[HN Gopher] Beeper - Moving Forward
___________________________________________________________________
Beeper - Moving Forward
Author : unshavedyak
Score : 278 points
Date : 2023-12-21 16:05 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.beeper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.beeper.com)
| spsesk117 wrote:
| I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the Beeper offices
| over the past few weeks. I've had a hard time guessing their
| intent.
|
| To some extent all of this Beeper Mini stuff seems to be almost
| an elaborate marketing stunt. I don't say that to diminish the
| impressive work of the team of anything like that, but it seems
| self-evident that Apple would hate this and I've been a bit
| surprised by the tone of the company throughout the past few
| weeks. The tone feels a bit like they've been surprised by
| Apple's response?
|
| With all of that said, I'm kind of selfishly happy they seem to
| be returning their focus to Beeper Cloud. I've been a very happy
| user of it for a while now and I don't particularly care about
| the iMessage functionality.
|
| I'm very impressed with what they've been able to achieve and
| overcome when taking on Apple here, and I'm really interested in
| where they'll go next.
| andwaal wrote:
| Totally agree, it has been fun to follow, but I really don't
| hope that this stunt destroys for the awesome product Beeper
| Cloud is. As an European user I couldn't care less about blue
| and green bubbles, all of my communication goes through FB
| messenger or Snap, only exception is the occasional SMS from
| old relatives without other platforms.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I'm increasingly of the belief that the plan was to become a
| nuisance so that Apple buys them out, to be accompanied by an
| incredible journey blog post, so proud of what we've done,
| excited about what comes next, etc., and then quietly dissolve
| the whole operation.
| striking wrote:
| I don't think the founders need any more money.
| chihuahua wrote:
| There are many people who "don't need any more money" but
| are still working day and night to make more money. For
| example, Satya or Tim Apple.
| striking wrote:
| Judging by their current projects I'd make the argument
| that Brad and Eric are working day and night to make
| things they find cool, even if it loses money.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Have you heard Eric talk about beeper? He genuinely
| believes that beeper is the future of message apps. He
| keeps saying that beeper is the only company that is
| completely focused on building a messaging app, and thats
| why they will win. He is simply deluded.
| striking wrote:
| I am a very happy customer of Beeper. It's a hard task
| and they're basically doing it for free. And all of my
| chats are more or less in one app. I even have my
| iMessage access back today.
|
| So I'll say that I get where you're coming from, but
| also, I believe him and Brad!
| eli wrote:
| Does Apple?
| malfist wrote:
| And yet, people like Musk and Bezos keep trying to make
| more money.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Musk, and probably Bezos, have goals that were previously
| only attainable by nation-states, which require nation-
| state-sized budgets.
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > Musk, and probably Bezos, have goals that were
| previously only attainable by nation-states, which
| require nation-state-sized budgets.
|
| A Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan discusses this a bit, not
| Musk and Bezos, but the cost of exploring space and his
| hope that space exploration was finally what would bring
| various nation states and humanity together. The irony is
| not lost on me that instead of bringing humanity and
| democracy to space, we instead brought back kings.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Perhaps I'm pessimistic, but I feel like humanity is a
| long way from our collective advancements being used for
| altruism. Space represents new territory to conquer.
| Smartphones aren't being used as the windows into global
| enlightenment, but more so as a means to spread hate and
| misinformation in manners that benefit the powers that
| be. Any of these things are relatively agnostic and still
| hold promise for the optimistic, but humanity needs a lot
| of growth for those dreams to be realized.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Why would Apple buy them? What value could they provide to
| Apple?
| playingalong wrote:
| Not being a nuisance.
| SnorkelTan wrote:
| For those who missed the incredible journey reference:
| https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
| harryVic wrote:
| I guess it is great marketing. I didn't even know they had a
| bleeper cloud offering.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Does their behaviour with beeper mini instill great
| confidence? Will you trust them with your credentials to all
| your chat apps?
| alright2565 wrote:
| The goal I see here is to get media[1] and regulator[2][3]
| attention on this issue, and to get Apple to clearly state
| their (anti-consumer) position. I'm sure Apple employees in
| every level and department have lost sleep over this.
|
| I don't think their expressed surprise is legitimate, but is
| instead a rhetorical choice to make Apple seem unreasonable.
|
| [1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/beeper-mini-brings-
| imessage...
|
| [2]: https://www.threads.net/@jolingkent/post/C0-zKSPrizx
|
| [3]: https://www.droid-life.com/2023/12/18/lawmakers-suggest-
| doj-...
| zwily wrote:
| You think Apple employees have lost sleep over this? I
| seriously doubt it...
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Employees, no. Executives, absolutely.
|
| Beeper put them between a rock and a hard place, where any
| action other than accepting Beeper would solicit regulatory
| action. This in fact ended up happening.
|
| Furthermore, I bet Beeper was outright hoping for a lawsuit
| from Apple, which would put up a well-publicized fight over
| adversarial interoperability that could yield to a
| disastrous legal precedent not just for Apple but other
| companies.
|
| Apple knows this and that's why they haven't sued them (or
| DMCA'd any repos).
| nwiswell wrote:
| > Furthermore, I bet Beeper was outright hoping for a
| lawsuit from Apple
|
| Doubtful. Beeper has several legitimate causes of action
| to bring their own suit, if they really expect that
| outcome (and more importantly, if they have the financial
| resources to litigate)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Beeper wouldn't have any arguments to stand on had they
| initiated the lawsuit - after all, Apple _is_ allowed to
| make changes to their protocol as they see fit.
|
| However, the regular pattern we've seen is that companies
| use copyright and/or ToS as basis for C&D'ing (with
| threat of litigation) developers that produce
| adversarily-interoperable solutions.
|
| If Apple did so (and Apple would've absolutely done it if
| Beeper wasn't a reasonably well-funded adversary), Beeper
| would suddenly have an argument, as well as the support
| of the media ("Apple sues small company for opening up
| iMessage to Android") and the potential to establish a
| legal precedent that would threaten not just Apple but
| the tech industry at large.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| This isn't how the law works. If it's a valid defence,
| it's a valid injunction.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't think neither Beeper nor Apple is doing anything
| illegal here. Neither has any legs to stand on for a
| lawsuit.
