out back in the 80s to break up Bell.
Is it really used by more than half in Europe? Obviously anecdotal, but I have never encountered it. Almost everyone is on WhatsApp/Telegram/FB messenger or some other non-SMS based app.
It’s the only way to get an encrypted message into a user’s iMessage inbox, and iMessage is, unchangeably, the only possible default messaging app on an iPhone—the only one you can use from Contacts and so on.
IMO if you could completely substitute WhatsApp (or whatever) for iMessage on iPhones to the point of being able to delete iMessage completely, I actually bet a lot of the handwringing over iMessage being closed would go away. It also feels to me (IANAL) like that’s part of the anticompetitiveness. Apple uses its dominance in phones to establish dominance in messaging apps. Beeper is trying to force the messaging app (iMessage) itself open, but a world where everyone is just deleting iMessage and replacing it with Beeper, as Apple is required to allow them to do, would probably be fine with them too.
True.
You kind of lost me here.
The Messages app is the default app on iPhone that handles both SMS/MMS and the iMessage protocol. So it goes without saying that it’s the only way to get get an encrypted message into a user’s “iMessage” inbox.
But it’s not the only one you can use from the Contacts app, nor is the only one you can use with Siri or the only one that pops up in the share sheet or the only one that you can use with CarPlay or the only one that you can receive notifications from or the only one that can ring your phone (if you want to count FaceTime as part of iMessage), etc, etc.
The Messages app, which supports iMessage, is the only app that can receive SMS/MMS via the cellular network. That’s pretty much the only limitation.
Other than that, there’s pretty much complete feature parity with iMessage in terms of native access, available should the third party messaging service want to implement it (and many do).
Take WhatsApp for example. WhatsApp will show up as an option in under contacts[0], WhatsApp message notifications will be read by Siri if you wear AirPods, use Siri to send messages and even set which default messaging app to use[1], have WhatsApp pop up as a suggestion in share sheets[2], and so on.
0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46422640/how-iphone-cont... this was 6 years ago, it’s now much more sleeker and you can set a default messaging service, but I couldn’t be bothered to upload a screenshot
1: https://i0.wp.com/9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/202...
2: https://wabetainfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WA13_Share...
Corporate policies aren't absolute. It doesn't matter if a provider dislikes the manner in which it's services are used if that use is found to be protected by law, which is obviously what Beeper is hoping for.
So that I better understand your position, would you feel differently if Beeper Mini was just a GitHub repo hosting the code to an unofficial 3rd party iMessage client? Why or why not?
HN as a community is made up of quite a few people who care about interoperability, the right to use our computers as we see fit, the joy of building solutions to solve problems that other people won’t solve, etc.
What is surprising to me is the growing number of comments that are defending Apple and framing the creation of an unofficial 3rd party client using terms like “flagrant misuse”.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect Apple not to fight this, but I think we need to walk back the hyperbole a bit and consider how utterly normal it is for developers to try to build their own clients when the official options either suck or are too restrictive.
I do think that trying to charge for the service was a questionable decision.
I mean, I think using that code would be a risky proposition at best that might earn you as a user the ire of Apple, and I wouldn't personally do it, but ultimately, showing people how to do a thing, or even providing the executable I don't think itself is a crime.
That said, I would also not be remotely surprised if Apple figured out how to block it's access to it's API's too. And, if there is money involved or if the breach is egregious enough in some other way, I don't think it would be altogether unexpected for the authors to find themselves in some legal hot water too, and/or for Github to receive a takedown notice.
Which I respect on the whole, but the key difference here is you are not just using your computer/smartphone, you are using Apple's computers too. That's where I find the disconnect. Each time Beeper Mini connects to those servers it is using compute resources, however infinitesimal, to perform it's functionality: functionality that is not supported, that fundamentally, Apple is now paying for. And you can justify that any way you want, but at the end of the day, that's stealing. And Apple is perfectly within their rights, IMO, to block it and if they feel they have a case, to pursue it legally afterwards.
And if you're talking about open protocols or API's, you have my support 100%! I've done some of that kind of work. But you can't just use API's that are publicly available but otherwise closed to you just because you want to. That's textbook misuse.
I think that boiling this down to something like "stealing" oversimplifies something that can't be reduced to a singular notion as such. I think there's a case to be made that it's not approved use of the various API endpoints, but there's more nuance than just theft of CPU cycles or services. For sake of argument, I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem. I have a half dozen devices that are all capable of communicating via iMessage. If I want to bring an Android device into my personal ecosystem, it doesn't seem clear ethically or morally that there is some theft occurring. I realize there are other scenarios where someone has no Apple devices, never intends to, and would be in a weaker position, having never "bought in".
How do you feel about web scrapers mining the open web and profiting from the results? Or browser automation tech that logs into websites as if there's a user at the keyboard for the purpose of building automated interactions with services that do not provide public APIs, e.g. Quicken banking connections? I'm bringing this up primarily because there is a whole ecosystem of products that exist based on brute force workarounds to a lack of public APIs. The existence of this kind of tech would equate to similar kinds of "misuse" if only judged based on whether or not the service provider intended for this use case and whether or not the client was using some publicly blessed integration channel.
I think it's reasonable to say that in some scenarios, such use could be classified as misuse. But I don't agree with a blanket statement that "using undocumented APIs is misuse".
When the subject is creating a client for the purpose of interoperability, and when the client implementation is using the underlying APIs/services for their intended use case (i.e. to provide feature parity with the 1st party client e.g. calling the API that sends a message does so for the purpose fulfilling the feature-equivalent send message functionality in the 3rd party client), it seems like this is all a lot greyer than "textbook misuse". Textbook misuse would be building an iMessage spammer bot.
CPU time, network bandwidth, storage space, the infrastructure to drive the rest, the fat, fat internet pipes to handle half of the United States' text messaging demands...
The ethics aren't the issue. The stealing isn't a problem because it's morally wrong; it's stealing because it's against the terms of use. It doesn't matter if you own 150 iPhones and 1 Android: the iPhones meet the requirements, the Android does not. And Apple has no legal, ethical, or market obligation to allow it in, they just don't. You can text the Android from the iPhone and vice versa and it will function completely correctly in both directions, with full support for the open protocols.
I think you're free to do it and the provider of the service is in turn, free to make your workdays a living hell in a never ending escalating pattern of back-and-forth modifications, or free to ignore you if they don't care. Quicken apparently doesn't care, Apple does. Those are respectively their responses and both are right depending on the organization's priorities.
Most web-scraping I see is pretty gray on ethics too though, things like the stack overflow clones that piss all over the information with ads and try and SEO themselves in front of the posts they're ripping off. Personally I think all those web operators can locate a fire to die in.
This is not undocumented, it is documented and said documentation is kept private because it is not meant for anyone's use outside of the organization.
