Serious questions, I haven’t been paying enough attention to all of this to know the answers:
Looking at Beeper’s website, I can see
> We currently offer a 7 day free trial, afterwards there is a $1.99 per month subscription.
I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it, without at least paying for the infrastructure they’re using. Why is Apple expected to accept it?
Isn’t the reverse-engineering against Apple ToS anyway? As far as I know, it’s a pretty standard clause in basically every company’s ToS. How is Beeper supposed to "win" here, short of that sort of ToS clause being declared unenforceable?
“Short of that sort of clause being declared unenforceable” is not an insurmountable barrier. Clauses are deemed unenforceable all the time.
Reverse engineering is not a problem.
Shutting down a competitor business draws scrutiny. Beeper’s strategy is not clean, but apple’s behavior in this space could be framed as anti competitive to begin with. They’re probably hoping so for some kind of concession that will force apple to open and provide a way for beeper to operate that is more above the table.
Huh? Of course it matters whether they are a viable company, at least according to many HN readers who upvoted this post to the front page and engaged in comments.
Viability only. matters to investors and anyone paying 1.99(which I believe Beeper has postponed till it stabilize). Currentl story lawmakers want DOJ to investigate.
Which illegal barrier are you talking about? The App Store may be illegal, but on what grounds would there be anything illegal about preventing other companies from using your servers?
And note that they are not even discouraging third-party chat apps, on the contrary, they actively promote the likes of whatsapp, signal, telegram etc.
This is the equivalent of a "When did you stop beating your wife" type of question. It puts words in my mouth. There's nothing remotely illegal about Apple operating iMessage. It takes even greater leaps to jump from that to then it somehow legally justifying the trespass...
>If there were nothing remotely illegal about this then there would not be the current situation.
Ah, guilty before being charged. Cool! If that's your approach, why even have the investigation? Why not just stick with the accusation if its sufficient to reflect Apple's culpability?
>Your premise of wife beating is unfounded and closer to what you’re accusing ironically imo.
I didn't accuse you of anything. You seem a bit confused so try to follow here: I'm literally just explaining to you that when someone goes and uses another other person's property without permission, its prima facie trespass. You can make a defense that it was "just", but that's an affirmative defense.
> Ah, guilty before being charged. Cool! If that's your approach, why even have the investigation? Why not just stick with the accusation if its sufficient to reflect Apple's culpability?
There’s no ambiguity over what Apple did. The question is whether it violates the law. Acknowledging that there is legal theory to suggest it’s illegal has nothing to do with “guilty before proven innocent” and it is a complete straw man to suggest that anyone is discussing throwing out the need for trials altogether
There's many legal theories for many things, whether or not they have merit is something entirely different. I wouldn't call a random congressperson's grandstanding a legal theory, but I am a lawyer.
Jurisprudence does not only establish that clauses that prohibit reverse engineering are enforceable, it clearly establishes that those clauses supersede the reverse engineering exception in the DMCA, see Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
And both Apple’s OS licenses and Apple’s MediaToS, both of which require agreement before being able to reach the parts that were reverse engineered, explicitly prohibit reverse engineering.
But the civil liability isn’t the most interesting part of this story.
The interesting part is that this referral to the DOJ can blow up in Beeper’s face in a violent way.
While there’s nothing the antitrust division of the DOJ can do here no matter how badly the congressional critters misrepresent the situation in the letter, CCIPS can definitely pursue computer trespass charges as defined in the CFAA due to Beeper’s unauthorized access of Apple’s servers.
And they write:
> Going forward, Cerulean Studios is committed to maintaining interoperability across all major IM networks. We will continue to work hard and pursue the necessary avenues to keep this a reality. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to all of you out there supporting us!
We’ve allowed third-party ecosystems to develop elsewhere before. And it’s been said before that the cost to Apple is minimal if you exclude the lock-in effect. Amortized across a global base, running a chat network is barely $1/year/user for the average case is what I’ve seen before on HN.
I’m not saying using a third-party client needs to be completely free - paying Apple in either attention or money makes some sense. But considering that many folks with Android phones might also have Mac laptops or subscribe to Apple Music, it doesn’t seem impossible that Apple could allow for interoperability across devices and clients and that lawmakers could encourage this.
Money paid to Apple isn’t the issue. There have been lots of analogies, and I apologise because I’m going to add to that!
Imagine a music festival. The only way to get tickets is to buy direct from the venue. For years, people have been cutting holes in the fence and allowing people through. While the venue would do their best to close the bigger holes, they’d leave smaller gaps and turn a blind eye. One year, someone starts to advertise the hole they’ve made and suggest a fee for the hole. The venue now cracks down on all holes. The hole-maker complains about this, publicly, and urges government to step in. This is, in my opinion, analogous to the Beeper situation. They know what they are doing is wrong, but are playing dumb.
Trillian, Pidgin et al. really came about after AIM opened up. Apple actually signed a deal with AOL to allow them to include AIM with iChat.
So in this analogy, to be clear, the product that apple is supposedly selling access to here is "Sending secure messages to your friends"
When someone exchanges phone numbers with a friend, you might not even know what kind of phone they have. Apple phones will send E2E iMessages by default to other Apple phones, and insecure SMS to non-Apple phones, and just shows this to you as "messages." This service only indicates this difference in connection status through a color change
This is a confusing choice, and most users don't even know the technical details, but the end result of it is that they might have extremely mixed information about how secure their text messages are, especially if they don't know in advance what kind of phone the other person has
I think we've seen about 15 years of tech companies trying to assert various kinds of control up to and including ownership over people's social graphs in order to lock them in to various services, and that it's clear some regulation is necessary to prevent this kind of play. Your analogy doesn't make sense because what Apple is trying to put a fence around is not something that it should be legal for them to in the first place
Happy to accept that criticism, it's fair. I'm sorry for pilling on more poor analogies...
> Apple is trying to put a fence around is not something that it should be legal for them to in the first place
Why?
When iMessage was released, it was done so as covenience feature for Apple users on iOS (so iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) to communicate with other Apple users. iMessage on OS X came later.
iPhone 4S comes with iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, which includes over 200 new features including Notification Center, an innovative way to easily view and manage notifications in one place without interruption and iMessage™, a new messaging service that lets you easily send text messages, photos and videos between all iOS 5 users. iOS 5 will also be available as a free software update for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS customers allowing them to experience these amazing new features.
Some have used the emails from the Epic trial discovery to illustrate that Apple whant to keep iMessage as "lock-in" for iPhone. I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice. Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps. Preventing moving numbers and and therefore blocking the ability to change messaging providers is wrong, and Apple were rightly called out on this and have fixed that.
Should a user be able to choose the default messaging app? Yes. I see no rational argument against, except perhaps for security, but that can be dealt with and limiting liability through sensible terms is always an option.
I'm on the fence as to whether they should open it up to Android users and provide a client. I certainly don't think they should be forced or coerced, especially given that the market is so competative oustide of the US (the 3rd largest market globally, but dwarfed by the first two [CN, APAC] and only marginably larger than the next two (West Europe, Latin America), RCS fallback will solve most of the issues mentioned elsewhere. The color of bubble is not one, and nor should it be. It's an American cultural phenomena. There absolutely should be an easy way to defferentiate which service a message originates from. Note: green has never ment Android.
> When iMessage was released, it was done so as covenience feature for Apple users on iOS (so iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) to communicate with other Apple users. iMessage on OS X came later.
Irrelevant. Apple and iMessage today are not what Apple and iMessage were when iMessage was released. When a company gets large enough, they are held to a different standard. And for good reason. Waiting for Apple to become a monopoly before enforcing competition and consumer protection laws is, for lack of a better word, stupid. Apple is at risk of becoming a monopoly in this space and it needs to be dealt with before it's too late.
> I'd suggest that the very fact that they had the discussion shows that the intention was never to be a multiplatform messaging client. They don't compete in that market. I also see anything inherently wrong with having sticky features which go to differentiating a product to make churning, or steering sales decisions a harder choice.
Market competition isn’t the only issue here. Consumer protection is as well. Apple is doing something called “tying”. iPhones and Macs are the tied product and iMessage is the tying product (iMessage being free is irrelevant, it is nonetheless a product and it is a product that can operate independently from the tied product as has been established by Beeper). Tying needn’t affect all consumers, it just needs to be shown that there is a demand for the tying product sans the tied product. It also doesn’t need to be shown that Apple has the majority of the market. There are examples of illegal tying where the company doing it has a lower, but not insignificant, market share.
Beeper shows that there is a demand for iMessage independent of an iPhone. iMessage is now (what it was is irrelevant) a tying product. There is demand for communicating between users utilizing the iMessage platform without having to use an iPhone or another of Apple's tied products (that some Apple users want iMessage exclusivity is irrelevant).
> Ultimately, there are choices and kids can have Android handsets and communicate securely and for free with multiple differnt apps.
It’s also disingenuous to try to differentiate the market while simultaneously suggesting alternatives that supposedly replace the tying product. Either iMessage is in its own market or it's not. But even that doesn't matter, because it is actually up to the consumer to decide what the market is. The truth is that iMessage is in the same market as other messaging apps, but is being unfairly used as a tying product.