|
| However, it's a common pattern that large companies can
| shut down adversarially-interoperable projects by
| threatening litigation against the developers. The
| lawsuit might be baseless but would still require upfront
| resources to defend; this is what these companies rely
| on, so they get their way without the argument ever
| getting into a courtroom.
|
| If Apple brought forward such a lawsuit and Beeper
| actually litigated it to the end (and actually got it
| into a courtroom), it would risk creating a legal
| precedent that would enshrine adversarial
| interoperability as legal and make such future bullshit
| legal threats ineffective. That is a major risk not just
| for Apple but the tech industry at large.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Sure. But if that were Beeper's goal, they'd file for an
| injunction. Waiting for someone to sue you to set
| precedent isn't a thing in civil law.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Fair enough. I'm obviously just speculating here and my
| knowledge of the US legal system is hearsay.
|
| However, it seems that Beeper effectively got what they
| wanted (bipartisan calls for regulatory action against
| Apple, and lots of media coverage over the issue) without
| any lawyers being involved.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Beeper effectively got what they wanted (bipartisan
| calls for regulatory action against Apple_
|
| Media attention, yes. Policy support, no.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Wouldn't this count:
| https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/18/beeper-mini-broken-
| antitrust/ ?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It looks like a sounding document--you put it out and see
| who calls. If quality voters call in support, it gains
| momentum. If it's crickets, or only people messaging why
| they like the _status quo_ , it's dropped.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I don't think neither Beeper nor Apple is doing
| anything illegal here.
|
| Beeper could definitely be prosecuted by the Feds.
|
| Aaron Swartz is probably the most famous example of
| someone being prosecuted using the Computer Fraud and
| Abuse Act. He was merely accessing a web server without
| permission and wasn't even trying to turn a profit.
| amazingman wrote:
| >Beeper put them between a rock and a hard place
|
| "Should we allow a third party we have no control over to
| man-in-the-middle our end-to-end encrypted messaging
| service or not? This is a tough one!"
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Nobody is MiTM'ing anything. Individuals willingly
| provide their credentials and only get access to their
| own messages - the same messages they can voluntarily
| take screenshots of & publish by logging into a real
| Apple device. Furthermore, Beeper's app runs entirely on-
| device with an _optional_ cloud-hosted bridge that may
| not even have access to the plaintext.
| amazingman wrote:
| Beeper's app is the MiTM. I already have to trust Apple
| not to abuse their privileged position re: e2e iMessage.
| Now I have to trust Beeper, Apple, and Apple has to
| continuously trust/verify Beeper. Privacy and interop are
| fundamentally in opposition here, and I find Beeper's PR
| approach regarding this to be misleading at best.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Beeper is as much of an MITM as your e-mail client is
| one, or your FTP client, or your SSH client, or your
| browser. Should those also be frowned upon? After all,
| they both implement a cryptographic protocol and have
| access to the plaintext.
|
| You also don't have to trust Beeper because you are not
| obliged to use it. You are welcome to not use it (and buy
| an Apple device) or even fall back to SMS.
|
| The recipient can themselves decide what level of
| security they want and whether they trust Beeper (but
| they don't need Beeper to compromise their security -
| they can just as well post screenshots of your
| E2E-encrypted messages with them, make a backup on a
| compromised computer or leak their Apple/iCloud
| credentials).
| amazingman wrote:
| Email isn't end to end encrypted. FTP and SSH are client-
| server protocols whereas iMessage is client-
| server(s)-client.
|
| Do you actually believe these things you're claiming, or
| are you arguing for the sake of contrarianism?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Email isn't end to end encrypted
|
| E-mail can be end-to-end encrypted; you can use PGP (of
| which there are multiple implementations, all compatible)
| or some other custom cryptographic protocol. Having
| multiple compatible implementations does in no way
| prevent it from being secure.
|
| > FTP and SSH are client-server protocols whereas
| iMessage is client-server(s)-client.
|
| I don't understand how iMessage and FTP are different?
| Both have a server which mediates communication between
| different clients. The FTP server accepts & persists
| files which other clients then see and can download. The
| iMessage server does something similar but with messages.
|
| > Do you actually believe these things you're claiming
|
| Yes? I believe every person should have the right to
| choose which software they use to interact with services,
| whether it's first-party, third-party, or their own
| creation. I don't know nor care which browser you're
| using to read & reply to my comments and shouldn't have a
| say it in in any case - whatever happens on your machine
| is your own business only.
|
| I don't understand what is so extreme about my position?
| It's like arguing that being able to open & create
| Microsoft Office files in anything but a Microsoft-
| approved version is heresy.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It is pretty much universally frowned upon to provide
| your credentials to a 3rd party. Plenty of places will
| suspend your account if discovered you have done this.
| Building a product that relies on receiving user's
| credentials to 3rd parties is just building your company
| on a foundation of very dry/loose sand
| Nextgrid wrote:
| To be fair, Beeper Mini operates entirely on your device,
| the _optional_ cloud component is there because there 's
| literally no other way. It's like an e-mail client, or an
| FTP or SSH client, or a browser. Are those considered bad
| now?
|
| > Plenty of places will suspend your account if
| discovered you have done this.
|
| Plenty of services base their business on restricted
| interoperability and suspend your account not because of
| security but because they'd miss out on all the
| "engagement" they get from the official client. This has
| nothing to do with security.
| dylan604 wrote:
| In the rare time I'd make a pro-Twit...er, X comment, if
| the platform makes its money from ads being delivered
| next to the content and then 3rd party comes up with a
| way to provide the users an ad free experience, OF COURSE
| they will not be happy with that. But this isn't specific
| to that particular platform. Any time you assist users in
| circumventing a method for the platform to earn money
| will be viewed as hostile. If you are build a product and
| pay a licensing fee to offset the lost earnings, then
| that would be potentially viewed as less hostile even if
| still not 100% accepted by the platform.
|
| This isn't rocket science.
| ClarityJones wrote:
| > Plenty of places will suspend your account if
| discovered you have done this.