And it could be easily made the case that this is exactly the reason why Apple demands you own Apple devices to use the iMessage service: Because it can't be automated on their own hardware, and because it can't be used by other devices/endpoints, it is much, much, much harder to spam via iMessage. In fact I'd say it's bordering on impossible unless you buy an iDevice and do it by hand, at which point, Apple can see your suspicious traffic and disconnect you from the network, possibly without you even knowing you've been.
That's not to say they couldn't secure it in a way to combat abuse, but again, why? What does Apple gain here apart from a happy nod from a userbase that is wanting to use an Android phone and an iPad? iMessage is a free service that Apple fans enjoy using. They gain nothing by making it open to people who don't use Apple devices, and that freedom for you comes at a security cost to the platform as a whole and the users in it. Apple is very clear that their priority (apart from profits) is their users, and this gains their users incredibly little while opening the platform to much wider instances of abuse that are already incredibly common.
And even aside of my views and understanding of systems integrity and API use/misuse, frankly, even just the anti-spam excuse would be enough for me to support them in this unilaterally, because as a service, iMessage is the only platform I make regular use of that I don't end up getting calls about my cars extended warranty, or messages from hot russian women who want to bang me, or people asking to buy my stupid house, or assholes telling me they've hacked my PC and are going to send videos of me jerking off to my family, or whatever the hell. And if the closed ecosystem is the only way to do that, which it kind of seems to be, then close the ecosystems I say.
I think you're missing the point GP is making, and I think it's an interesting one: There's lots of precedent for offering products and services interoperating with an "uncooperative" third party (in this case, Quicken scraping banks' websites to import their customers' transactions).
Sometimes such “forced” interoperability is illegal, sometimes it's the opposite and the a regulator or legislator recognizes it as an important public good, and very often (such as here) there is no precedent and we know absolutely nothing about the legality. We can have our educated guesses, but that's it.
I'd personally be very curious in seeing a lawsuit; it seems like important precedent to have with all the FUD going around, here and elsewhere.
You say this as if all these cases have the same fact pattern and it’s just a roll of the dice. But that’s not true and in fact there is very clear precedent that matches the facts of the case at hand.
Quicken and other scrapers are generally allowed, especially, but exclusively, when it pertains publicly accessible data.
Those kinds of cases have been tried with the main argument being the exceeding of authorization under the CFAA and copyright violations.
Courts have consistently decided that scraping doesn’t rise to the levels of computer trespass in the form of exceeding the authorization given to access the computer system and that it’s not copyright violation primarily because, to put it simply, it doesn’t exceed the authorization enough and because there’s a fair use component to it.
The most recent case law on this, which happens to involve publicly available data so isn’t fully analogue with Quicken, is hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn[0]
However, there’s also case law on clauses in EULAs and ToSs that prohibit reverse engineering (like in the case of Apple’s EULAs and ToS) that says those clauses are not only enforceable but they supersede the DMCA reverse engineering exception.
In fact the case law is even more relevant for this Beeper debacle, because it also happens to pertain to a company that reverse engineered another companies software, repackaged it to then sell it for a price, like Beeper tried to do with Beeper mini for $2/mo. That case law is still good standing case law and is Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, Inc.[1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
1: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
lol dude this wasn’t reverse engineering your lawn sprinklers to work with a raspberry pi. In effect this was always an abuse of services Apple funds and intends to be a value add for only their customers.
(Coming from someone who wishes Apple would just go ahead and release iMessage for android.)
Yes that's the point, Beeper are probably hoping Apple sues them for the reasons you describe.
This is pretty tenuous. They do have proper authorization because the keys in question are valid iMessage keys and they are being used by the same individuals those iMessage keys are allocated to. They're not trying to commit any further crime post-access.
Does it? This seems like a pretty textbook case of reverse engineering for interoperability.
Probably the case they're hoping for a lawsuit on - the degree to which Apple has legitimate claim to control use of the iMessage protocol given their market presence. In the process of the lawsuit, if Apple is found to be leveraging this protocol anti-competitively, they're in trouble.
And beyond that, Apple is a highly litigious company with great lawyers and extremely deep pockets and large incentives to defend their ownership of the messaging market.
That they've been this slow to sue Beeper probably signals enough on its own that there's probably no field day to be had.
Authorization in the legal sense of the CFAA is permission, plain and simple.
The ToS and EULA explicitly only allow using the iMessage service on Apple hardware, so any other form without explicit permission by Apple is unauthorized.
Spoofing device credentials to fool the server and gain an authentication blob definitely doesn’t fall under authorized access.
But even with legitimately attained credentials you can still be in violation. Ex employees of a corporation, finding a device with credentials on it, etc.
Whether they commit any further crime or not is irrelevant for criminal liability.
The DMCA exception only applies to interoperability for legally acquired (e.g., licensed) software.
But it doesn’t really matter but because ToS and license clauses that explicitly prohibit it overrule it, see Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
This reads like a Gish gallop with a bunch of weak arguments that border fantasy.
There is no “Apple in trouble” when it comes to iMessage and there are no signals.
I don’t know where you get this from but I suggest seeking better sources on understanding legal standards and ramifications.
0: https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F3/320/320.F3d...
This case is probably relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
In that case, breaking the ToS superceded the fact they were merely accessing public information.
The other question is whether Beeper is violating terms of service or their users are. I'm guessing Beeper is not and they instead need to be implicated for some kind of tortious interference. I would love if Apple individually started suing their own customers though.
Not sure why you think HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn is relevant here?
The facts of that case are not analogous to the matter at hand.
hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn primarily deals with scraping publicly available data and the definition of "exceeds authorized access" in the CFAA. And to a lesser degree selectively banning competitors. ToS violation was a generic argument and not the contentious part.
Meanwhile Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, Inc. is current standing law on reverse engineering clauses in ToS and EULAs, while the matter at hand has nothing to do with publicly accessible data, no exceeding of authorized access and no data scraping.
That would be Beeper, no question about it. They had to agree to the OS license agreement that prohibits reverse engineering and the ToS for Apple Media Services that also prohibit reverse engineering, before they could get to the parts that needed the reverse engineering they did.
The users didn’t do any reverse engineering, although they would be in violation of the terms that state iMessage (and other Apple services and software) is only licensed to be used on Apple devices. But that’s small fry in comparison to reverse engineering, repackaging and reselling Apple’s service without a license to do so.
Tortious interference has more to do with affecting a relationship you’re not a party to. This is more of an intentional tort, like conversion, although in this instance that would be more of a “side-dish” claim.
After all why go through that trouble and prove damages when you’ve got more suitable options with statutory damages.
This case involves a company reverse-engineering another company's software in order to make a clone product.
Do you think a case about reverse-engineering for the purpose of interoperability might have a different outcome?
That's the thing. None of this is remotely settled, the legal system is still figuring out what the book says. Various courts at various levels have affirmed and vacated all sorts of decisions. The amount of people overconfidently declaring this is an open book shut book case are living in cloud cuckoo land.