Of course Apple doesn't want iMessage to be cross-platform, but consumers don't want to be forced to choose what they see as an inferior tied product (regardless of Apple fans' beliefs about Apple's superiority, Apple fans don't represent all consumers, only some of them). To keep the market fair for consumers, Apple has to be held to a higher standard, which means unbundling iMessage and making it available on non-Apple devices or opening the protocol to third parties.
It's clear that iMessage is a feature specifically tailored for Apple-to-Apple device communication, and it remains that Apple continue to see it as such. The size of Apple as a company, in this context, seems less pertinent.
Although not mentioned, I believe that you're alluding to the Microsoft and Internet Explorer case in 2001, which does raise an intriguing point. Although there are parallels, the situations are not exactly the same. Microsoft's strategy involved using its Windows licenses to influence the web browser market, notably by limiting Netscape Navigator's presence. In contrast, Apple does not appear to be exerting similar market force in the instant messaging sector. They haven't restricted alternative messaging platforms. For instance, in the US, there are approximately 135 million iPhone users and about 187 million Facebook Messenger users. This, along with the 40 million WhatsApp users, suggests that Meta might be more dominant in instant messaging to the point of having a Monopoly.
While the Microsoft Corp. v. United States case in 2001 significantly altered the legal landscape, the legality of tying arrangements in the US is still based on several factors, such as market power, coercion, competition in the tied product market, and overall impact on interstate commerce. The evaluation of these factors has evolved from a strict illegal standard to a more nuanced "rule of reason" analysis.
Considering these factors, it's challenging to view Apple's approach to iMessage as harmful to non-Apple customers. The absence of coercion, the presence of healthy competition, and adherence to existing standards are notable. Declaring iMessage as a tying product is, at this stage, more of an opinion than a confirmed fact.
Your argument hinges on the assumption that iMessage is a dominant tying service. However, statistical evidence suggests a competitive instant messaging market exists on iOS and more broadly. To establish iMessage as a dominant force, it would need to be demonstrated that there is a lack of competition in instant messaging, which current evidence does not support.
I don't think you need a tying argument at all. This is a deceptive business practice and harms apple's customers moreso than non-apple customers. Apple users who expect their text messages to be secure because of how imessage has been advertised to them send insecure messages in the same application based on a difference between people they might not even know about upon receiving their phone number (or that may change if that person switches phones), and the only argument I've seen people make is that Apple wants this to be some "exclusive" service, and this Beeper case has made it clear that they're willing to try to enforce this in the face of someone else interoperating with their protocol
Our default position on businesses, especially large ones, should not be that any agreement or restriction they want to hold their customers to is legal, but even setting that aside, this is deceptive advertising that harms their own customers
1. Apple makes it clear that this indicates whether someone has an iPhone. This does not make clear to non-technical users that this indicates that you are sending a different type of less-secure message to these users.
2. Even if Apple made this clear, it still creates a pretty insecure environment in practice. If you don't know ahead of time what phone someone you're talking to has, you must receive a message from someone before you can know whether messages you have sent them are secure, in the same chat application you use to send secure messages
>It's clear that iMessage is a feature specifically tailored for Apple-to-Apple device communication, and it remains that Apple continue to see it as such. The size of Apple as a company, in this context, seems less pertinent.
It's important here because iPhones are the dominant device by market share in the US. Their share is something like 57%.
>I believe that you're alluding to the Microsoft and Internet Explorer case in 2001
I'm talking about the strategy of tying in general. The tying Apple is doing with iMessage is not the same as Microsoft III.
>In contrast, Apple does not appear to be exerting similar market force in the instant messaging sector. They haven't restricted alternative messaging platforms.
Again, iMessage is the tying product, iPhones are the tied product. Apple is using iMessage to maintain its dominance in the smartphone market. They are restricting the smartphone market by coercing consumers with the threat of hindering communication (i.e. making the experience worse for both parties) within their social network by cutting off access to iMessage. In other words, if I switch back to Android, I lose access to the group chats (through exclusion) and can no longer share or receive media in high resolution. I am then forced into trying to convince a large social network (some of whom I am only acquainted with) to use some other messaging platform.
>For instance, in the US, there are approximately 135 million iPhone users and about 187 million Facebook Messenger users. This, along with the 40 million WhatsApp users, suggests that Meta might be more dominant in instant messaging to the point of having a Monopoly.
Just one point, because I've already addressed this, but "you can use Messenger/WhatsApp/etc" is the equivalent of "a gay man can get married here, he just needs to marry a woman!" Getting significantly everyone in an iMessage-dominant social network to switch to a cross-platform messaging application is very difficult, if not impossible, which is why this is an issue at all.
>Your argument hinges on the assumption that iMessage is a dominant tying service.
No, my argument relies on the fact that iPhones are a dominant tied good through which one is coerced into buying to be able to access iMessage the tying good. No assumptions are needed, the market data reflect this. This isn't about iMessage dominance, this is about iPhone dominance.
There's no violation of antitrust laws here. Apple does not have a monopoly on messaging services and has taken no actions which prevent their competitors from existing or thriving. All competing messaging services are available in the App Store, and internationally, the majority of users chose them over iMessage.
> Shutting down a competitor business draws scrutiny.
Let's say I own a lemon orchid and it's known around the area people are welcome to come pick a few as they want, but we primarily sell wholesale. One day, John down the road (who doesn't own an orchid$ decides he wants to sell lemons wholesale too. He proceeds to recruit pickers and they start combing through my open orchid stripping trees to sell.
As a reaction to this behaviour - which I clearly didn't intend for, but did technically allow - am I being anti-competitive? Would you classify this as "shutting down a competitors business"?
Apple isn't preventing competition. There are numerous messaging apps available on iPhone. They are preventing non-customers from using a service provided for customers only.
To make a bad analogy, it is like Jack's Auto Repair selling a service that enables Honda owners to use BMW service centers. And then Accord owners expecting to go to their nearby BMW dealer and get warranty repairs to their Honda.
Apple has a simple solution here. Identify how many unique users are coming to the iMessasge service via Beeper's app and send Beeper a bill for one iPhone 15 Max Pro for each user.
I hope that any attempt Beeper made to negotiate authorized access is made public in an investigation, and Apple’s control of the default secure messaging service baked into all iOS telco customer devices is scrutinized.
If they weren’t concerned about competition, we would have seen iMessage on Android a decade ago.
If they wanted to provide iPhone users a default secure way of messaging competitor hardware, they would have pursued an open alternative to SMS before they faced antitrust investigations.
I hope cell providers get the option to bundle a secure messaging service that's compatible with all of their customer's devices.
Right now a Verizon iPhone customer can't securely send a message to a Verizon Android customer without forcing their customer to download a third-party app and agree to its terms, and the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers.
Vaguely reminds me a little bit of the web browser antitrust days. Regulators will catch up soon. At least Apple is planning to adopt RCS finally, even though they missed their chance to be part of the formation of the standard.
Edit: Or Apple could release iMessage for Android and for web.
If 1 and 2 happen, that might motivate Apple to implement a secure open standard that bypasses the carrier solution to "all of our customers can securely text each other with just their phone number." Apple will call it an innovation and sell the hell out of it.
> the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers
They can just not sell those devices? I find this argument pretty twisted. It’s also based on a false premise. Verizon is also free to implement whatever they want on top of their @vtext.com endpoint.
If they stopped selling iPhones (lol), what would they do for all of their current iPhone customers? Boot them off until they trade-in for an Android phone?
How is the @vtext.com endpoint any more secure than MMS? Default, secure transfer using your carrier phone number through the built-in messaging app on Verizon iOS devices is restricted only to Apple's servers, and the recipients MUST be Apple users.
Nonsense. Apple does nothing to prevent you from installing WhatsApp, Signal, FB Messenger, or any one of dozens of other messaging services which also don’t allow third-party interop with their protocols!
There’s nothing anticompetitive or even out of the ordinary going on here. You can install competitive services on an iPhone at any time.
WhatsApp, Signal and FB Messenger are all available with feature parity on both iOS and Android devices. Beeper is able to sell subscriptions by reverse engineering entirely due to this not being the case with iMessage.
Considering that Apple has opened up third-party apps to do autofill for things like passwords (I autofill password fields from Bitwarden on iOS all the time), this seems a lot less like an advantage they're gating to their app and more like a potential feature they just haven't shipped yet because it has no use case at the moment (since right now nobody sends 2FA codes over any platform other than SMS). If it became widespread to use WhatsApp, Signal etc. for sending 2FA codes, I'm pretty sure Apple would add it.
There's not really much other system integration with iMessage either, other than some Siri stuff I doubt sees much use. It's surprisingly disconnected from the rest of the operating system.
Apple also does nothing to warn you about the insecure nature of sending sensitive messages via the SMS/MMS protocol the default messaging app uses to reach non-Apple hardware.
Yes I did. You'll notice Apple doesn't have any IaaS offerings on their product pages. So they're in no way a public cloud and I wouldn't expect to use any of their services as if they were.
The two legal factors discussed during the first round of reporting were:
- The explicit carve-out of reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in the DMCA
- The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
What's not clear to me is how relevant the DMCA is here, and/or if a ToS can supersede these laws.
> I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it
There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
I'm not arguing that Apple is ok with this, but that as a model, it's not uncommon.
> The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
I think this would be _fan-tas-tic_. But beeper is not a chat network. It is a company that simply wants to be be the iMessage for Android client, using Apple's network.