|
| And yet that's not the route Apple chose to take.
| dylan604 wrote:
| if you can take out the 3rd party tempting Apple users
| from doing this, then Apple doesn't have to lose those
| users. doesn't seem very strange for them to do this.
| however, if it's not something that Apple could control
| on their end, then they probably still have the "suspend
| user" club in their bag
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Wait until you discover how Plaid works.
| mplewis wrote:
| Plaid is also bad.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Plaid is bad, but is there another way? (OAuth and PSD2
| could be, and IIRC they use that for banks that support
| it, but many banks don't.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| I very much am aware of how Plaid works and will not use
| it.
|
| Someone recently really tried to get me to use Chime. As
| soon as the "must use Plaid" part came up in their
| onboarding, I stopped immediately. It's just a shame that
| I had already provided Chime so much of my information
| just to stop there.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > "Should we allow a third party we have no control over
| to man-in-the-middle our end-to-end encrypted messaging
| service or not? This is a tough one!"
|
| That's absolutely not what's happening, and I think
| Beeper's response here was totally correct.
|
| There is no encryption, at all, between iOS and Android
| clients if the iOS user is using iMessage. And,
| furthermore, my understanding is that the presence of a
| _single_ Android user in a group chat means _nobody_ gets
| an encrypted messaging experience.
|
| In the past, Apple's response to this has literally been
| "Buy your grandmother an iPhone". How can anyone not call
| incredible amounts of bullshit when their response to a
| company that actually let, for the first time, an Android
| user have an encrypted conversation with an iOS user as
| "This is unacceptable, we can't allow this" _and_ claim
| it 's because Apple care's about user security???
|
| Not enough BS chutzpah in the universe for that one.
| advael wrote:
| This is a great illustration of how you can only take
| Apple's security claims seriously if you don't understand
| them.
|
| One of the primary benefits of end to end encryption is
| that it can protect messages from an untrusted carrier.
| In other words, a proper encrypted messaging setup is not
| vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks
| turquoisevar wrote:
| I hate to be the one to bursts bubbles, but there's no
| cause of action here under the current legislation. None.
|
| That is unless we're talking about Beeper being the
| defendant.
|
| They have incurred criminal liability by violating the
| CFAA and committing computer trespass and civil liability
| by violating the the OS license agreement and ToS that
| both prohibit reverse engineering (yes that supersedes
| DMCA exception) not to mention the general copyright
| violations of reselling Apple's IP for $2/mo (pypush
| isn't without proprietary Apple code).
|
| CCIPS would have a field day with this and if by some
| weird "blow up in your face fashion" they get their hands
| on the referral after the antitrust division of the DOJ
| is done shrugging at it, Beeper might get more than they
| bargained for.
|
| The only thing that could actually affect Apple in this,
| is if legislators pass new bills. The problem however is
| that this would have cascading effects across the
| industry, if not the economy as a whole, because there's
| no way to legislate this in such a way that it would only
| affect Apple and Apple alone.
|
| Anything short of that makes for a fun fantasy that I'm
| sure some people will get off on, but a fantasy
| nonetheless.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Keep in mind that Beeper is a company (backed by some
| people wealthy enough to open themselves up to litigation
| against Apple) and most/all of the CFAA horror stories
| have been against defenseless individuals, so it might
| play out very differently as corporations are given much
| more leniency.
|
| Beeper has managed to get enough media coverage on this
| issue that any litigants will need to consider before
| bringing any suits, including attention from legislators
| themselves who are calling for antitrust investigation.
| That's no small feat and suggests Apple may not be on as
| solid footing as you think.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| This has been my gut feeling about the entire thing and I
| don't understand so much about:
|
| a) How Beeper thought they had a business model here
|
| b) How so many HN readers can justify flagrant misuse of
| private API's and servers as some sort of liberatory move
|
| Apple's iMessage service is a privately owned, privately
| hosted, closed source protocol and always has been. You
| are not allowed to use it without an iPhone, an iPad, or
| a Mac and you never have been allowed to use it
| otherwise. That's just... what it is. You can dislike
| that, you can think it's anti-competitive and you might
| even have a case for it, I guess we'll see, but insofar
| as I can see it:
|
| iMessage is a closed source, walled garden, private
| protocol Apple uses to permit a higher tier of text
| messaging for owners of iDevices. There is no reason at
| all to think you're entitled to access that service
| without using the aforementioned devices, and there's
| even less reason to be surprised in the slightest that,
| when a company was offering services to bypass those
| requirements and use the API without meeting Apple's
| requirements, that Apple would shut that shit _right
| down._
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > You are not allowed to use it without an iPhone, an
| iPad, or a Mac and you never have been allowed to use it
| otherwise
|
| What about for those who do own an Apple device and thus
| paid the "tax" to use iMessage, but want/need to use it
| on unapproved devices out of convenience? The argument
| would be very different if Apple merely restricted the
| service to Apple IDs associated to a valid Apple device
| purchase, but that's not what they're doing. They're
| clearly not making the cost/resource usage argument
| otherwise it would be trivial for them to implement such
| a restriction.
|
| > There is no reason at all to think you're entitled to
| access that service without using the aforementioned
| devices
|
| Would you also apply that argument to Microsoft Office
| files? Microsoft would sure love it if it would be
| forbidden to create/edit such files in anything but
| Microsoft software. Would you also want
| LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Apple's very own
| Pages/Numbers/Keynote to not be able to read such files?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > What about for those who do own an Apple device and
| thus paid the "tax" to use iMessage, but want/need to use
| it on unapproved devices out of convenience?
|
| You'd probably be told no, that you can only access it
| via Apple's devices. Your options there are to access it
| via approved devices or use a different service. You
| cannot arbitrarily bypass requirements to use it how you
| want to use it and expect Apple to just organizationally
| shrug their shoulders.
|
| > The argument would be very different if Apple merely
| restricted the service to Apple IDs associated to a valid
| Apple device purchase, but that's not what they're doing.
|
| That's correct. They only want their hardware and
| software on all ends of this traffic. That is not
| inherently unreasonable or anti-competitive and is likely
| spelled out in the terms of service.