I sure as hell don't know how this will play out, and neither can anyone with any massive degree of certainty. Hacker News opinion-passive-aggressively-stated-as-fact syndrome strikes again.
The problem is that everything works through Apples private services, even if there is no DMCA things in the app. On top of that they are making business with that. Quite unfair use.
What if I use Amazon’s private APIs for running my cloud. Even share it to others and charge even money from it?
Seems legitimate to me.
There's no reasonable case for trespass under the CCFA as proper credentials are being used and there's no intent to use that access to commit further crime.
You can't infringe on intellectual property of a server by making requests to it, that doesn't make sense. Any case there would be access violations under the CCFA which are already covered above.
The only real claim would be the intellectual property of the client app in the way that it forms requests and accepts responses which this system is undoubtedly based on the reverse engineering of. The only problem with that argument is that the DMCA includes a specific exemption for interoperability as fair use.
Note that simply building a new client app doesn't necessarily constitute fair use, but in this case the client app extends to a platform that is otherwise not supported. Seems a pretty obvious case for interoperability in my eyes.
"Fair" or "unfair", what is the crime? Your intuition pump doesn't include enough details to be useful, I don't understand it.
Beeper does not talk only to Apple devices but also to other Beeper clients. There is no authorization by Apple to use their backends, and they are not sharing any revenue from their business, while Apple funds all the million messages.
CCFA covers the value gain, should be less than 5000 in one year, what I doubt is happening here.
I am not even sure if they are authorized in any point, because they violate ToS. Technically they fake authorization by preventing to be something other than they are, and not authorized by the terms and conditions.
A text message is, on the high side, 1000 bytes, so a million messages is <1GB. For reference paying $0.09/GB for bandwidth is considered a high price.
This is not a number which is literally zero, but it's a number which rounds to zero.
Your premise seems to be that they want Apple to sue them?
That point is moot now.
Not fucking likely
Keep in mind that Beeper is a company (backed by some people wealthy enough to open themselves up to litigation against Apple) and most/all of the CFAA horror stories have been against defenseless individuals, so it might play out very differently as corporations are given much more leniency.
Beeper has managed to get enough media coverage on this issue that any litigants will need to consider before bringing any suits, including attention from legislators themselves who are calling for antitrust investigation. That's no small feat and suggests Apple may not be on as solid footing as you think.
Apple would have little to do with it as CFAA violations are a criminal matter.
And I’m not very impressed by US legislators in any context, they’re politicians first and foremost, ones that are always 2-4 years away from elections.
Even in a criminal matter, wouldn't Apple's description of their systems and services matter quite a lot on how that would go?
Apple would only have to report it, similar to how you report a regular trespass and provide some evidence like logs.
Maybe, if LE is unable to connect the dots, explain how it was done so the prosecution can explain it well.
But it’s significantly less intrusive than a civil case where a lot of discovery is involved.
I think you might be right about Beeper not having any legal right to iMessage interoperability.
On the other hand though, if Apple's legal right to continue locking them out was as certain as you make it sound, wouldn't it make sense for them to file a lawsuit and set precedent for anybody walking in Beeper's footsteps?
Prefacing this by saying that I’m not privy to what, if anything, Apple is cooking up. But such a case isn’t something you cobble together in an afternoon.
In my experience a lead time for something like this is at least about a month, a week if it’s urgent and less if it’s really urgent and you seek an injunction (and then you try to flesh it out afterwards).
But ideally you want to take your time so you can discuss your strategy both internally with higher ups as well as with outside counsel, collect exhibits and draft up a solid initial filing.
Part of these discussions is also what kind of exposure you’ll have during discovery. Apple for example genuinely believes that Masimo used Apple’s internal confidential documents that Masimo received during discovery in the California trial to create the competing W1 smartwatch.
It could be that they’re weary of having to share more internal information, especially since so much has already come out during the last couple of years full of cases. Or wary that Beeper would learn more about the inner workings of iMessage.
I wouldn’t characterize it as a high priority matter with urgency either because they seem able and effective in blocking Beeper, with little loss in device sales as a result.
A lot of effort is going towards the Apple Watch issue with Masimo that prevents them from selling the newest models.
Lastly, while only of minor importance, it’s slightly more beneficial for Apple if Beeper would sue them while they keep successfully blocking Beeper than Apple suing Beeper.
All in all, it’s a lot of weighing pros and cons, even when you’re in the right. That’s one of the reason why there are so many settlements, because it often is cheaper, faster and easier than a whole trial.
Invoking the CFAA for messaging interoperability is a pretty dystopian take. If it were as open and shut as you think it is, then why didn't AOL use the CFAA against Microsoft for doing exactly what Beeper is doing in MSN Messenger?
"Should we allow a third party we have no control over to man-in-the-middle our end-to-end encrypted messaging service or not? This is a tough one!"
Nobody is MiTM'ing anything. Individuals willingly provide their credentials and only get access to their own messages - the same messages they can voluntarily take screenshots of & publish by logging into a real Apple device. Furthermore, Beeper's app runs entirely on-device with an optional cloud-hosted bridge that may not even have access to the plaintext.
It is pretty much universally frowned upon to provide your credentials to a 3rd party. Plenty of places will suspend your account if discovered you have done this. Building a product that relies on receiving user's credentials to 3rd parties is just building your company on a foundation of very dry/loose sand
Wait until you discover how Plaid works.
Plaid is also bad.
Plaid is bad, but is there another way? (OAuth and PSD2 could be, and IIRC they use that for banks that support it, but many banks don't.)
I very much am aware of how Plaid works and will not use it.
Someone recently really tried to get me to use Chime. As soon as the "must use Plaid" part came up in their onboarding, I stopped immediately. It's just a shame that I had already provided Chime so much of my information just to stop there.
To be fair, Beeper Mini operates entirely on your device, the optional cloud component is there because there's literally no other way. It's like an e-mail client, or an FTP or SSH client, or a browser. Are those considered bad now?
Plenty of services base their business on restricted interoperability and suspend your account not because of security but because they'd miss out on all the "engagement" they get from the official client. This has nothing to do with security.
In the rare time I'd make a pro-Twit...er, X comment, if the platform makes its money from ads being delivered next to the content and then 3rd party comes up with a way to provide the users an ad free experience, OF COURSE they will not be happy with that. But this isn't specific to that particular platform. Any time you assist users in circumventing a method for the platform to earn money will be viewed as hostile. If you are build a product and pay a licensing fee to offset the lost earnings, then that would be potentially viewed as less hostile even if still not 100% accepted by the platform.
This isn't rocket science.