Their case would be stronger if they did have their own network and used this reverse engineered iMessage connection to provider interop between the two networks.
They do have their own network because they integrate more than just iMessage. It's "Apple's network" because Apple won't allow anyone else to run a server. Adversarial interoperability might ruffle some feathers, but we wouldn't have Venmo or any financial apps without it.
They advertise Beeper Mini (the iMessage component) separately from Beeper Cloud at the moment. Probably because of the gray area they're operating in. Completely agree with Beeper's approach though. Defaulting iPhones to SMS whenever an Android device is in the chat makes the network less secure for everyone. I would personally prefer being able to use iMessage with my friends that have Android devices so I wouldn't need a couple of different apps with varying degrees of privacy and security.
> The explicit carve-out of reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability in the DMCA
Explicit prohibitions against reverse engineering in ToS and licenses, as is the case here, supersede the DMCA exception as per Bowers v. Baystate Technologies, 320 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2003)[0]
> The European Digital Markets Act, which will require chat networks to provide interoperability
Only for ones that are big enough to meet a threshold, which iMessage does not. If it did it would only be enforceable in the EU, so that wouldn’t affect US users.
> There is a whole ecosystem of products built on this premise. Quicken, for example, relies on a library of reverse engineered banking interfaces to automate interaction and data aggregation of one's accounts.
The big difference with your example and this case is that in your example it leads to a new product that is sold, whereas in this case it’s the repackaging of someone else’s product, which is then subsequently sold and relies on someone else’s infrastructure.
Note that Apple hasn’t sued Beeper (yet) for reselling/sub-licensing iMessage, instead they’ve tightened access of their infrastructure.
It goes without saying that even if you’d believe that the DMCA reverse engineering exception allows for repackaging and resale of the reverse engineered product (which it doesn’t), it certainly doesn’t come with entitlement to the resources of owner of the reverse engineered product.
> Search and LLM products are also built on the consumption of other people's data and then charging for it.
Ignoring the fact that the adjudication on the legality of this has yet to be resolved for a second, this is still not analogous to the situation at hand.
Consumption of other people’s data to produce, generally, new data in new forms and context is not the same as repackaging and reselling.
It’d be different if Beeper used their reverse engineering to setup their own competing chat network, although then you get into the territory of clean rooms etc.
> Only for ones that are big enough to meet a threshold, which iMessage does not.
Has that actually been decided? I know Apple pushed some weird arguments about their size, but AFAIK they're still counted as a gatekeeper.
> If it did it would only be enforceable in the EU
Kinda. The Brussels effect is very real and multiple EU changes got effectively implemented worldwide. For example you can get a full data checkout from lots of online companies, regardless of your EU connection. (Including Apple https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/a... )
> Has that actually been decided? I know Apple pushed some weird arguments about their size, but AFAIK they're still counted as a gatekeeper.
Only in a tentative sense[0], but based on the facts it’s inevitable.
What you call “weird arguments”, I call simply the logical conclusion based on facts.
For Apple to be deemed a gatekeeper under the DMA w/r/t iMessage, Apple needs to pass a couple of thresholds. Nobody is arguing the revenue and market cap thresholds, so I’ll skip those.
That leaves either 45m monthly active users or 10k monthly active business users.
Apple’s claim is that they don’t meet those thresholds. Apple could of course lie, but companies of this size typically don’t commit fraud that could easily be disproven by a basic criminal investigation that could be triggered when fraud is suspected.
When you take into account the lower market penetration of iPhones and other Apple devices in the EU and then take into account the abysmal market penetration of iMessage in the EU it’s very plausible that Apple doesn’t have 45m monthly active users.
And frankly nobody is seriously disputing the 45m number. Instead people, including Google et al., were mainly focusing on the 10k monthly active business users, because they hoped that lower threshold was easier to prove.
Not only is the EU’s tentative conclusion that Apple doesn’t even have 10k monthly active business users, but this too is very plausible.
If you look at the US, where iMessage is most successful compared to other countries, you can’t even find 10,000 companies that support iMessage Business Chat.
I can tell you from personal experience that in the EU the amount of companies that have adopted it is in the single digits, mainly airlines that have adopted it to serve their international (often American) passengers.
Now one could argue that regular non-Business Chat iMessage should be included in that count, which is a minor debate that part of the greater debate, but even if that premise would be accepted, you’d then circle back to low adoption rates of iMessage amongst EU consumers and the question of how many companies will bother to send iMessages to their customers when SMS provides a near guarantee that the message will be received by the customer.
In my personal experience, I’ve never received an iMessage from a business in all my 30+ years of living in the EU. Businesses big and small will instead insist on sending messages via WhatsApp, if they insist on reaching out by non-traditional means at all (i.e., SMS, email, call).
None of my anecdotes are authoritative of course, purely a speck of data in an already plausible claim that Apple makes about their monthly active users.
As it stands, all signs, including the ones produced by the EU themselves, point to Apple not meeting the thresholds.
> Kinda. The Brussels effect is very real and multiple EU changes got effectively implemented worldwide. For example you can get a full data checkout from lots of online companies, regardless of your EU connection. (Including Apple https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/a... )
That only goes so far. In particular when it comes to pet peeves that Apple has, like iMessage and side-loading.
We already know that when it comes to the latter Apple intends to only enable that in the EU, going as far as developing a special “countryd” daemon to ensure that it’ll only be activated in the EU[1].
TOS can and do override DMCA’s general protection for reverse engineering. Look up the Warcraft battle.net case (I think the service was called bnetd?)
The second owner issue doesn’t exist here because the prohibition on reverse engineering is both part of the OS license as well as the Apple Media Services ToS, i.e. the device and the Apple ID account.
Both of which regularly require renewed agreement after updates which would trigger an explicit agreement, but there’s at the very least multiple instances of derived agreement.
1) Beeper runs multiple Mac minis for their Beeper Cloud service, those don’t run without agreeing to the terms. That agreement, which is a license to use macOS, applies to any subsequent uses of macOS on any other device. In fact, all it takes is for a single Apple computer to be used in any capacity within the company, because again, you’re agreeing to a license to use the OS, not to use the device, you own the device outright after all.
2) The EULAs and ToS are self-executing (“By using this software you agree”) in addition to requiring a click, trying to circumvent it by introducing a “second owner” isn’t going to change much
3) Claiming you didn’t agree to the EULA or ToS doesn’t do you any good, because then you’re admitting to using Apple’s software without a license i.e. piracy and the DMCA reverse engineering exception doesn’t magically grant you the right to pirate software (would be fun though, I could download whatever I want under the guise of “reverse engineering”).
> Both Microsoft and Apple have reportedly argued that Bing and iMessage aren’t popular enough in Europe to warrant being covered by the DMA, despite the commission claiming they meet the required thresholds.
> A report from Bloomberg on Wednesday suggests that the EU will rule in Apple's favor. Sources familiar with the matter cited by the report claim that officials are "leaning toward the reprieve" for iMessage, given its relative lack of popularity in the EU marketplace.
I don't dispute that at all, but may I ask why you're replying to me?
I'm sure you remember my name, as we were having a discussion on the same topic just a day or two ago. You called me immature, didn't know what I was talking about, claimed I was arguing in bad faith, and that I had a chip on my solider, and then ended by giving yourself a reminder not to reply to me again in the future.
I think we would both prefer it if we avoided each other, so I'm just curious why you would instigate a conversation with me after apparently having such a negative experience and claiming you wouldn't do so in the future.
People that are old enough can remember applications like Pidgin, Gaim or similar, I do not remember anyone attempting and wining to sue the developers. The user will create an account so IMO if I have an Apple account (I own an old Apple laptop) then WTF would Apple care I send the bytes from a differrent application.
I am curious what a judge or legislators will decide on this, can a company force you to use their client to connect to their service? Then Google can force us to use Google approved and signed apps to access youtube and google apps, even if they can't block alternatives they can bully the alternatives with the justice system.
It would be also interesting to know if using this app instead of the fallback it is actually using maybe less resources and it would be a benefit for the world for Apple to open the protocol.
I am all against monopolies, I loved pidgin (and just saw that actually it still exists!), but the beeper-mini case was quite weird.
> The user will create an account so IMO if I have an Apple account (I own an old Apple laptop) then WTF would Apple care I send the bytes from a differrent application.
Actually, the initial version of beeper mini did not require an apple ID. And actually this was one feature they seemed to advertised a lot. Only the phone number was used: "No Apple ID is required" [1].
I guess the idea was that they could provide an upgrade to the current, unencrypted communication between iMessage and android (that does not require an apple id either). But I guess the issue here, was that people who used it did not necessarily have an apple ID, and thus not consented to apple's ToS, which as I understand makes it different than pidgin etc. And they actually say that this is a problem they are trying to fix:
"Phone number registration is not working yet. All users must now sign in with an AppleID. Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. We’re currently working on a fix for this." [2]
Unless I misunderstand something, beeper mini stopped working because apple somehow disabled this "feature".
I mean I do not have any invested interest in this, I do not own an iphone and even if I did all people I know use other chatting apps, I do not own apple stocks or anything, I am all for piracy and whatnot, but I would not consider blocking access to their service when there is no ToS agreement "anti-competitive behaviour".