|
| > Would you also apply that argument to Microsoft Office
| files? Microsoft would sure love it if it would be
| forbidden to create/edit such files in anything but
| Microsoft software. Would you also want
| LibreOffice/OpenOffice/Apple's very own
| Pages/Numbers/Keynote to not be able to read such files?
|
| I think it would be a bad decision on the part of
| Microsoft to attempt that, as the file formats are
| already supported by other software and artificially
| restricting them to only Microsoft apps would only serve
| to drive users to Libre/Open office, but ultimately
| having proprietary file formats that are crypto-
| graphically secured is also _not without precedence_ and
| also _not inherently anti-competitive._ At my current
| employer we sell specialized software for maintaining
| machinery, and our files are _locked right down_ because
| that 's how we make our money: the ability to open, save,
| and utilize our files is our entire business model so
| you're damn right it's secured. That's not anti-
| competitive either: if you don't like how we do our
| business, you are free to use a competitor's product.
| What you're not free to do is crack open our software and
| use it anyway.
|
| Edit: I'm being rate limited:
|
| > This is closer to a Telcom/Basic Utility law issue
|
| No, it isn't, because iMessage is not the _only way to
| text on an iPhone._ It degrades gracefully into full
| compliance with SMS /MMS protocols to allow it to text
| Androids, Blackberries, or flip phones.
|
| > and is the default way to text message on this "basic
| utility" platform
|
| No it is not, SMS/MMS is. If your iPhone is in a
| particularly bad data area, it will _also SMS other
| iPhones absent it 's ability to contact the iMessage
| service._
|
| > Interoperability should be a given
|
| _IT IS._
| topato wrote:
| But what about the companies that make the machinery that
| you produce software for? Shouldn't they have the right
| to prevent you from accessing their built hardware and
| force companies to get service from them directly?
| Obviously I don't know what your company does exactly,
| but it and Microsoft are both very bad examples. This is
| closer to a Telcom/Basic Utility law issue, imsg is used
| by roughly half of Americans, more than half in Europe,
| and is the default way to text message on this "basic
| utility" platform. Interoperability should be a given and
| it's closer to a Ma Bell situation This is starkly
| similar to the tweaking of antimonopoly practices that
| needed to be hammered out back in the 80s to break up
| Bell.
| closewith wrote:
| > You cannot arbitrarily bypass requirements to use it
| how you want to use it and expect Apple to just
| organizationally shrug their shoulders.
|
| Corporate policies aren't absolute. It doesn't matter if
| a provider dislikes the manner in which it's services are
| used if that use is found to be protected by law, which
| is obviously what Beeper is hoping for.
| haswell wrote:
| > _How so many HN readers can justify flagrant misuse of
| private API 's and servers as some sort of liberatory
| move_
|
| So that I better understand your position, would you feel
| differently if Beeper Mini was just a GitHub repo hosting
| the code to an unofficial 3rd party iMessage client? Why
| or why not?
|
| HN as a community is made up of quite a few people who
| care about interoperability, the right to use our
| computers as we see fit, the joy of building solutions to
| solve problems that other people won't solve, etc.
|
| What is surprising to me is the growing number of
| comments that are defending Apple and framing the
| creation of an unofficial 3rd party client using terms
| like "flagrant misuse".
|
| Don't get me wrong. I didn't expect Apple not to fight
| this, but I think we need to walk back the hyperbole a
| bit and consider how utterly normal it is for developers
| to try to build their own clients when the official
| options either suck or are too restrictive.
|
| I do think that trying to charge for the service was a
| questionable decision.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > So that I better understand your position, would you
| feel differently if Beeper Mini was just a GitHub repo
| hosting the code to an unofficial 3rd party iMessage
| client? Why or why not?
|
| I mean, I think using that code would be a risky
| proposition at best that might earn you as a user the ire
| of Apple, and I wouldn't personally do it, but
| ultimately, showing people how to do a thing, or even
| providing the executable I don't think itself is a crime.
|
| That said, I would also not be remotely surprised if
| Apple figured out how to block it's access to it's API's
| too. And, if there is money involved or if the breach is
| egregious enough in some other way, I don't think it
| would be altogether unexpected for the authors to find
| themselves in some legal hot water too, and/or for Github
| to receive a takedown notice.
|
| > HN as a community is made up of quite a few people who
| care about interoperability, the right to use our
| computers as we see fit, the joy of building solutions to
| solve problems that other people won't solve, etc.
|
| Which I respect on the whole, but the key difference here
| is you are not _just using your computer /smartphone,_
| you are using _Apple 's computers too._ That's where I
| find the disconnect. Each time Beeper Mini connects to
| those servers it is using compute resources, however
| infinitesimal, to perform it's functionality:
| functionality that is not supported, that fundamentally,
| Apple is now paying for. And you can justify that any way
| you want, but at the end of the day, that's stealing. And
| Apple is perfectly within their rights, IMO, to block it
| and if they feel they have a case, to pursue it legally
| afterwards.
|
| > Don't get me wrong. I didn't expect Apple not to fight
| this, but I think we need to walk back the hyperbole a
| bit and consider how utterly normal it is for developers
| to try to build their own clients when the official
| options either suck or are too restrictive.
|
| And if you're talking about open protocols or API's, you
| have my support 100%! I've _done some of that kind of
| work._ But you can 't just use API's that are publicly
| available but otherwise closed to you just because you
| want to. That's textbook misuse.