And yet that's not the route Apple chose to take.
if you can take out the 3rd party tempting Apple users from doing this, then Apple doesn't have to lose those users. doesn't seem very strange for them to do this. however, if it's not something that Apple could control on their end, then they probably still have the "suspend user" club in their bag
Beeper's app is the MiTM. I already have to trust Apple not to abuse their privileged position re: e2e iMessage. Now I have to trust Beeper, Apple, and Apple has to continuously trust/verify Beeper. Privacy and interop are fundamentally in opposition here, and I find Beeper's PR approach regarding this to be misleading at best.
Beeper is as much of an MITM as your e-mail client is one, or your FTP client, or your SSH client, or your browser. Should those also be frowned upon? After all, they both implement a cryptographic protocol and have access to the plaintext.
You also don't have to trust Beeper because you are not obliged to use it. You are welcome to not use it (and buy an Apple device) or even fall back to SMS.
The recipient can themselves decide what level of security they want and whether they trust Beeper (but they don't need Beeper to compromise their security - they can just as well post screenshots of your E2E-encrypted messages with them, make a backup on a compromised computer or leak their Apple/iCloud credentials).
Email isn't end to end encrypted. FTP and SSH are client-server protocols whereas iMessage is client-server(s)-client.
Do you actually believe these things you're claiming, or are you arguing for the sake of contrarianism?
E-mail can be end-to-end encrypted; you can use PGP (of which there are multiple implementations, all compatible) or some other custom cryptographic protocol. Having multiple compatible implementations does in no way prevent it from being secure.
I don't understand how iMessage and FTP are different? Both have a server which mediates communication between different clients. The FTP server accepts & persists files which other clients then see and can download. The iMessage server does something similar but with messages.
Yes? I believe every person should have the right to choose which software they use to interact with services, whether it's first-party, third-party, or their own creation. I don't know nor care which browser you're using to read & reply to my comments and shouldn't have a say it in in any case - whatever happens on your machine is your own business only.
I don't understand what is so extreme about my position? It's like arguing that being able to open & create Microsoft Office files in anything but a Microsoft-approved version is heresy.
SMS can be end-to-end encrypted; you can use PGP.
If I get a new iPhone and set it up without restoring it from a backup and I have NOT opted into "Messages in iCloud" (I personally have not), then my entire iMessage history is unavailable to me on my new iPhone.
Then you also believe that forgoing E2E encryption is an acceptable tradeoff for exercising that freedom.
It's not that your position is extreme, it's that you don't seem to understand the consequences of that position.
This is a great illustration of how you can only take Apple's security claims seriously if you don't understand them.
One of the primary benefits of end to end encryption is that it can protect messages from an untrusted carrier. In other words, a proper encrypted messaging setup is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks
https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...
Please tell me more about how Beeper can't be used as a MiTM for E2E encrypted networks like Signal.
So is the issue that there's a cloud web service that interacts with some of the proprietary protocols? That definitely is another point of trust and it would seem weird that they do it that way, especially for protocols that aren't proprietary. For proprietary ones, this might be necessary to dodge intellectual property liability claims that could take the whole thing down, which is a great argument for not allowing security-critical proprietary code to be protected by law in this way, but that's just a plausible reason for them to have this problem, not a reason it doesn't matter
I appreciate you pointing out specifically what the problem was rather than just repeating that it was insecure, rather than how, and admit what I said was, as far as I now know, wrong
That said, what are the odds that Apple would accept a solution that was encrypted on-device? If this were feasible, would Apple still block the interoperation with their network, and do we agree on whether they'd be wrong to?
I think the main issue I see with iMessage that this highlights is that it's presented in a way that's deceptive to its users, and thus might give them a false sense of security in their messaging. An interoperating client on android is a band-aid for this problem at best, but it's a weird move to block it. I guess for now there's the plausible deniability of what appears to be a real issue though. The way Apple's messaging has addressed it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because they do not make clear that what you point out is the issue
That's absolutely not what's happening, and I think Beeper's response here was totally correct.
There is no encryption, at all, between iOS and Android clients if the iOS user is using iMessage. And, furthermore, my understanding is that the presence of a single Android user in a group chat means nobody gets an encrypted messaging experience.
In the past, Apple's response to this has literally been "Buy your grandmother an iPhone". How can anyone not call incredible amounts of bullshit when their response to a company that actually let, for the first time, an Android user have an encrypted conversation with an iOS user as "This is unacceptable, we can't allow this" and claim it's because Apple cares about user security???
Not enough BS chutzpah in the universe for that one.
Doubtful. Beeper has several legitimate causes of action to bring their own suit, if they really expect that outcome (and more importantly, if they have the financial resources to litigate)
Beeper wouldn't have any arguments to stand on had they initiated the lawsuit - after all, Apple is allowed to make changes to their protocol as they see fit.
However, the regular pattern we've seen is that companies use copyright and/or ToS as basis for C&D'ing (with threat of litigation) developers that produce adversarily-interoperable solutions.
If Apple did so (and Apple would've absolutely done it if Beeper wasn't a reasonably well-funded adversary), Beeper would suddenly have an argument, as well as the support of the media ("Apple sues small company for opening up iMessage to Android") and the potential to establish a legal precedent that would threaten not just Apple but the tech industry at large.
This isn’t how the law works. If it’s a valid defence, it’s a valid injunction.
I don't think neither Beeper nor Apple is doing anything illegal here. Neither has any legs to stand on for a lawsuit.
However, it's a common pattern that large companies can shut down adversarially-interoperable projects by threatening litigation against the developers. The lawsuit might be baseless but would still require upfront resources to defend; this is what these companies rely on, so they get their way without the argument ever getting into a courtroom.
If Apple brought forward such a lawsuit and Beeper actually litigated it to the end (and actually got it into a courtroom), it would risk creating a legal precedent that would enshrine adversarial interoperability as legal and make such future bullshit legal threats ineffective. That is a major risk not just for Apple but the tech industry at large.
Beeper could definitely be prosecuted by the Feds.
Aaron Swartz is probably the most famous example of someone being prosecuted using the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was merely accessing a web server without permission and wasn't even trying to turn a profit.
The question is: Would they really?
There are many instances of "adversarial interoperability" (somebody else already mentioned screen scraping of online banking for budget management tools already in a different thread), and I haven't seen the CFAA being thrown at the responsible parties all that often.
I'd be quite curious to see precedent being set here, but I doubt it'll happen. Apple has much more to lose than to gain from that:
They can play cat and mouse on the tech side as long as they want, but with all the attention and scrutiny of a lawsuit, I could see a small chance of Apple ending up having to open up their service for interoperability.
If they're willing to prosecute some kid who wasn't even trying to make a profit off of his access to a web server, why wouldn't they prosecute a company for trying to sell hacked access to someone else's servers?
Also, there have been many prosecutions under this law. Aaron's case is just the most infamous example.
This is totally different.
Beeper is trying to use an api to send message to users. They are not getting nor trying to get shell access to apple servers.
No, Beeper is using Apple's servers without authorization, in the same way that Swartz was accessing web servers without authorizaton.
Not really in the same way. And you forget that what is the most important in a prosecution is the intent.