Maybe Apple should be able to block people that are not registered Apple users, but as I said I have an Apple account, I own a very old Apple laptop, so if I send a mesage from my PC or I remote enter in the laptop and send the message from there is the same resources used from Apple servers.
From what I understand the problem is Apple refusing to make iOS and Android users communicate smoothly, they downgrade group chats so bad that Android users are bullied and not invited into groups. I am sure those well paid Apple engineers can solve the issue if they care about the customers , at least the ones that maybe have Apple laptops but an Android phone, or an iOS phone but they want to mesage from their Apple laptop running Linux.
> I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it, without at least paying for the infrastructure they’re using.
How is this not a violation of the same Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz for unauthorized access to a web server?
I've been wondering the same thing. Could Apple ask the DOJ (or whomever would be appropriate) to go after Beeper with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)? To my uneducated eyes, this looks like a pretty clear case of Beeper accessing Apple computers without authorization.
> I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it,
They may not be ok with it but they should be forced to allow and not attempt to thwart "adversarial interoperability", on which the computing and the internet were built!
The problem for Apple is because they are so big, any action they take will be seen as a "David vs Goliath" battle, regardless of the underlying right and wrong.
Verizon's network is as federated as iMessage, as in not at all. You can't just use Verizon for free, you pay for access through an authorized vendor or through Verizon themselves.
Just because something is accessible does not implicitly grant authorization, there are hundreds of court cases that have set that precedent (this is why you DON'T need an MOTD auth warning anymore). Not only is Beeper doing that, they're also profiting from their abuse. This is more than enough to be a major violation of the CFAA and this is probably what the DOJ is investigating.
I don't follow your argument. Verizon's network is federated with AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, whomever. Messages can be routed freely between those networks unadulterated. That is what federation means.
To communicate via iMessage you must use Apple's servers. There are no other servers which can accept iMessage messages and forward them back and forth with Apple's server. (Only in a lossy manner, via MMS.) It is not a federated protocol.
Federation promotes competition. Preventing 3rd party access by any mechanism stifles competition.
If iMessage were federated, as in, Beeper could host their own servers which federate with Apple's, I think more of us would side with Apple here.
It is federated in the same way matrix or mastodon are. You join a server and it can talk to other servers. If the server you are on shuts down you won't be able to login and make posts no matter how many agreements have been signed between different servers. It also uses the hardware of the server you are on.
You could even start your own carrier just like you could set up your own Mastodon server. Of course there would be far more regulations, but it is technically possible.
It's clearly not as procuring another SIM card from another carrier requires actual effort and money that is by no means guaranteed to be available for everyone. (And in some countries there is an ID check or other legal obligations/contracts must be signed.)
And even then the new SIM card still won't allow the phone to connect with any of the proprietary cellular towers and antennas for normal usage, only emergency situations.
>It's clearly not as procuring another SIM card from another carrier requires actual effort and money that is by no means guaranteed to be available for everyone
Setting up an email/mastodon/matrix server requires effort and money. You either need to self host which requires a local internet connection, electricity, and ideally a static IP none of which are guarantee. If you host at a hosting company it costs money.
>(And in some countries there is an ID check or other legal obligations/contracts must be signed.)
Hetzner and other hosting companies require IDs as well. I wouldn't be surprised if in some countries you have to have an ID to get internet.
>And even then the new SIM card still won't allow the phone to connect with any of the proprietary cellular towers and antennas for normal usage, only emergency situations.
A mastodon server won't connect with a proprietary protocol so it seems like it is the same boat? It won't even connect in emergency situations!
>This is not federated in any sense.
Seems exactly the same. There are just far more gatekeepers when it comes to carriers.
Not at all. iMessage which is what this whole thread is about is an example of something not federated. I can't set up an iMessage server and connect with Apple's. I can set up my own email server and email an iCloud email address.
There is a mentality where if a service becomes ubiquitous enough, it should be treated like a public utility. It’s not a particularly valid way of thinking, but common nonetheless.
> There is a mentality where if a service becomes ubiquitous enough, it should be treated like a public utility. It’s not a particularly valid way of thinking, but common nonetheless.
You mean if a monopoly is created, it should be regulated like a utility. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, not sure what's invalid about this way of thinking.
We're talking about about what "should" happen, not what allegedly does happen. There's nothing intrinsically problematic with saying any monopoly should be regulated like a utility, which is what the OP had claimed.
The power company is a monopoly because you can only get power from it. iMessage is not a monopoly because you can get messaging service from multiple other providers, and you are not even limited to using iMessage on an iPhone.
Yes. Thats how competition works.
The entire internet is built on this concept.
Some languages even use githubs infrastructure free of charge. Npm was the way in its early days. Go still is this way.
Also,
there are already so many products that do this.
Custom gmail apps,
anything email,
DNS,
Anything that uses google maps
See Reddit clients vs charging for API debate
If apple wants to shut down beeper, there is a very very very easy way.
Release iMessage for android.
And suddenly beeper is dead overnight.
All they have to do is build the product people want.
The problem isn't the API. If I build a service using the S3 API but run it on my own infrastructure, that's competition to Amazon. If I somehow write a system that uses Amazon's S3 infrastructure without Amazon's approval, I'm probably violating the CFAA.
Beeper's problem isn't implementing the iMessage API but providing access to Apple's infrastructure without authorization.
Lawmakers question why Apple doesn't provide outside authorization to their default secure messaging app, or provide their own secure means of messaging non-Apple hardware a family member might be provided by their cell carrier.
The answer seems to be Apple wants to force families to purchase an iPhone for every family member, or download and agree to the terms of a third-party app in order to securely communicate.
Beeper isn't "reselling infrastructure" they're building a compatible clone of Apple's infrastructure. And yes, a variety of companies have reverse engineered and copied Amazon S3 for example.
The difference is that Apple's business model is built around preventing you from communicating with iMessage while Amazon is happy to let you copy things from anywhere into or out of your Amazon S3 bucket (for a price.)
This is not correct. The Beeper client directly connects to Apple's servers while bypassing authorization checks through serial number spoofing. They did not build their own infrastructure based on reverse engineering iMessage.
You have to do that to communicate with iMessage. The infrastructure is the Internet, Apple is just operating a mailbox and the only way to send a letter to that mailbox over the public infrastructure is to bypass the auth check.
CFAA would be unenforceable if it required unauthorized users to have agreed to the terms of service of the systems they were abusing. You’re not supposed to be there and that’s sufficient.
Very cut and dry CFAA case, I'm guessing Beeper saw how well it went for Epic Games when they leveraged the useful idiots to sway public opinion, so they are doing the same for a quick buck and hoping it gets political enough to avoid getting fined.
All its users have, as Beeper is aware, and Beeper has taken extensive steps, predicated on the existing of that customer agreement (in fact: meaningful only because of that agreement) to help them renege.
If we’re presuming that the end-user has not agreed to any term of service, then why are we assuming that they have the right to use the service in anyway whatsoever? It’s basically the definition of unauthorized use at that point.
Maybe I have an Apple laptop but an Android phone and would like to use a unified messaging solution across both.
But we shouldn't have to get to such specific examples to discuss the issue at play here—Apple is fighting against adversarial interoperability. I'm amazed to see people arguing in their favor on Hacker News.
Does that mean they are therefore not competing with Apple? And if their users are using Beeper Mini to access iMessage, are they not implicitly accepting the ToS?
Better analogy would be iWork 365 where Apple reverse engineers the back end to do the cloud storage and collaboration all using MSFT's azure boxes. And charge money for it.
Microsoft365 has an API and therefore doesn’t need to be reverse engineered. You’re making a great point for having Apple open up the iMessage platform or at least meet consumer demand for access to iMessage on non-Apple devices. They can even charge for it - the going rate looks to be $1.99 a month.
It’s taking a lot to pretend like you’re not being intentionally snarky.
No, I’m not actually arguing that because that’s not what I said nor is it an accurate rewording of what I said. I didn’t say anything about making anything free; I said “they can even charge for it”.
Some have suggested courts are less willing to enforce "click-wrap" agreements against consumers than they are against corporations. The later might be more likely to read and thus consent. Did Beeper read the Apple ToS. What do you think.
Perhaps the outcome of challenging Apple's ToS depends on where the case would be filed. For example, 5th Cir would favour Beeper as it follows Vault v Quaid. 1st Cir follows Bowers v Baystate and would favour Apple. 8th Cir has followed Bowers (See Davidson, the Blizzard case).
"[P]rivate parties are free to contractually forego the limited ability to reverse engineer a software product under the exemptions of the Copyright Act[,]" Bowers v. Baystate Techs, Inc., 320 F.3d 1317, 132526 (Fed. Cir. 2003)
But note that in Bowers, Baystate did not actually attempt to plead fair use or copyright misuse. It only focused on preemption. The Bowers case is used to argue against reverse engineering as fair use but Baystate never asserted that defense.
The so-called "tech" companies and their supporters would prefer Bowers to apply everywhere. But it does not apply everywhere.
What is more interesting than the copyright issues, IMHO, is the idea of an antitrust illegality defense to breach of a software license. From 1996,
Samuelson and Scotchmer mentioned it again in 2002.
"While antitrust and competition law may regulate antireverse engineering clauses in an appropriate case or context, no such claim has as yet been brought, let alone sustained."