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| > unless we're talking about Beeper being the defendant
|
| Yes that's the point, Beeper are probably hoping Apple
| sues them for the reasons you describe.
|
| > criminal liability by violating the CFAA and committing
| computer trespass
|
| This is pretty tenuous. They do have proper authorization
| because the keys in question are valid iMessage keys and
| they are being used by the same individuals those
| iMessage keys are allocated to. They're not trying to
| commit any further crime post-access.
|
| > violating the the OS license agreement and ToS [...]
| (yes that supersedes DMCA exception)
|
| Does it? This seems like a pretty textbook case of
| reverse engineering for interoperability.
|
| > reselling Apple's IP for $2/mo
|
| Probably the case they're hoping for a lawsuit on - the
| degree to which Apple has legitimate claim to control use
| of the iMessage protocol given their market presence. In
| the process of the lawsuit, if Apple is found to be
| leveraging this protocol anti-competitively, they're in
| trouble.
|
| And beyond that, Apple is a highly litigious company with
| great lawyers and _extremely_ deep pockets and large
| incentives to defend their ownership of the messaging
| market.
|
| That they've been this slow to sue Beeper probably
| signals enough on its own that there's probably no field
| day to be had.
| mikeryan wrote:
| Your premise seems to be that they want Apple to sue
| them?
|
| That point is moot now.
| Frivolous9421 wrote:
| >CFAA violation for logging into your own iMessage
| account and using the service
|
| Not fucking likely
| sgustard wrote:
| Apple is a massive company that swats away pesky threats
| all the time. It's like Exxon executives losing sleep
| over a guy with a hose siphoning gas from the corner
| station. From a PR standpoint they won't dignify it with
| a response of any kind, other than to quietly crush it to
| dust.
| _Microft wrote:
| As an iPhone user, I'm pretty happy how Apple dealt with this
| so far. I would hate to get spammed on iMessage and knowing
| that my messages are rendered exactly as intended on the
| receiver's side is reassuring.
|
| Calling this anti-consumer is rather subjective.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Your messages are all screwed up when delivered to anyone
| not using an iPhone. Pictures and movies are basically
| destroyed and worthless.
|
| The fake spam complaint is addressed in the article.
| _Microft wrote:
| > Your messages are all screwed up when delivered to
| anyone not using an iPhone. Pictures and movies are
| basically destroyed and worthless.
|
| Sure and it is absolutely obvious on my side because
| these contacts don't show blue messages. Take that away
| and the situation turns worse because now I'd have to
| guess.
|
| Edit: don't get me wrong - I don't send broken messages,
| I just contact them on other messengers instead.
| sanex wrote:
| It's obvious to you but not obvious to your average
| iPhone user which is why I get videos with 3 pixels sent
| to me repeatedly. On the flip side I can mms videos with
| acceptable resolution just fine. It's all just to try and
| keep people in the system, not because it's a better user
| experience.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Bullshit. AT&T limits MMS videos to 1 MB, Verizon to
| between 1 MB and 3.5 MB depending on the sender,
| T-Mobile/Sprint 1 MB to 3 MB depending. If you're getting
| "acceptable resolution" H.264 videos they're being sent
| over RCS.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| I'm likely wrong here but isn't that a problem with SMS
| and not necessarily iMessage?
| daedalus_j wrote:
| I can exchange MMS to other Android users (and it's MMS,
| not RCS) that aren't ridiculously compressed, so I've
| always assumed it was Apple.
| giantrobot wrote:
| MMS limitations stem from the carrier. They have
| different attachment size limits which affects how
| Messages will encode the content.
| jmye wrote:
| This is absolutely, unconditonally untrue. I can send a
| message to an Android user just fine. SMS is delivered as
| it is anywhere else. Pictures go through fine - my
| partner and I can, and do, regularly share pictures
| without any issue at all.
|
| Why hyperbolize things and spread outright nonsense? To
| what possible end?
| sixothree wrote:
| I experience the issues described when texting android
| users.
| Larrikin wrote:
| MMS in 2023 is not an acceptable fallback. We all have
| cameras capable of shooting amazing pictures and 4k
| movies.
|
| The size limit destroys decent looking pictures and
| basically prevents movies from even being an option with
| how grainy they appear stretched out on our 4k screens.
|
| This is ignoring all the other interactive elements that
| are just table stakes in any kind of messaging
| application that make SMS absolutely terrible in
| comparison.
| Grustaf wrote:
| If you do don't like mms, don't use it, there are tons of
| alternatives. I have half a dozen chat apps.
| luma wrote:
| The Apple Stockholm Syndrome is endemic on HN. The lengths
| people will go to support open source and open access while
| also vehemently defending the exact opposite behavior from
| Apple is astounding.
| _Microft wrote:
| I do more than enough tinkering but my phone's supposed
| to just work.
| luma wrote:
| How is your tinkering enhanced by Apple making it
| difficult to communicate outside of their kingdom?
| riscy wrote:
| I don't see Google making it easier to communicate
| outside of their kingdom. AFAIK Google's RCS (with their
| encryption extensions) is not an industry standard or
| available for 3rd party apps to use. Why is the
| expectation only on Apple to make such changes?
| tedd4u wrote:
| Apple says they will implement RCS in 2024.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/16/23964171/apple-
| iphone-rc...
| legobmw99 wrote:
| Without end to end encryption, because that is not part
| of the standard, as the grandparent comment said
| nicoburns wrote:
| IMO they should also be made to open up. As should
| whatsapp and facebook messenger.
| luma wrote:
| My suspicion is that someone like the EU made it clear to
| Apple that they would either interop or the EU would make
| them do so. They have finally relented to support RCS in
| the coming year.
| riscy wrote:
| I'm glad it's happening. RCS finally got widespread
| carrier adoption (minus encryption) and it's a big
| improvement over SMS!
| luma wrote:
| RCS is a spec ratified by the GSMA, the same standards
| body that specified things like SMS. Google tried to get
| Apple to do RCS, they refused, then Google tried to get a
| license to interop with iMessage and Apple refused again.
| Google has tried literally everything to try and get
| Apple to play ball here.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > Google has tried literally everything to try and get
| Apple to play ball here.
|
| You're framing it in a nefarious way as if Apple is flat
| out denying it. They didn't. They would have to LOWER
| security in iPhones by implementing RCS because iMessages
| have E2EE but RCS doesn't. Which is something all you
| anti-Apple people seem to conveniently leave out, because
| you know nobody would take it seriously if you said it.
| xg15 wrote:
| Well I guess then they should let other people interop
| with iMessage directly, so the E2EE can be kept.
| ruszki wrote:
| In the thread to which you replied, somebody mentioned
| that it's possible to do that on top RCS, and Google
| already did it. If Apple wants to make their own
| encryption they can do it, nothing stops them.
| Interoperability would still be better, just like in the
| case of Google with other RCS solutions.