Beeper intent is to serve both Apple customers and non Apple customers to exchange messages securely. Its goal is interoperability, not stealing, or blindly using resources it doesn't own.
The intent is to sell hacked access to somebody else's servers.
If I sell hacked access to Microsoft's Office 365 servers, I can claim to have any motivations I like. It's still a crime.
Sure. But if that were Beeper’s goal, they’d file for an injunction. Waiting for someone to sue you to set precedent isn’t a thing in civil law.
Fair enough. I'm obviously just speculating here and my knowledge of the US legal system is hearsay.
However, it seems that Beeper effectively got what they wanted (bipartisan calls for regulatory action against Apple, and lots of media coverage over the issue) without any lawyers being involved.
Media attention, yes. Policy support, no.
Wouldn't this count: https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/18/beeper-mini-broken-antitrust/ ?
It looks like a sounding document—you put it out and see who calls. If quality voters call in support, it gains momentum. If it’s crickets, or only people messaging why they like the status quo, it’s dropped.
Apple is a massive company that swats away pesky threats all the time. It's like Exxon executives losing sleep over a guy with a hose siphoning gas from the corner station. From a PR standpoint they won't dignify it with a response of any kind, other than to quietly crush it to dust.
Executives, absolutely not. Apple is so opinionated and principled. Have you seen the emails that came out during recent trials where they state so clearly how much they deserve 30% of all commerce on their devices?
They would have firmly believed that iMessage is their service that no one else has an entitlement to. If they had any involvement, it would be just one email to say to shut it down, and then never thought of it again.
As an iPhone user, I‘m pretty happy how Apple dealt with this so far. I would hate to get spammed on iMessage and knowing that my messages are rendered exactly as intended on the receiver’s side is reassuring.
Calling this anti-consumer is rather subjective.
The Apple Stockholm Syndrome is endemic on HN. The lengths people will go to support open source and open access while also vehemently defending the exact opposite behavior from Apple is astounding.
I do more than enough tinkering but my phone‘s supposed to just work.
How is your tinkering enhanced by Apple making it difficult to communicate outside of their kingdom?
I don't see Google making it easier to communicate outside of their kingdom. AFAIK Google's RCS (with their encryption extensions) is not an industry standard or available for 3rd party apps to use. Why is the expectation only on Apple to make such changes?
RCS is a spec ratified by the GSMA, the same standards body that specified things like SMS. Google tried to get Apple to do RCS, they refused, then Google tried to get a license to interop with iMessage and Apple refused again. Google has tried literally everything to try and get Apple to play ball here.
You're framing it in a nefarious way as if Apple is flat out denying it. They didn't. They would have to LOWER security in iPhones by implementing RCS because iMessages have E2EE but RCS doesn't. Which is something all you anti-Apple people seem to conveniently leave out, because you know nobody would take it seriously if you said it.
In the thread to which you replied, somebody mentioned that it’s possible to do that on top RCS, and Google already did it. If Apple wants to make their own encryption they can do it, nothing stops them. Interoperability would still be better, just like in the case of Google with other RCS solutions.
Google made a copy of iMessage since it is closed source and can talk to only to the same app. How is that better?
I don’t know what you talk about, because both can talk to whatever they want, because both support SMS.
Then there isn’t issue with iMessage either?
But you know what I mean - E2EE of Google Messages is closed solution.
Both have issues. iMessage has problems with interoperability, RCS has problems with requirement of operator support.
Google is still working on the standard and adding features to it. If their previous statement is true, they will open source it after that.
Please explain how interoperability between messaging apps is possible if two different, proprietary E2EE schemes are used atop RCS.
Google's interop "solution" with the Samsung messages app is by not using encryption. Apple has that same level of support coming to iOS next year, and has also announced plans to work with GSMA on adding standardized encryption to RCS.
I like that you put Google’s solution into apostrophes, while Apple’s current solution has the same problem, and even more. But I’m glad that we agree.
Well I guess then they should let other people interop with iMessage directly, so the E2EE can be kept.
the iPhone messages app already supports unencrypted SMS though
Sounds like Samsung users need to separately download Android Messages to get E2EE.
Quotes from https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... which is cited by Wikpedia on RCS.
the best part is that I, as a google voice user, still don't have RCS support even though it's a google product.
google implemented the exact minimum they'd need to give them a foot to cry on in the courts, and no further. and now that there is a mandate to implement RCS, they almost certainly will choose to kill google voice rather than implement it. I am already planning my exit strategy, because otherwise they'll take my phone number with it. and this is not trivial, we are talking about buying another phone (hopefully it will make it until the next-gen iphone with N3E) and paying for two lines for a couple of months. This is a pain in the ass for me.
and google has already embrace-extend-extinguished the standard - their encryption implementation is proprietary and they've refused to let anyone interop, so essentially they have put themselves as imessage 2.0 but with google as the man in the middle this time.
IMO they should also be made to open up. As should whatsapp and facebook messenger.
My suspicion is that someone like the EU made it clear to Apple that they would either interop or the EU would make them do so. They have finally relented to support RCS in the coming year.
I'm glad it's happening. RCS finally got widespread carrier adoption (minus encryption) and it's a big improvement over SMS!
Apple says they will implement RCS in 2024.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964171/apple-iphone-rc...
Without end to end encryption, because that is not part of the standard, as the grandparent comment said
You seem to be mistaken: https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/
Because this story is about Apple ?
What is good about whataboutism again ?
OP didn't say they tinkered on their phone - actually the total opposite. Read it again.
"I do more than enough tinkering but my phone‘s supposed to just work."
Anyway, you've missed the point that at the end of the day there's real-world benefits to many of the things people complain about. The FindMy lockout prevents phone theft (and has strong reductions in theft rates for these users). Serializing parts prevents thieves from stripping stolen phones and selling for parts. Having only one app store prevents large players with high network effect (tencent, facebook, etc) from demanding you install their app store to bypass the Apple's review/permissions process to spy on you (FB already got caught using dev credentials to do it anyway). Etc.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
I tend to agree, that a phone is not where I care to tinker in my life. Having it be secure and well-integrated is more important to me, I have a PC if I want to tinker. I can sign and sideload apps already if I want to try something (for 7 days), or getting an official dev credential extends this to 30 days. Android phones have a real problem with OS support lifespan and OEM parts availability, and I have no desire to install third-party ROMs and then spoof safetynet so I can run my bank app. Assuming that's even an option at all - Sony for example will wipe the camera's firmware when you unlock the bootloader, so it degrades a premium cameraphone to flip-phone levels.
"Not everyone wants to be stallman trying to figure out how to root their phone and spoof safetynet" is actually a great way to put it.
It’s not Stockholm syndrome, you incorrectly assume that every iPhone owner is some kind of mini Stallman. Most people really don’t care about all this stuff, they just want a product that works well, with minimum fuss. They don’t care about third party appstores. Sideloading, open sourcing imessage and all this linux hacker stuff.