I'm surprised that the defendants in the Bowers case didn't raise a public policy argument. Wouldn't the reverse-engineering exceptions both to copyright (made by common law precedent through fair use) and the DMCA (section 1201(f)) be strong evidence of such a public policy position? Were it otherwise, any copyright holder could lock their software behind an EULA or similar agreement that prohibits reverse-engineering and foreclose what would otherwise be fully legal research into the non-copyrightable expression/systems/methods in the software code.
The people who buy Apple products or subscribe to Apple services already paid for Apple's infrastructure and services.
Beeper (theoretically) exists to allow Android users to communicate with iPhone users, so one of the two users in the conversation already gave Apple hundreds of dollars. They'll survive.
Genuinely surprised at the prevalence of "Apple is right, Beeper is wrong" comments on Hacker News of all places. Beeper is filling a market need via a technologically creative solution. Since when is protectionism of large entrenched actors our cause?
I miss the days of GAIM/Pidgin/Trillium/Adium and hope Beeper prevails here.
> The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use.
> It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business, or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense.
Beeper’s CEO is acting high and mighty, speaking like he’s some kind of ideological liberator, while charging for a service using another’s infrastructure. Had it been free and open-source from the start¹ you’d see a lot more people on their side. As soon as you start charging, you lose a lot of “hacker” sympathy.
It’s possible to disagree with Apple for not providing iMessage on Android while at the same time disagreeing with Beeper’s approach.
¹ And I do mean the whole app, not the proof-of-concept from the teenager.
> The hacker spirit is about personal use. It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business
I reject this idea completely. The "hacker spirit" in no way excludes doing business or making money. Hackers creating businesses to bring the benefits of their hacking to the world are the very foundation of YC who created and operate this site.
> charging for a service using another’s infrastructure
Beeper doesn't get any benefit from using Apple's infrastructure per se. The resource usage is trivial. If there was a way to go around Apple's infrastructure and communicate with Apple's iMessage users directly Beeper would be all over it and more than happy to replace all that "infrastructure" themselves at no cost to Apple.
Apple has inserted themselves between their users and the world, making it impossible for anyone to send proper group or video messages to their unchangeable default messaging app without going through Apple. Beeper is simply doing the only thing that will work to fix Apple's intentional crippling of communication with Android for their own benefit.
> Hackers creating businesses to bring the benefits of their hacking to the world are the very foundation of YC who created and operate this site.
I disagree. There is a clear line in many business from "cool hacking shit" to "cool/profitable business", but that hacker spirit is lost every single time.
The "hacking spirit" is never about money either - see any 90s/00s movie about hacking, or any of the 80s/90s manifestos online.
These aren't freedom fighters, trying to fight Goliath and bring messaging to the people. The original project they built on was. Beeper are profiteers, seeking to middle man some money. There nothing wrong with that - good on them - but that's hardly "hacker spirit".
Yeah honestly normally I’d probably support something like beeper, but they just give me bad vibes. They’re being painted as a scrappy startup but to me they seem like another bunch of get-rich-quick, move fast and break things “disruptor” types. Which, ironically, is what the hacker in hacker news has largely come to symbolize in my opinion. Apple has an established culture and history of not operating that way, to make matters worse. It’s “growth hacking” versus the only company that still understands polish, however monopolistic they may be.
Beeper has been around since 2020 and its primary product (now called beeper cloud) is an all-in-one chat application which supports many protocols from the same client, not just imessage. Even if imessage/beeper mini is the product generating discussion right now, beeper cloud has been the primary focus of their company since the start and beeper mini is just a recent tangent. They use matrix bridges as the backend and some of the devs now working for beeper were already working on the open source bridges which beeper now uses even before beeper the company existed. Beeper was the first organization (and one of the few it seems) to become a corporate sponsor of the matrix foundation, and they also routinely sponsor developers to work on the open source bridges that make up much of their infrastructure, even beyond the ones they hired on as staff.
I'm not sure how all this points to "get-rich-quick" silicon valley startup type to you but the behavior looks pretty different to me. Given their history, my guess is they put beeper mini out there primarily to put pressure on apple. If apple doesn't shut it down, cool, everyone has access to imessage through beeper. If apple does shut it down, at least it leaves little doubt about the situation: interoperability is not impossibly hard, apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do, and at the end of the day imessage is only limited to apple devices because apple is apple. (For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense, kind of similar to nintendo in that way.)
I suppose if all I had seen was the past month of buzz around them then I might perceive them differently.
Who ever argued it was? Apple never claimed they wouldn’t bring iMessage to Android because it was hard. Them making an Android app would be trivial, they simply choose not to. Which I disagree with, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with Beeper’s approach.
> apple really doesn't care about the security or privacy of their customers as much as they like to say they do
That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them? Beeper probably isn’t siphoning messages from user’s devices to spy on them but Apple doesn’t know that, none of us do. And if they allow that use, the app that comes next might be nefarious.
> For most companies I would say imessage is locked to apple devices because it's about the money but apple is one of those companies that takes weirdly principled positions even when it makes no sense
I think lots of lobbyists were making such arguments about the DMA in Europe.
> That’s a bogus argument from Beeper. Why would Apple trust them?
This has little to do with beeper's client. The point is, apple could easily bring imessage to android and doing so would increase their customers privacy, because now all their android conversations could be e2ee. apple of course chooses not to do this even with how trivial it would be, showing that their privacy focused marketing is really just empty words. Beeper's role here is simply bringing more attention to this two faced apple propaganda.
It's possible that imessage wasn't brought to android for monetary purposes early on, but at this point it's pretty clear there's a large segment of android users willing to pay a subscription to get imessage and that would be practically free money for apple. I think the main reason they still haven't included android is it goes against their vertical integration philosophy. They want to control everything (they don't control android, or the android app store) and are willing to make sacrifices and gambles in pursuit of that (eg them sinking loads of money to try and engineer their own modems even though it is likely to be worse than qualcomm's for quite some time, and who knows if they'll ever even ship an iphone with an apple modem before they shut the division down).
I too thought this was "Hacker" News, where we found ways to break down barriers and expand access to services to the benefit of society. Apple is absolutely abusing their market position and we should all be finding ways to establish healthy, multi-platform communication standands. It is disheartening to see many folks here fighting for the status quo, which clearly isn't working. Beeper devs are the hackers I will always support, the kind that drive a subconscious shift of our morals to something more inclusive.
They are tying one market (phone hardware) to another (their messaging network). Whether that rises to the level of "abuse" is up to you.
I consider it so because of recent reports that 87% of US teens own iPhones, and colloquial knowledge of how "green bubbles" negatively affect teens' social and mental health.
That teens like iMessage and are dumb enough to cyber bully each other over it is not Apple's fault in the least. Their idiocy definitely does not constitute market abuse on Apple's part.
Green bubbles, plus making iPhone using friends and family too lazy to install a 3rd party messaging app (accusations not valid outside of the continental US).
How is Apple to blame for the laziness of your family and friends? I've never seen Apple disencourage in any way third party messaging apps on their devices.
Probably because while we're hackers at heart, we're also don't think that because a company is large and profitable we're entitled to their resources free of charge to sell to other people violating all of their terms of service.
I don't think Apple cares about the resource usage here. (Note that's not their argument, they argue that Beeper clients will bypass content protections.) The servers running iMessage, heck even the team supporting it, are probably a drop in the bucket for them.
Apple's goal is for iMessage to remain an exclusive feature of their hardware. That exclusivity is what Beeper -- or an Apple-vended Android client, or RCS interoperability, or federation generally -- threatens.
And -- it's exactly the proposition of, "to use our popular offering in market X, you must also purchase our offering in market Y" which is anticompetitive.
Lots of platforms like gaming consoles have exclusive content where the same company is both the hardware/services owner and the content creator. What would be anticompetitive is they leveraged their position as an app platform to stunt other legitimate chat apps from gaining popularity. Beeper claims that’s what’s happening to them but their legitimacy is debatable.
My devil's advocate for Apple is that iMessage is relatively free of spam because of the exclusive architecture tied to hardware.
The issue isn't so much Beeper as it is the open the door to anyone on the Internet. I.e. Apple probably cares little about Beeper itself, and more about the risk of 3rd party software accessing its services/users.
A good number of us have had to combat spam/abuse in our careers, and we're sympathetic to the plight.
This argument I'm sympathetic to. But I think it would sit a lot better with me if Apple were to produce an Android client. That it's a closed ecosystem doesn't bother me as much as that it's tied to their specific phone hardware.
(I'd still prefer to see 3rd party clients as I appreciate the integration those can bring. But the hardware lock-in is particularly egregious.)
iphones and imessages are incredibly easy to automate for spam. Today's free, grey and dark markets are often powered by real devices as it's easier to maintain than to reverse engineer and replicate. Usually real devices are mixed with automation code for best results (e.g. real devices generate fingerprints and sign stuff while code automates actions).
Creating barrier to entry for spam definitely reduces it but we know for a fact that's not a very effective spam fighting strategy.
I also think modern anti-spam tech is really good. My Samsung phone here is really good at blocking robo calls here in Thailand. In fact I handn't received one since my upgrade to S22. If Samsung can block robo calls and open protocols like federation and email can stop spam through simple tech and volunteer work then multibillion company with some of the best engineers surely can't find this that challenging right? So I find the spam argument for closing off iMessages not very convincing to say the least.