| riscy wrote:
| Please explain how interoperability between messaging
| apps is possible if two different, proprietary E2EE
| schemes are used atop RCS.
|
| Google's interop "solution" with the Samsung messages app
| is by not using encryption. Apple has that same level of
| support coming to iOS next year, and has also announced
| plans to work with GSMA on adding standardized encryption
| to RCS.
| ruszki wrote:
| I like that you put Google's solution into apostrophes,
| while Apple's current solution has the same problem, and
| even more. But I'm glad that we agree.
| nicce wrote:
| > In the thread to which you replied, somebody mentioned
| that it's possible to do that on top RCS, and Google
| already did it
|
| Google made a copy of iMessage since it is closed source
| and can talk to only to the same app. How is that better?
| shawnz wrote:
| the iPhone messages app already supports unencrypted SMS
| though
| riscy wrote:
| > One thing that isn't part of the [RCS standard ratified
| by GSMA] is the encryption standard Google is adopting.
| It's building it on top of RCS right into the Android
| Messages client.
|
| > If you are texting with somebody who isn't using
| Android Messages (say, somebody using Samsung Messages or
| an iPhone), the fallback to either less-encrypted RCS
| chat or SMS will still work just fine.
|
| Sounds like Samsung users need to separately download
| Android Messages to get E2EE.
|
| Quotes from
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-
| enc... which is cited by Wikpedia on RCS.
| paulmd wrote:
| the best part is that I, as a google voice user, still
| don't have RCS support even though it's a google product.
|
| google implemented the exact minimum they'd need to give
| them a foot to cry on in the courts, and no further. and
| now that there is a mandate to implement RCS, they almost
| certainly will choose to kill google voice rather than
| implement it. I am already planning my exit strategy,
| because otherwise they'll take my phone number with it.
| and this is not trivial, we are talking about buying
| another phone (hopefully it will make it until the next-
| gen iphone with N3E) and paying for two lines for a
| couple of months. This is a pain in the ass for me.
|
| and google has already embrace-extend-extinguished the
| standard - their encryption implementation is
| _proprietary_ and they 've refused to let anyone interop,
| so essentially they have put themselves as imessage 2.0
| but with google as the man in the middle this time.
| redhale wrote:
| You seem to be mistaken:
| https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-
| iphone/
| paulmd wrote:
| OP didn't say they tinkered on their phone - actually the
| total opposite. Read it again.
|
| "I do more than enough tinkering but my phone's supposed
| to just work."
|
| Anyway, you've missed the point that at the end of the
| day there's real-world benefits to many of the things
| people complain about. The FindMy lockout prevents phone
| theft (and has strong reductions in theft rates for these
| users). Serializing parts prevents thieves from stripping
| stolen phones and selling for parts. Having only one app
| store prevents large players with high social leverage
| (tencent, facebook, etc) from demanding you install their
| app store to bypass the Apple's review/permissions
| process to spy on you (FB already got caught using dev
| credentials to do it anyway). Etc.
|
| I tend to agree, that a phone is not where I care to
| tinker in my life. Having it be secure and well-
| integrated is more important to me, I have a PC if I want
| to tinker. I can sign and sideload apps already if I want
| to try something (for 7 days), or getting an official dev
| credential extends this to 30 days. Android phones have a
| real problem with support lifespan and OEM parts
| availability, and I have no desire to install third-party
| ROMs and then spoof safetynet so I can run my bank app.
| Assuming that's even an option at all - Sony for example
| will wipe the camera's firmware when you unlock the
| bootloader, so it degrades to flip-phone levels.
|
| "Not everyone wants to be stallman trying to figure out
| how to root their phone and spoof safetynet" is actually
| a great way to put it.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Those are not contradictory viewpoints anymore being pro
| housing but not wanting random homeless people in your
| house while you're away isn't contradictory either.
| Grustaf wrote:
| It's not Stockholm syndrome, you incorrectly assume that
| every iPhone owner is some kind of mini Stallman. Most
| people really don't care about all this stuff, they just
| want a product that works well, with minimum fuss. They
| don't care about third party appstores. Sideloading, open
| sourcing imessage and all this linux hacker stuff.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Are you okay with Apple not supporting RCS on their phones?
| As far as I can tell, that strictly worsens your experience
| as a user.
| _Microft wrote:
| I was not familiar with RCS yet but according to
| Wikipedia, Apple will begin to support RCS in 2024.
|
| On the other hand, this doesn't exactly inspire
| confidence that it is going to be a polished experience:
| _,,Not all RCS functions defined in the standard are
| offered by every network and every client; only the
| services that are available to two communication partners
| are also offered in the client."_ (translated from the
| German Wikipedia article).
| forty wrote:
| That's one of the point of the article. It's not known
| whether the RCS implementation of apple will be
| interoperable with Android's.
| Grustaf wrote:
| I've had iPhones for ten years and never once cared about
| RCS. Never even heard of it until recently, and I don't
| think anyone I know has ever heard of it. It's very very
| niche to care at all about it.
| crakhamster01 wrote:
| This comment makes no sense - I'm an iPhone user and
| receive spam almost daily. And if it's reassuring to know
| that your messages are rendered correctly, Beeper Mini
| would only expand the number of contacts that this applies
| to.
|
| How exactly is Beeper worsening the iPhone experience?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Please drink verification can and continue.
|
| Anyone unsure what this means: it's a popular meme where
| the future of cloud/online gaming will degrade to cross-
| sell products maliciously. (Requiring the user to drink a
| sugary soft drink to continue using the product).