And nonetheless there's demonstrable harm to the broader industry being caused despite their lack of care about it. Corporate misbehavior you're not consciously aware of can still cause you harm despite not being consciously aware of it.
Sure, when it comes to things like pollution, or for Apple, child labour. But the broader industry is not harmed by Apple not releasing the Messages app for Android, that’s just silly.
It doesn't if it can't reliably do basic things like sending e2ee messages to people using smartphones from other brands with its default messaging app.
is there a device that does this, or are we measuring iPhone's performance on some unrealistic standard?
Those are not contradictory viewpoints anymore being pro housing but not wanting random homeless people in your house while you’re away isn’t contradictory either.
Your messages are all screwed up when delivered to anyone not using an iPhone. Pictures and movies are basically destroyed and worthless.
The fake spam complaint is addressed in the article.
This is absolutely, unconditonally untrue. I can send a message to an Android user just fine. SMS is delivered as it is anywhere else. Pictures go through fine - my partner and I can, and do, regularly share pictures without any issue at all.
Why hyperbolize things and spread outright nonsense? To what possible end?
MMS in 2023 is not an acceptable fallback. We all have cameras capable of shooting amazing pictures and 4k movies.
The size limit destroys decent looking pictures and basically prevents movies from even being an option with how grainy they appear stretched out on our 4k screens.
This is ignoring all the other interactive elements that are just table stakes in any kind of messaging application that make SMS absolutely terrible in comparison.
If you do don’t like mms, don’t use it, there are tons of alternatives. I have half a dozen chat apps.
I experience the issues described when texting android users.
Sure and it is absolutely obvious on my side because these contacts don’t show blue messages. Take that away and the situation turns worse because now I‘d have to guess.
Edit: don’t get me wrong - I don‘t send broken messages, I just contact them on other messengers instead.
It's obvious to you but not obvious to your average iPhone user which is why I get videos with 3 pixels sent to me repeatedly. On the flip side I can mms videos with acceptable resolution just fine. It's all just to try and keep people in the system, not because it's a better user experience.
Bullshit. AT&T limits MMS videos to 1 MB, Verizon to between 1 MB and 3.5 MB depending on the sender, T-Mobile/Sprint 1 MB to 3 MB depending. If you're getting "acceptable resolution" H.264 videos they're being sent over RCS.
I’m likely wrong here but isn’t that a problem with SMS and not necessarily iMessage?
I can exchange MMS to other Android users (and it's MMS, not RCS) that aren't ridiculously compressed, so I've always assumed it was Apple.
MMS limitations stem from the carrier. They have different attachment size limits which affects how Messages will encode the content.
Are you okay with Apple not supporting RCS on their phones? As far as I can tell, that strictly worsens your experience as a user.
I’ve had iPhones for ten years and never once cared about RCS. Never even heard of it until recently, and I don’t think anyone I know has ever heard of it. It’s very very niche to care at all about it.
While "RCS" is an obscure standard nobody cares about, "being able to send reactions, high-res photos, videos, and voice memos in text messages" is a pretty universal concern. iPhone support for RCS would let iPhone users have those features in conversations with the green-messages.
I never once wished I was able to do that, the only application for that would be to communicate with android users that for some reason refuse to use whatsapp, fb messages, telegram or any of the numerous cross platform that do that. Why would anyone want to do this specifically using the sms protocol?
I was not familiar with RCS yet but according to Wikipedia, Apple will begin to support RCS in 2024.
On the other hand, this doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that it is going to be a polished experience: „Not all RCS functions defined in the standard are offered by every network and every client; only the services that are available to two communication partners are also offered in the client.“ (translated from the German Wikipedia article).
That's one of the point of the article. It's not known whether the RCS implementation of apple will be interoperable with Android's.
This is the entire fiasco distilled down to what is the root of the issue: to apple, non-apple users are not consumers. Substandard. This is the exact sentiment behind "Buy your mom an iPhone"
Messaging is by definition something that needs interop. This is why Apple (begrudgingly) supports at least SMS and MMS, because obviously you need to interop with "the others." It's also why they're being dragged kicking and screaming into RCS, which in all likelihood, they'll make equally shitty.
The fact that one company can dictate the terms of that interoperability, and make it as excruciating and inferior as possible, tells you all you need to know. But if you're the "in group" you can't even see what the issue even is.
Actually you are correct. I confused consumers and customers.
Please drink verification can and continue.
Anyone unsure what this means: it's a popular meme where the future of cloud/online gaming will degrade to cross-sell products maliciously. (Requiring the user to drink a sugary soft drink to continue using the product).
Spam is a lame excuse.
From what I have understood in the first beeper mini anonucement, iMessage spam does already exist.
Also I never received spam on any open source messaging app, even when they were interconnected with gmail and facebook (xmpp). I've never received spam from telegram either, despite clients, protocol and API being open source. I have received less than a handful of spam on Whatsapp in more than 10 years. The only platform where I have received spam in their messaging app was instagram (I left in the meantime). It would be the same for iMessage. As long as spam is bound to a phone number, spammers will be banned the minute they start sending messages to people and will never reach you.
Spam however is a big deal on SMS, which if I understand correctly end up on iMessage on Apple devices.
So basically the Apple way is the worse way to deal with spam as all end up on the same app while on most other smartphone OS spam end up in the dedicated SMS messaging app that you can just totally ignore and disable notifications for. Apple does make it worse for its user in that context.
This comment makes no sense - I'm an iPhone user and receive spam almost daily. And if it's reassuring to know that your messages are rendered correctly, Beeper Mini would only expand the number of contacts that this applies to.
How exactly is Beeper worsening the iPhone experience?
I guess I just don't understand why it makes Apple look bad here. My understanding is that Beeper reverse engineered their APIs and people expect Apple to just accept it? How is it much different from blocking a hacker who's poking around to find holes? And to be clear, I use Android and I do think the whole iMessage situation is silly. I just don't get how anyone could see an unofficial iMessage client going any differently.
Last century it was bell whining about customers connecting unauthorized equipment to their network. This century, it's apple whining about customers connecting unauthorized equipment to their apis.
Last century, were the customers connecting their equipment without paying money to Bell ?
You now need legit Apple hardware tokens to connect to the network. Those of us currently with iMessage on Beeper have paid our dues.
You've paid your dues to Apple, right? You're not just using someone else's service to connect to another service you're not paying for, right?
Yes, I own the physical hardware that the tokens are coming from. I own an (out of date, but still legit) iPhone 6, as well as a new Mac. I have paid Apple that which they would demand of any normal customer, and now I want the messages to flow to my Android phone and my Linux/Windows Desktop.
Yes. https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/3.2/Car...
So it's very different. Beeper connects to Apple's service without an agreement or payment. The issue with Bell was with paying customers. No one was asking Bell to allow people without an account with them to connect.