> iphones and imessages are incredibly easy to automate for spam
You lost me here. iMessages in particular are not able to be automated because they always require user input before they’re sent.
There are very few OS processes that have an escalated privilege which allows sending iMessage without user input, but given the lack of widespread iMessage spam vs. SMS spam, it seems those processes aren’t actively being exploited.
Even iPhones in general are actually very hard to automate.
So honestly I have no clue what you’re talking about.
Because most of us didn't think AOL was doing something illegal by blocking third party clients. AOL created the service and ran the servers. AOL was free to make it work however they liked. And we never tried to insist that AOL was legally liable for making any changes to their own protocol without notice or approval to third party clients - what a hellscape of a world that would be for anyone trying to run a service!
Sentiment at the time was that we wished AOL would welcome third party clients but it was not their duty or obligation to do so. Likewise most people believed the third party clients were free to adapt to the changes. Both had the right to play cat/mouse as long as they wished.
Beeper is making a very different argument: that the courts and/or law should force anyone exposing an endpoint to the internet to bend over backwards so third parties can use the endpoint too (for free) because that would be convenient for end users. That Beeper can decide, at its own discretion, what is or is not allowable for something that was never intended to allow third party access.
Every company is almost by definition a monopolist with regard to its own products and services because even mostly equivalent things are still different in some way that could matter to a customer. It is all about where you draw the lines.
Especially surprising since consolidating multiple messaging protocols under Matrix is literally Beeper's service, and has been for a few years.
Several other comment mention "piggybacking", but there are plenty of services piggybacking on tech giants: SearX, Nitter, Invidious, Teddit, Libreddit. One can even argue that LineageOS and GrapheneOS are piggybacking on Google's efforts.
That's why there's are exemptions to copyright for interoperability reasons. You can't hide behind copyrights (or trademarks) solely to exclude competitors. (I believe Beeper uses this library solely for registration, not normal operation.) Such tactics have lost in court multiple times.
That’s a totally different kind of case where the barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce copyrighted content, like in the case of the DSMOS chip which contains a poem which has to be provided for the OS to work. These tactics have sometimes been successful and sometimes been unsuccessful. It’s just the legal lottery.
Here they simply provide someone else’s library to perform the authentication. That’s just basic copyright infringement, however lofty the goal.
You can’t write an emulator and sell it including the bios written by Sony. Has been enforced many times. Similarly, you can’t do what Beeper is doing here.
> the barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce copyrighted content
This is exactly the case here. The barrier to interoperability is the ability to reproduce this obfuscated code which, crucially, serves no other purpose. Even if it would be theoretically possible to achieve interoperability otherwise by heroic reverse engineering of said code, that doesn't matter just as it didn't matter in Sega v. Accolade where that exact argument was made unsuccessfully by Sega.
This is not analogous to reproducing a whole BIOS which is not obfuscated code and is used for miscellaneous purposes having nothing to do with access restriction. This is clearly fair use according to precedent.
I don't get the angle from these lawmakers. Beeper could be doing nothing illegal, but Apple has every right to block unwanted access to their server. Just as Reddit has the right to block all third-party clients and YouTube has every right to block ad-block users.
I thought what Beeper did was fun at first, but now I consider their work dangerous, since it rationalizes a push for remote attestation, which is what Apple has been meaning to do for a long time. Now they have a valid reason to fully utilize it, after which Google may try to follow suit and probably face less backlashes.
Lawmakers make the law. They have to consider not only what is currently illegal but also what should be illegal. Just because Apple is currently allowed to block access from competitors doesn't mean they should be allowed to.
>since it rationalizes a push for remote attestation
No it doesn't. By this logic, Apple should have gone through with plans to implement CSAM scanning on iCloud. Except customers complained and they abandoned it. Then they debuted e2e encrypted iCloud storage 2 years later; completely antithetical to the school of thought used by CSAM scanning advocates.
Lawmakers make and change laws, so it seems sensible to find out whether they need changing. "This isn't illegal now therefore it shouldn't be looked into by lawmakers" would be circular reasoning.
Sure, but no one was arguing that ought to have been legal or that the phone system would be in the wrong to attempt to patch exploits found by hacking.
Their Blue Box efforts were very cool! So is the coding that let Beeper do this.
But it is mystifying to me that people are arguing it is illegitimate (under our current system) for Apple to try to secure its system.
The irony is people are rooting for a company (Apple) which only exists because it did something similar like Beeper early on, but root against Beeper. Apple is its present and history.
So Beeper is piggybacking off Apple’s servers that facilitate iMessages and is charging $1.99 per month to users and they thought Apple would be okay with this?
You could make a somewhat similar argument about an email provider sending emails to iCloud email addresses, thus “piggybacking” off Apple’s iCloud servers. Granted, Beeper probably doesn’t prevent it being used between two Android users, but the primary function, and why people would pay for it, is to communicate with Apple users.
The primary difference is that in one case it’s a closed proprietary protocol and in the other an open protocol. But who pays for what is not the main concern. Apple would still disagree even if Beeper would be willing to share an appropriate part of their revenue.
I don’t understand your point. The user with iMessage that the Android user wants to communicate with is an Apple customer as well, and arguably pays Apple to be reachable via iMessage. And in the iCloud Mail example, the non-Apple user who is sending an email to the iCloud user also is not an Apple customer and doesn’t pay for Apple’s iCloud Mail infrastructure.
> You could make a somewhat similar argument about an email provider sending emails to iCloud email addresses
No. They don't work the same way. Your email provider has to maintain a mail server to send and receive emails on your behalf. Your email client connects to that email server to do all its work. Beeper Mini directly connects to Apple's Push Notifications servers to do all send/receive.
People arguing for an open iMessage system like email are completely forgetting how much spam and bad actors have ruined the openness of email. It use to be the case that you could run your own email server, but due to spam, many major email providers like Gmail will reject emails from untrusted IP addresses, for example.
I never said the Messages app was free from spam or bad actors, only you did.
SMS and iMessage spam that is handled by the Messages app are considerably less of a problem precisely because they’re less open protocols. They’re not at all comparable; the vast, vast majority of email is spam.
Or: Apple's servers are serving APIs on the public internet and which clients a user chooses to connect to them with is no concern of Apple's, and any attempt to block certain clients is clearly anti-consumer and anti-competitive…
The "paid" aspect is seemingly not the problem. Automattic does what Beeper does (without unauthorized access to Apple services) and charges $15/month. https://texts.com/subscription
It looks like their service only works on MacOS, which means they're probably just using the local iMessage db like others have done. They're not integrating with the API or providing access for other platforms, it's a totally different (and limited) solution.
If you have a Mac sitting around, airmessage.org has made this work cross platform for a while now.
My feeling is that Beeper leadership saw the kid's hack and adopted it without thinking it through. They could've designed it in a way that didn't depend on unauthorized access to Apple services.
That's not really the issue at play here, it's at what point does forbidding 3rd party clients to your service become anticompetitive. Right now the answer is basically "never" but I think the technological landscape would be healthier if the bar was significantly lower.
The real situation is that you've granted me SSH access to your server but block anything than the OpenSSH client and I would like to use Go's crypto/ssh.
And it's one thing when they're two OSS implementations but when those alternative clients are your competitors it starts looking anticompetitive.
You giving me SSH access to your machine gives me the ability to use your infrastructure and resources for my purposes. Make the example instead you giving me access to an internal API.
You're focusing on the mechanism of my example rather than the effect. Apple hasn't given Beeper (or me or you) free access to their infrastructure. Shutting down Beeper using an exploit is well within their rights.
Oh shit, a wild nuance appears. The yt-dlp (and all alternative YouTube clients) are accessing open endpoints into YouTube. While YouTube can choose to block these things the clients are not accessing some non-public API. Having been following various yt-dl forks for the past few years, YouTube blocking them is annoying but within their rights as the hosts of the service. If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.
Apple does not offer any sort of public access to iMessage, Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity. Beeper can keep up their cat and mouse game but whining to regulators and pretending they are doing something noble is ridiculous. They're trying to grab headlines to get either bought out or investment dollars.
If they want to reverse engineer iMessage they can take their licks and keep up with Apple's efforts to lock them out.
> The yt-dlp (and all alternative YouTube clients) are accessing open endpoints into YouTube
Kind of, but I can't completely agree to this. There is circumvention work that went into these projects. Youtube has public, but "protected" endpoints, not exactly just open video streams.
> If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.
So your main issue is not Beeper Mini, but the surrounding situation and "activism" they are attempting to do? Based on your SSH comment it seemed like your main issue was unauthorized access.
> Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity.
If this is the main issue, then I think Aurora Store or microG are better exemples of currently existing similar apps. Revanced (and other unofficial yt clients that offer sign-in) I think should also qualify for this, and reddit clients with hacked in private API keys.
Reminds me of the old battles with AOL Instant Messenger compatible clients like GAIM, that used the TOC protocol. Think that ended up in an extended cat and mouse game of AOL changing things to lock out GAIM and other clients while the developers found new ways around the changes. Not sure if there was much, if any, encryption being used back then for instant messaging system. If not, clear text would have been much easier to hack around.