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >I've had a hard time guessing their intent
|
| They were selling a service for $2/month. Did everyone forget
| that? For essentially a tosser app that could quickly be a
| pretty lucrative amount of money.
|
| There is some white knight narrative that has suddenly arisen
| that isn't based in reality. That these guys are freedom
| fighters that just wanted to take on Goliath. In reality
| they're capitalists who saw a way to make money off of a proof
| of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they could shame the
| target into not taking obvious actions to squash them.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > In reality they're capitalists who saw a way to make money
| off of a proof of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they
| could shame the target into not taking obvious actions to
| squash them.
|
| The "target" here is also literally the largest company in
| the world, whose executives have been discussing since _2013_
| about how to lock families into an iPhone monopoly that costs
| thousands of dollars a year by restricting iMessage [1].
|
| There are no white knights here (it's all a money game), but
| Beeper's stance isn't as one-sided and ridiculous as you're
| making it out to be.
|
| ----------------------------------------
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609
| /ph...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| I said that Beeper saw a business opportunity _to make
| money_. This is without question. You 're posing a false
| dichotomy that therefore I'm somehow sainting Apple or
| something, which simply isn't true: Apple _absolutely_ is
| out to make money (humorously a couple of days ago I called
| Apple one of the greediest companies -- in a bad way --
| ever, and my comment was flagged which...rofl), and
| absolutely no one doubts that. No one is claiming that
| Apple are the white knights in this or any other situation.
| mattl wrote:
| What does tosser app mean in this context?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| It is a simple app, and is yet another of literally
| thousands of chat apps. The single compelling reason why it
| would be in a position of charging fees is purely because
| it backdoored into Apple services (which Apple of course
| bears the burden of), using Apple device identifiers to
| access it. The value they were trying to convert to cash
| was Apple's.
| DirkH wrote:
| But... It wasn't simple. No other app has been able to
| create the bridge they created. We all saw their initial
| trending HW post and the impressive technical breakdown.
|
| If it were simple many others would have done this by
| now.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >If it were simple many others would have done this by
| now.
|
| Would they? Not only was it obviously going to get
| crushed by Apple (this isn't some 20/20 hindsight -- when
| they first announced this I stated exactly what they were
| doing and exactly the reasons why it would be easily
| squashed), it's actually _completely illegal!_. Like if
| Apple were so inclined they could actually demand legal
| action of the criminal kind. Apple has been incredibly
| soft-handed about this whole thing.
| hx8 wrote:
| Incredibly early user of beeper here. I actually didn't
| use it for iMessage at all. The Matrix Bridge system they
| used (bridge slack, discord, sms, etc) to allow all of my
| communications into a single app had real complexity. My
| biggest concern was the front end -- the simpler part of
| the app -- wasn't very good. The back end had complexity
| if you ignore the iMessage bridge.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I didn't realize making an app like beeper was so simple,
| can you recommend your favorite alternative? The other
| 3rd party apps I've tried to use for FB tend to have lots
| of problems (eg missing/delayed notifications, rendering
| issues).
| borski wrote:
| They stopped charging almost immediately, as soon as the
| iMessage functionality was broken, and never started again.
| This is a strawman.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| They literally released this as a commercial service for
| $2/month. That they removed fees temporarily while it was
| _completely broken_ does not make my statement of absolute,
| verifiable, incontestable fact a "strawman".
|
| History isn't rewritten because they lost.
| borski wrote:
| Fair enough. I don't disagree they saw it as a way to
| make some money.
|
| I took your comment to imply that as a result of
| charging, their goal in fighting Apple was to "get back
| to charging $2/mo" which is a pretty surface-level
| statement. Their goal is to get iMessage on Android
| phones. I honestly doubt they'd care if they were the
| ones who eventually did it, as the main thing they
| eventually plan on making money off of is Beeper, not
| Beeper Mini.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If this was any where near the truth, they would not have
| started charging at all. It would have been released as a
| free app to gain traction, and then start charging money
| for it. They fact that they started charging on such a
| slippery app shows it was a cash grab
| DirkH wrote:
| I could just as easily claim there is more of a "they are
| just capitalists trying to sell a white knight narrative"
| narrative than an actual white knight narrative.
|
| They're a smaller business that wants to make money, but
| Apple doesn't want to play fair. I agree with this part of
| their blog:
|
| "Apple is within their rights to run iMessage how they see
| fit"
|
| This might be true if Apple was a small company. But they
| aren't. They control more than 50% of the US smartphone
| market, and lock customers into using Apple's official app
| for texting (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way
| people communicate). Large companies that dominate their
| industry must follow a different set of rules that govern
| fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to
| innovation. We are not experts in antitrust law, but Apple's
| actions have already caught the attention of US Congress and
| the Department of Justice.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Yes, there is only the official app to send sms. Do you
| think anyone cares? Have you ever heard anyone yearn for a
| third party app to send texts?
| i5-2520M wrote:
| Look up some alternative SMS clients on the Play Store
| and you will see there is a market for it. People on
| forums have been also complaining about there being no
| way to do this with RCS.
| i5-2520M wrote:
| Look up some alternative SMS clients on the Play Store
| and you will see there is a market for it. People on
| forums have been also complaining about there being no
| way to do this with RCS.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Large companies that dominate their industry must follow
| a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm
| to consumers and barriers to innovation.
|
| Must? You're really going to need to provide some actual
| citations there. Tortured interpretations of anti-trust
| laws do not count.
| kotaKat wrote:
| They should do Google Messages next. Isn't there _still_ not an
| API to integrate third party chat into Google 's walled RCS
| garden?
| eredengrin wrote:
| Beeper Cloud has had google messages support since at least
| September.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Is that an official API, or a hacked implementation like
| their iMessage client?
| tedd4u wrote:
| Apple says they will implement RCS in 2024.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2023/11/16/apple-rcs-coming-to-iphone/
| Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal
| Profile, the standard as currently published by the
| GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile
| will offer a better interoperability experience when
| compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage,
| which will continue to be the best and most secure
| messaging experience for Apple users.
| creativeembassy wrote:
| The article addresses this.
|
| > Just one year ago, Tim Cook had this to say about RCS: "I
| don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in
| on that at this point. [...] Buy your mom an iPhone."
|
| > Long story short, I will believe it when I see it. Apple
| has a long history of claiming they will support an open
| standard, then failing to add support. In 2010, Steve Jobs
| promised that Apple 'would make FaceTime an open industry
| standard'. That never happened. More recently, in 2021,
| Apple promised to open their Find My network to competitors
| like Tile. Instead, they've penalized Tile by additional
| warnings in front of their app.
| rchaud wrote:
| > I've had a hard time guessing their intent.