This is really it. It's exactly the same scenario and it would be great if it could be restated for the new networks we use today. History repeats itself.
iMessage infrastructure belongs solely to Apple. It’s a value add for people who hit their products. What is owed to people who are not their customers?
If you ran a business and provided a service to your paying customers, should you be forced to offer it gratis to anyone who wants to use it? That’s an absurd position.
You have to be an Apple customer to use Beeper Mini with iMessage. What's your point?
Yes, it is absurd. It's a great strawman.
A more realistic option would be to say that Apple has to sell access to its infrastructure via the API its own app uses, at a cost allowing some reasonable profit; this would conveniently align with other court decisions regarding anti-competitive practices by incumbent providers with strong market positions.
Pretty sure if an alternate phone networks existed, it was free to switch to them, and they had billions of users already, antitrust case against bell would have no merit.
(disclaimer: Android user, wish users had stopped bothered with iMessage already and switched to something else)
From the article:
How do they lock customers in? There are plenty of messaging apps from other tech conglomerates, that no one chose to use alternatives in the U.S. is not Apple's problem. The market spoke.
Because the market we're talking about is not the broader messaging ecosphere, it's "texting". To the US consumer, Whatsapp and the like are not texting. Frankly it makes total sense that this is the way it is in the US, because most people do not want to waste their time using a messaging app that can only message a fraction of people. They want an app that can message 100% of people. Apple Messages can do that, as can every other texting app, because the lowest common denominator technology (SMS, soon to be RCS especially once Apple ships it) is supported on every single handset. You never need to guess if a phone number is on Whatsapp or Signal or Telegram. You can just send a text to it.
This is pretty different to the international dynamic, as MMS often comes at a surcharge in many non-US markets, but here unlimited MMS has been included in most plans for a very long time, so there's not even a "hey, you are costing me money" stigma involved like there was in the bad old days decades ago.
there is no "guessing", the person giving you their number can also tell you which platform they are on (in my country 99,9% of the time it will be Whatsapp).
making an antitrust case on the basis of "I don't want to guess" seems weak, but law can always turn out counterintuitive
That... doesn't solve the problem. We don't need fragmented messaging systems, we need the world's largest company to lay down some rules and abide by them. Right now, the existence of iMessage is predicated on the poor performance of traditional SMS messaging. It wouldn't surprise me if the United States (much like Europe's antitrust council) forced Apple to standardize their proprietary alternatives. There's nothing counterintuitive about that to me.
By going out of their way to make the experience worse when texting people who don't use iMessage.
In what way?
They don't give them a blue bubble.
Messaging networks have a network effect. You have to use the same one as the people you're communicating with, so if two or more people don't want to use the same one, at least one of them is forced to use the one they don't want to.
It doesn't matter how many other networks there are when you can't get your group to use those instead.
Beeper Mini bas a net positive impact on society, contrary to hackers finding holes. The only reason it's not possible to use iMessage with Android is that it's not profitable, and it's good to remind Spoke zealots that no, Apple isn't here for you.
The point of an API is interoperability. If somebody has to reverse engineer your API, you either suck at documentation, or are up to no good.
It forces Apple to explicitly do the equivalent of Microsoft making competing word processors malfunction in DOS to pressure people to use Microsoft Word.
That's the easy one. Interoperability is legitimate, credit card fraud isn't.
I'm increasingly of the belief that the plan was to become a nuisance so that Apple buys them out, to be accompanied by an incredible journey blog post, so proud of what we've done, excited about what comes next, etc., and then quietly dissolve the whole operation.
I don't think the founders need any more money.
There are many people who "don't need any more money" but are still working day and night to make more money. For example, Satya or Tim Apple.
Judging by their current projects I'd make the argument that Brad and Eric are working day and night to make things they find cool, even if it loses money.
Have you heard Eric talk about beeper? He genuinely believes that beeper is the future of message apps. He keeps saying that beeper is the only company that is completely focused on building a messaging app, and thats why they will win. He is simply deluded.
I am a very happy customer of Beeper. It's a hard task and they're basically doing it for free. And all of my chats are more or less in one app. I even have my iMessage access back today.
So I'll say that I get where you're coming from, but also, I believe him and Brad!
That’s great for you, but none of that contradicts the fact that he is deluded. And also, they are not doing it for free, they have taken in and burnt millions of dollars of investor money.
What are you on about? You can go on Crunchbase right now and see they've only raised a seed round for $125k. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/beeper/company_finan...
Everything else came out of their pockets or from the super early customers who paid before launch, before they started offering their service for free.
In case you're unaware, these folks made Pebble. Their finances are probably fine.
They have raised $16m, and I am very aware of who they are. I have talked extensively with both Eric and Brad. They are nice guys, but Beeper is definitely based on a delusion, Beeper Mini even more so.
Some people said it was 4D chess, a brilliant marketing ploy, but after 3-4 iterations I think we can all agree that was not the case. They genuinely believed that Beeper Mini would fly.
There is nothing sinister about being deluded, as a startup founder you might say it's a prerequisite. But nonetheless, they are.
When I'm wrong I'll admit I'm wrong, Pitchbook's data does differ.
I agree that they believed in Beeper Mini being a reasonable strategy, I'm not contesting that. It definitely wasn't just marketing, they really wanted to bring iMessage to everyone.
But I don't see how Beeper (or the other parts of Beeper Mini) are a delusion. Having a close-enough interface to all of the relevant chat networks is great. It works well and is relatively sustainable, especially if you're targeting the least common denominator of features plus a couple additional things.
iMessage isn't the reason I use Beeper. It's a very cool feature, but I paid for Beeper before I figured out how to register my phone number with iMessage, and I'd still have done so even if I never used iMessage at all.
And yet, people like Musk and Bezos keep trying to make more money.
Musk, and probably Bezos, have goals that were previously only attainable by nation-states, which require nation-state-sized budgets.
A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan discusses this a bit, not Musk and Bezos, but the cost of exploring space and his hope that space exploration was finally what would bring various nation states and humanity together. The irony is not lost on me that instead of bringing humanity and democracy to space, we instead brought back kings.
Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but I feel like humanity is a long way from our collective advancements being used for altruism. Space represents new territory to conquer. Smartphones aren't being used as the windows into global enlightenment, but more so as a means to spread hate and misinformation in manners that benefit the powers that be. Any of these things are relatively agnostic and still hold promise for the optimistic, but humanity needs a lot of growth for those dreams to be realized.
There’s less people in poverty than there ever has been in human history. Even with ongoing global conflicts, the world is still existing in one of the most peaceful times in human history. Could we do better? Of course. Are some people left out? Definitely. Humans as a whole are relatively young however, and we’re still figuring things out.
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”
~ Carl Sagan
What is there to conquer in infinity..? The idea that space is new territory to conquer is more of a reflection of the state of humanity than actual reality.