Apparently AOL eventually "beat" MSN trying to reverse engineer their protocol by exploiting a known buffer overflow in their own implementation, and then MSN fumbled by trying to leak the security issue to put pressure on AOL but being too transparent in their manipulations and losing the PR battle that ensued.
It's really disappointing to see how Apple went from championing open standards in the early days of Mac OS X, especially with regard to communication protocols, to this.
I want a premium messaging experience on my iPhone, regardless of what the other party has. I do not want compressed images and videos, and as an end-user, it's bullisht that I have to figure out how to do that using 3rd party apps.
How is iMessage a monopoly? I would like open communications standards as much as the next guy, but next to iMessage there are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. etc.
And as far as I know, you have to use the official WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp, same for Telegram, etc. etc. So apart from iMessage not being a monopoly, they are also not more restrictive than their competition.
So besides not matching with our "open" ideology for communication, what exactly has Apple done wrong here?
My view is that all of those messaging platforms blocking alternative clients are equally problematic.
I've arrived at this position because I'm not able to use any of those platforms because they don't provide accessibility tools that I need. Beeper does, and most matrix clients do also.
I recognize that the open source "everything should be open" view is not remotely mainstream, but the only way forward is to demand better.
We have best practices and movies about having too little control of other people's systems too. If law, morality, and debate only required finding whether there was a negative outcome they would be trivial. Unfortunately that doesn't yield practical results. Things need to be weighed and debated on a larger scale.
Throwing in my perspective: I largely agree with the DMA and think while iMessage was found not to be popular enough to qualify in Europe we should have something similar in place in the US and it certainly has enough penetration here to qualify under the same wording. I.e. I think we need something between "free rein" and "monopoly" for very large players which has practical effects on how you're required to interop.
Apples only escape here is that they're only popular in America. Whatsapp, Facebook messenger etc have to open up in the coming months because it's illegal in Europe. Apple should open up too, just like they have to with the App Store (because that is big enough to count as a gatekeeper)
Definitely not true for Telegram, they are completely open about the client side infrastructure: https://telegram.org/apps (and there are dozens of third party clients, some even linked on their official website)
Telegram does have some weird restrictions on third-party clients -- in particular, you'll get blocked if you try to create an account or perform certain other operations using an unofficial client. But generally, yes.
> How is iMessage a monopoly? I would like open communications standards as much as the next guy, but next to iMessage there are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. etc.
Because it's the replacement for SMS for Apple phones and doesn't require an account in the same way those other services do. It just uses the Apple account iPhone owners already need to have.
> But most people don't because it's the default. MS was found to have a monopoly with IE even though there were alternatives.
Windows also was the dominant operating system with a market share in the 90% or higher. iOS isn't even the market leader in the US let alone the world, so can't really be a monopoly now can it?
iPhone and Samsung combined make up almost 80% of smart phone market share in the US. Being as Statistia is a premium thing I can't get accurate numbers, but lets say splitting 50/50 because if it was anything with any serious gap, they wouldn't group them the same. I'd assume they're high 40's and low 50's split between the two, so means iPhone is ~40%, now I ain't no math magician or anything but that leaves ~60% for non-iPhone devices.
In plenty of other threads I've seen people bring up that in the US most phones are iPhones, they are the most popular choice by far. I can't remember where they sourced the info from and not about to research it myself though, at least not at the moment.
No buddy. I've looked up and verified sources in the past, just not willing to do so conversing with you in this particular discussion, especially since your reasoning which was just making assumptions was not very convincing. Thankfully others have already provided better sources.
> Really? It's never insisted upon for any core service?
You might need to qualify "core service" here, but no. Calls, SMS, MMS, internet all work fine without an account. You need an account to download apps from the app store, but that's a different argument. If you wanted to, there are various methods to load apps up without an account too (side loading via Xcode, MDM, etc).
Apparently since Apple made it more convenient to iPhone users to not only message other iPhone users from iMessage, but also receive their text messages in that single app too, it's a monopoly?
That probably didn't help things but I think the root cause comes down to the usual source of monopolies in this case: having vertical integration and a default app. Technically you don't even need an iPhone or SMS service to use iMessage. It is by the most common use case though, and one which increased the amount of integration a bit.
So if your ISP like AOL makes all of their webpages nice and fast but competitors slower and uglier artificially then is AOL abusing their market position here? We already set the precedent here that this is market abuse. This new case is no different.
Also, Apple knows this. They know they'd lose that's why they are already ahead of this by announcing adoption of RCS in 2024.
How can anyone presume that Apple would stand some sort of ideological ground here? We literally have emails where Apple c-suits say that iMessages mistreating android benefits them and they don't want to fix this. This is such a clear case I don't understand how anyone can defend this.
Tangentially, this has been great for Apple to get metrics on Android demand for iMessage. Sure, one can assume every Android user would want access, but instances like this show people are willing to pay for access as well.
Apple should bundle iMessage access for Android into iCloud's subscription and release an official Android app. Maybe some eyes from the DOJ will get that on Apple's roadmap (I can dream, right?).
One possibility I haven't seen discussed is whether this will end with some sort of "compromise" where Beeper is allowed to continue to operate but users are marked in some way differently than both iMessage (client) users and SMS users. Beeper would claim a victory in being allowed to continue existing and provide iMessage access on Android with encryption, sans-SMS, etc., and Apple would be able to mark the "others" in a chat (and perhaps add features to chats with only iMessage clients that aren't supported in chats with other clients).
> If Apple insists, we would consider adding a pager emoji to metadata on all messages sent via Beeper Mini. This would make it easy for Messages App to filter out any messages from Beeper Mini users.
This whole thing is absurd! DOJ investigation against whom? Aren't beeper's author's technically in violation of CFAA for knowingly bypassing security measures and accessing systems (imessage servers) against authorization?
This entire society us upside down! Just because apple is big bad corp doesn't mean any issue against them is right!
Kudos to beeper but don't make this a legal thing against apple.
I already have to trust that Apple adheres to its promise not to abuse their privileged position to break E2E encryption. Now I have to trust Apple to continually verify that Beeper is not breaking E2E encryption? I don't know what the folks at Beeper are smoking, but it appears that a lot of very smart people are smoking it too.
"Interoperability" was cool and all 20 years ago or so, but I do not understand how nowadays anybody really considers it a good idea tbh. It has pretty much obvious security risks (it need not have in theory, but in practice it certainly does). And it is not that we lack decent multiplatform, secure solutions that people can use independent of platform.
With beeper actively attacking security critical infrastructure
it's just a question of time until someone pulls out the patriot act
and jails them as terrorists.
An obvious solution would be for Apple to offer users an integrated messaging experience of its own across platforms. I understand why on the surface that seems in error, but its badly needed.
Beeper has an application to consolidate many different messaging applications into a single app. One of those messaging apps was iMessage, with the added ability to use iMessage on Android.
Previously, they did this by effectively having you sign-in to iCloud on a Mac system running in their datacenter. Handing over your iCloud password to a third-party obviously has security implications, even if you trust Beeper wont intentionally abuse it.
Recently, they had a new Beeper-Mini, that instead reversed-engineered the iMessage protocol and spoofed your Android phonenumber as being an Apple device. This allowed you to use iMessage without ever handing over your password to some remote server (although, still handing it over to a third-party application, and trusting it doesn't do something shady).
Beeper, for its part, has claimed this reverse-engineering falls under the protection of allowed exceptions for the purpose of interoperability. Apple has not yet made any legal claim one way or another, and instead just shutdown the method being used to gain access to iMessage from non-Apple devices.
It's an open-source (open core? not sure if the serverside is open) multi-platform single-pane-of-glass instant messaging client (Beeper) with a cloud/webapp (Beeper Cloud I think it's called).
The server is matrix, you can host your own opensource official beeper bridges on your own matrix server and use your own matrix application. The official beeper cloud applications only talk to their matrix server, but everything the bridges do are end to end encrypted to your device via matrix so as long as you trust they do not log your messages or you run your own bridges they can’t read any of your messages.
From the article: “The two Beeper messaging apps allow Android users to interact with iPhone users through iMessage — an interoperability Apple has been opposed to for a long time now.”
Reverse engineered the API that iMessage uses and made an app for Android making use of them (while charging a fee for it). There's more to it than that (what got them smacked originally was using fake device credentials for attestation), but that's the tl;dr.
So Beeper is charging money to let users access Apple's servers in an unauthorized way by spoofing a serial number, and then they complain to regulators when Apple locks them out?
I think that was their play from the beginning, get something working to prove it's technically possible and eliminate that line of argumentation, wait for the retaliation, and then sue them for anticompetitive practices that now clearly demonstrates consumer harm.
Get the regulators to force Apple to open the front door for them.
They were charging for iMessage over a year ago in what is now called Beeper Cloud. I wonder why Beeper Mini created the ruckus, perhaps because it was iMessage only?
I think it is because this new Beeper Mini spoofs a Mac, whereas the older Beeper Cloud used a real Mac in a datacenter to forward your messages to you. Personally, I don't think that Apple would have any leg to stand on if they went after the Beeper Cloud on-a-real-Mac implementation.
The article highlights Beeper's founder/CEO testified to the Senate about the concern before hand. Not sure if they've said anything since but I'm also not sure they really need to, they've already complained they'd get locked out and now they have. Really it's probably a better image for them to not be the ones to mention it again at this point.
I've got an idea. Apple could man up and create an android app instead of all this bullshit. They have been forced into RCS which will be huge, but they have already decided to keep the green bubble garbage. They will do their best to make sure the user experience is as degraded as possible.
As someone who used to use multi-IM clients (Pidgin, Trillian, Meebo) back in the MSN/AIM/ICQ days, I have to say, it's surreal to see how the conversation has shifted to the point that this is now a reasonable-sounding comment.
Notably so, I believe Trillian was a paid product and Meebo was actually treated like a real tech startup. Interesting, indeed, how much the sentiment has shifted over the course of 10-15 years...
AFAIK the players like AIM, MSN, ICQ didn’t cut off access to third party clients.
Maybe they wanted to, but it was too onerous back then to force client software updates that they had to continue supporting reverse-engineered versions of the protocol?
They absolutely did. AOL in particular used a buffer overflow bug in AIM to execute arbitrary code to determine if the client was actually AIM or a third-party client pretending to be AIM.
MSN Messenger and Yahoo IM both cried foul about this and called out for interoperability, but then turned around and denied third-party clients access to their own networks once they got big enough.
Yeah, it's outright incredible how much even tech libertarian HN commonly visceraly HATES market competition and wants to outright remove the possibility of market alternatives for critical services.
I bet if HDMI and USB wouldn't exist, they'd protest against being able to connect their MacBooks to non-Apple TVs and non-Apple keyboards - to keep them safe from evil Samsung monitors and bad Logitech mice.
UK here. "no-one" uses iMessage. The only people I use it with are the ones who refuse to use Signal (because I refuse to use WhatsApp). Most people here don't know or care that the green/blue bubbles mean different things. I've had to explain it repeatedly.
The way iMessage locks your phone number into the Apple ID system, meaning that people using iMessage to chat with people who have changed their phone away from Apple sometimes can't get messages through.
I assume you put no-one in quotes because it's not true? Of course people in the UK use iMessage! From this source, it looks like about 1 in 3 internet users age 16-64 use it.
Unpacking my quotes, I mean it like this: most people don't choose to use iMessage because of its features, and to look after their groups. They mainly use Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat or Signal for that purpose. You _can't_ use iMessage outside of niche groups because of the roughly 50/50 split in iOS/Android ownership [0].
People do use iMessage, because it's the SMS app on their phone.
> The way iMessage locks your phone number into the Apple ID system, meaning that people using iMessage to chat with people who have changed their phone away from Apple sometimes can't get messages through.
You can disable iMessage on an iPhone and it just becomes SMS. You're not even forced to use it as an iPhone user.
Discriminating is completely fine unless it's done based on protected classes (which, generally speaking, are things that aren't a result of simple choices). Choosing whether to use an iPhone falls on the "discriminating is totally fine" side of things, in my book.
I've never had an iPhone but the default messaging apps on my recent Android phones have told me whether or not the person I'm messaging has RCS or not. That lets me know whether I should expect them to see typing indicators and so forth. Is that also a bad thing? What if it used colors instead of a written label?
> The blue/green icon debacle should have been ruled discriminatory.
This discrimination is not arbitrary, it is critical functionality. The set of features available to blue icons is vastly broader (it goes far beyond messaging) than the features available to green icons. Some of these features cannot be practically replicated to non-Apple platforms.
Blue icons also have a much higher quality of service because they don't rely on telco infrastructure for delivery. Green icon messages frequently get lost or are delivered extremely late.
I use WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage daily. Apple's iMessage (blue icon version) is the best of the bunch and it isn't particularly close. I don't think this is because there is anything special about iMessage per se, it is more that implementing complex core features across a broad range of unrelated platforms necessarily dumbs things down to the lowest common denominator, which makes for an unnecessarily rubbish experience on many platforms. iMessage goes for depth where other messaging platforms go for breadth.
But you do, for the arguments mentioned. Native iMessage client with native iMessage functionality versus SMS with whatever garbage implementation your carrier decided to go with.
You can distinguish between iMessage messages and SMS/RCS messages more subtly than making them a different color and going out of your way to 'other' non-iMessage users.
Can we stop labeling everything that people like a "public utility"? What is ridiculous phrase. At any point in time I can open 10 chat apps and talk to my friends.
There are _existing_ public utilities that have way more, _actual_ monopoly power than iMessage and federal, state and local governments do nothing - nay - support it.
or with people who _do_ understand other messaging platforms but choose to use iMessage? I fall (mostly) into the latter category. I well understand that other messaging systems exist, have accounts on a handful; but the people I communicate most with use iMessage. I'm not going to persuade them otherwise; and I'm not going to be harangued with notifications on a half-dozen different messaging apps.
> 50+ year olds
It's how I message with my 15 year old. And mostly how she messages with her friends.
I think the usage patterns are more nuanced than old/young and simpleton/cognoscenti.
I'm not sure I buy particularly the "Android users are jealous of a coherent ecosystem" part on two counts.
The first because you just said there is outstanding competition in the rich messaging space. Competition means a lot more than quantity of companies trying to do something. If, at a large scale, consumers are truly jealous of something they can't get without swapping hardware and OS providers to the message provider then competition is poor at best.
The second because I'm an iPhone owning user who uses Beeper, it has much better multi-os iMessage sync without having to sync/mirror my phone locally. So it's not just Android users it's even owners/users of Apple's products wanting to break a bit out of needing to use a Mac to get proper access to their iMessage. This widens the overall scope of the discussion quite a bit.
I will agree Beeper is entitled and lawmakers are clueless. We may differ on whether that entitlement is warranted or what lawmakers are clueless about though :).
Jealous? Is this Ford vs Chevy corporate worship? For me, the big problem with Apple's behavior is that combined with their market dominance with minors in the US, they're able to use social peer pressure to crush any competition. Having the wrong color text bubble in a chat is social death in many teen groups, so they all have to get Apple products to avoid this. Apple is all too happy to exploit the desire of children still developing their social skills to belong to a peer group.
Edit
>A survey reveals that an overwhelming 87% of American teens own an iPhone, and an even more staggering 88% plan to purchase an iPhone as their next smartphone.
This wouldn't be if Apple had done the right thing and made iMessage a standard or worked with Google on RCS. No. Apple wants to control. Beeper wants to make a profit. Android users are tired of feeling second-class to iOS users when they have the same hardware. Lawmakers are still clueless. End-users just want to be able to send media to friends and family. You're right it's getting ridiculous. Apple has every right to deny and go after Beeper. Apple publicly will say its for the security of their users. The reality is it's all about their bottom line and making sure people on iOS, stay on iOS.
Imagine that you created a monopoly by forcing users to switch to your product. You then locked out competitors, then intentionally degrade quality when your users attempt to contact the outside world. Then you created and fostered a culture of bullying other users (especially teens).
There is no "Poor Apple", there were mistakes, but mostly intentional malic the entire way. People repeatedly asked them to stop, people asked to be let in, and Apple had plenty of chances to allow RCS and additional layers of security like "Verified sent from Apple hardware".
> created a monopoly by forcing users to switch to your product
Under what possible manipulated definition of "forced" are you using? That Apple makes a desirable product? That they don't replace their messaging app every two years? That they don't bloat the phone with garbage?
Many aspects of society dictate that we use a phone. Apple forbidding interoperability of the phones so that you’re either all in or all out is anti competitive.
Not everyone is in the position to turn down a job because of a moral stance on the device(s)/tools they are assigned. Even if you think they are "weak" saying that to continue to fan the flames isn't going to help anything. Why not argue why you think those types of use cases shouldn't impact the decision instead?
Who said anything about turning down a job? You're just moving the goalposts at this point.
Everyone has their own personal device. I chose iPhone. But if I had a job where I had to use an Android for some reason, I wouldn't feel I was FORCED to use an Android, because I would only use that device for work related things, and my preferred device, the personal iPhone for everything else.
The goalposts remain the same, it's a one example of what they are. Some people are forced into situations they have to use one product over another, the situation isn't a matter of people having equal footing to just choose a non-integrated device all the time.
Of course you're welcome to use another device for your personal things but this doesn't mean the other choice limitations of the device in the required case are no longer present.
Personally I don't like whether an example of being boxed in is present as a decider though. My argument against it, instead of saying it just never happens, is that there needs to be a critical mass of occurrences. I.e. I think there are costs to both choosing to regulate or not regulate and it's a matter of when one outweighs the other not as much when some specific event occurs to some people. So, while many people do have to use Apple products for certain things in certain scenarios, it's not necessarily wrong by that fact. It's that it's so entrenched. I wouldn't call it a monopoly but I also don't want to wait until things are that bad to ever do anything, otherwise you end up with Microsofts doing massive damage before being reeled in.
Looking at Beeper’s website, I can see
> We currently offer a 7 day free trial, afterwards there is a $1.99 per month subscription.
I can’t imagine any company being okay with another company reverse-engineering their product and then charging for it, without at least paying for the infrastructure they’re using. Why is Apple expected to accept it?
Isn’t the reverse-engineering against Apple ToS anyway? As far as I know, it’s a pretty standard clause in basically every company’s ToS. How is Beeper supposed to "win" here, short of that sort of ToS clause being declared unenforceable?