This is true, that said, smartphones have also empowered people to learn new languages, collaborate on Wikipedia, and share lives across space and time. It’s easy to get lost in the noise of everything humanity does wrong. That’s only because no one is talking about what humanity does right.
It is my hope that humanity never stops growing and learning how to better itself.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
~ William Gibson (The Economist, December 4, 2003)
Does Apple?
Why would Apple buy them? What value could they provide to Apple?
Not being a nuisance.
I guess beeper users will wear out and give up before Apple need to buy them.
That is a fantasy.
For those who missed the incredible journey reference: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
They were selling a service for $2/month. Did everyone forget that? For essentially a tosser app that could quickly be a pretty lucrative amount of money.
There is some white knight narrative that has suddenly arisen that isn't based in reality. That these guys are freedom fighters that just wanted to take on Goliath. In reality they're capitalists who saw a way to make money off of a proof of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they could shame the target into not taking obvious actions to squash them.
What does tosser app mean in this context?
It is a simple app, and is yet another of literally thousands of chat apps. The single compelling reason why it would be in a position of charging fees is purely because it backdoored into Apple services (which Apple of course bears the burden of), using Apple device identifiers to access it. The value they were trying to convert to cash was Apple's.
But... It wasn't simple. No other app has been able to create the bridge they created. We all saw their initial trending HW post and the impressive technical breakdown.
If it were simple many others would have done this by now.
Would they? Not only was it obviously going to get crushed by Apple (this isn't some 20/20 hindsight -- when they first announced this I stated exactly what they were doing and exactly the reasons why it would be easily squashed), it's actually completely illegal!. Like if Apple were so inclined they could actually demand legal action of the criminal kind. Apple has been incredibly soft-handed about this whole thing.
Incredibly early user of beeper here. I actually didn't use it for iMessage at all. The Matrix Bridge system they used (bridge slack, discord, sms, etc) to allow all of my communications into a single app had real complexity. My biggest concern was the front end -- the simpler part of the app -- wasn't very good. The back end had complexity if you ignore the iMessage bridge.
I didn't realize making an app like beeper was so simple, can you recommend your favorite alternative? The other 3rd party apps I've tried to use for FB tend to have lots of problems (eg missing/delayed notifications, rendering issues).
I could just as easily claim there is more of a "they are just capitalists trying to sell a white knight narrative" narrative than an actual white knight narrative.
They're a smaller business that wants to make money, but Apple doesn't want to play fair. I agree with this part of their blog:
“Apple is within their rights to run iMessage how they see fit”
This might be true if Apple was a small company. But they aren’t. They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market, and lock customers into using Apple’s official app for texting (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way people communicate). Large companies that dominate their industry must follow a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to innovation. We are not experts in antitrust law, but Apple’s actions have already caught the attention of US Congress and the Department of Justice.
Yes, there is only the official app to send sms. Do you think anyone cares? Have you ever heard anyone yearn for a third party app to send texts?
Look up some alternative SMS clients on the Play Store and you will see there is a market for it. People on forums have been also complaining about there being no way to do this with RCS.
Sure, there are all kinds of people in the world, but would that group represent more or leas than 1% of users?
Look up some alternative SMS clients on the Play Store and you will see there is a market for it. People on forums have been also complaining about there being no way to do this with RCS.
Must? You're really going to need to provide some actual citations there. Tortured interpretations of anti-trust laws do not count.
They stopped charging almost immediately, as soon as the iMessage functionality was broken, and never started again. This is a strawman.
They literally released this as a commercial service for $2/month. That they removed fees temporarily while it was completely broken does not make my statement of absolute, verifiable, incontestable fact a "strawman".
History isn't rewritten because they lost.
Fair enough. I don’t disagree they saw it as a way to make some money.
I took your comment to imply that as a result of charging, their goal in fighting Apple was to “get back to charging $2/mo” which is a pretty surface-level statement. Their goal is to get iMessage on Android phones. I honestly doubt they’d care if they were the ones who eventually did it, as the main thing they eventually plan on making money off of is Beeper, not Beeper Mini.
If this was any where near the truth, they would not have started charging at all. It would have been released as a free app to gain traction, and then start charging money for it. They fact that they started charging on such a slippery app shows it was a cash grab
Based on my reading of their post where they announced it was free…
… and based on my reading of their jobs page …
… and the affirmation of that on their homepage …
… I’m not sure where the narrative that their goal was anything other than to make money is coming from. They’re a business with a potentially useful product and full-time salaried employees.
The "target" here is also literally the largest company in the world, whose executives have been discussing since 2013 about how to lock families into an iPhone monopoly that costs thousands of dollars a year by restricting iMessage [1].
There are no white knights here (it's all a money game), but Beeper's stance isn't as one-sided and ridiculous as you're making it out to be.
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[1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609/ph...
I said that Beeper saw a business opportunity to make money. This is without question. You're posing a false dichotomy that therefore I'm somehow sainting Apple or something, which simply isn't true: Apple absolutely is out to make money (humorously a couple of days ago I called Apple one of the greediest companies -- in a bad way -- ever, and my comment was flagged which...rofl), and absolutely no one doubts that. No one is claiming that Apple are the white knights in this or any other situation.
They should do Google Messages next. Isn't there still not an API to integrate third party chat into Google's walled RCS garden?
Apple says they will implement RCS in 2024.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/
The article addresses this.
Some smoothly disingenuous rhetoric going on there.
WRT FaceTime - turns out video calling had patent encumbrances. Apple was sued for massive amounts as soon as they rolled out FaceTime on their own devices. The VirNetX saga just wrapped up earlier this year. [0]
And Apple has opened up their Find My Network. [1] Other trackers, such as Chipolo, are making use of it. [2] Also, Apple and Google just today published the latest revision of a cross-platform spec to detect unwanted location trackers regardless of which network you’re using. [3]
[0] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/apple-wins-reversal-of-...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apples-find-my-networ...
[2] https://chipolo.net/en-us/products/category/chipolo-spot
[3] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-detecting-unwanted-lo...
Beeper Cloud has had google messages support since at least September.
Is that an official API, or a hacked implementation like their iMessage client?
I guess it is great marketing. I didn't even know they had a bleeper cloud offering.
Does their behaviour with beeper mini instill great confidence? Will you trust them with your credentials to all your chat apps?
Imagine if they knew for some time the cutoff date from Apple so they released mini just before to ride the PR tsunami, That would be nice.
They say in the post that they will focus on their own chat app going forward. This is their last attempt at making Beeper work.
Totally agree, it has been fun to follow, but I really don't hope that this stunt destroys for the awesome product Beeper Cloud is. As an European user I couldn't care less about blue and green bubbles, all of my communication goes through FB messenger or Snap, only exception is the occasional SMS from old relatives without other platforms.
> The tone feels a bit like they've been surprised by Apple's response?
What they say and how they really feel aren't necessarily the same thing