|
| They say in the post that they will focus on their own chat app
| going forward. This is their last attempt at making Beeper
| work.
| airstrike wrote:
| _> The tone feels a bit like they 've been surprised by Apple's
| response?_
|
| What they say and how they really feel aren't necessarily the
| same thing
| samstave wrote:
| > _Beeper Mini stuff seems to be almost an elaborate marketing
| stunt_
|
| Imagine if they knew for some time the cutoff date from Apple
| so they released mini just before to ride the PR tsunami, That
| would be nice.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It was a bad idea from day 1
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Exactly, beeper has no credibility
| COGlory wrote:
| Eric's not an idiot, so I'm thoroughly confused by what he was
| hoping to accomplish, here.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| someone had to do it. i thank him for his service.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Do _what_?
| MBCook wrote:
| Break into iMessage to free Android users from the
| oppression of... I don't know.
|
| This has all been weirdly performative.
| realusername wrote:
| This is a bad precedent giving ammunition for the next
| antitrust lawsuits so I guess that could be one of the goals.
| smashah wrote:
| Setting the ball in motion to set a precedent I'm guessing.
|
| Everything that has transpired over the last few weeks
| strengthens the narrative for an anti trust case and hopefully
| makes an illustrative case in favour for adversarial interop
| (w.r.t megacorps).
|
| That itself protects an untold amount of OSS projects that have
| been victims to billion dollar megacorp legal threats and
| bullying.
|
| Idk how these things work but I hope Eric and the beeper team
| take Apple to the cleaners and get enough to retire a thousand
| times over.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I doubt Beeper will ever see any legal action (or settlement
| for that matter) directly with Apple from this. I do think it
| will be a strongly referenced bullet point as regulators look
| towards something like the DMA for the US or other corps
| challenge Apple though.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| That is my thought as well. This was a winning scenario for
| Beeper because either the iMessage integration kept
| working, or Apple forced its own hand on very directly
| locking down messaging to the devices it sells.
| MBCook wrote:
| > or Apple forced its own hand on very directly locking
| down messaging to the devices it sells
|
| But that's not really any different? Even if they hadn't
| technically implemented it that way that is the intended
| way the service is supposed to be used. Locked to Apple
| devices.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's a bit like being in an HOA where you think the
| president would tell you to take your specific flag down
| vs putting up a flag and having them tell you to take it
| down. Regardless of whether the flag is actually right or
| wrong in the law (or should/shouldn't be) nobody can take
| the HOA to court about it because they think the HOA
| intends for such a flag to be taken down... but they can
| easily bring it up if it's something the HOA has
| explicitly done and explicitly messaged about.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| I don't understand this at all. Messaging is not locked
| down on Apple devices. You can message with android just
| fine via sms, and you can install dozens of other
| messaging solutions.
|
| Why does having specific Apple only features outside of
| the core message set mean it's now locked down?
| ethanbond wrote:
| There is no judge on the planet who will take the position
| that a 3rd party is allowed to circumvent a service's
| security controls and TOS to build a monetized product using
| a backend that neither they nor their users pay for.
|
| Absolutely zero chance.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Imagine reverse engineering AWS keys, using AWS services
| for free, reselling them, and then trying to sue AWS when
| they fix the security hole.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| However, there is every chance that circumventing a
| service's security controls is a violation of the Computer
| Fraud and Abuse Act.
| supergeek133 wrote:
| People have been complaining about the defacto Apple "phone
| class" they have created with messaging for years.
|
| This threw it back up into the light a little more by not just
| complaining but trying to do something about it.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I suspect they were hoping it would be harder for Apple to
| close the workarounds, so they'd have a unique position in the
| marketplace for a little while longer than they did.
|
| Probably decent marketing... how many people didn't know beeper
| existed before this?
| MBCook wrote:
| I think this whole saga is stupid, but you're absolutely
| right. I had never heard of them before.
|
| Maybe they did get some users out of this who will use the
| non-iMessage parts of the service that already existed.
|
| However while I now know who they are might view of them is
| also tainted a bit because they made (what I see as) bad
| decisions. So at least in my case I'm not sure it's that
| beneficial to them.
| bko wrote:
| It's good they are open sourcing it. That's where it belongs.
| It's incredible how effective open source adblock software has
| been for years.
|
| You can't build a business on a hacky work around. And being
| centralized gives apple an edge in responding.
|
| Some businesses were built on hacks. Airbnb is the prime example
| where a huge percentage of listings out in the open were illegal,
| but the adversary there was government so slow to respond. And I
| think Plaid basically scraped data using user credentials which
| was obv insecure and against terms of use. But again, banks
| aren't super agile and the UI isn't exactly a huge value add.
| Regardless, not a great business model
| pants2 wrote:
| It does have some hope yet as open source software. YouTube has
| been trying to kill yt-dlp for years but the community is
| always one step ahead.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Seems categorically different though, right?
|
| YouTube doesn't control anything about the endpoint which it
| is streaming video to, it just has control over how their
| servers respond to different requests
|
| But Apple does control both ends.
| wnevets wrote:
| Am I the only one who finds its humorous that the within roughly
| the same week you were able to download & install Beeper on an
| Android phone without using the Play Store, Apple breaks it but
| it was Google that was found guilty of abusing its position?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It's not an anti-trust violation to patch holes in a closed
| API.
| theshackleford wrote:
| Yes, I find it humorous that more than one of you seems unable
| to comprehend the basics of the situation.
| gunalx wrote:
| If they really wanted to, they should go the opensource route.
| Maybe they could succeed like unblock origin. They basically
| based their product on a 12yo's solution so why not let others
| contribute as well.
| smashah wrote:
| They did open source it.
| remram wrote:
| They did, here's the link from the article:
| https://github.com/beeper/imessage
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| > "Each time that Beeper Mini goes 'down' or is made to be
| unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper's credibility
| takes a hit. It's unsustainable," Beeper writes.
|
| This was my feeling from the first time I saw it on HN. I am in
| the Apple ecosystem, so I had no need for it anyways, but I
| didn't expect a product to last when it relies on Apple not
| restricting something they clearly want to restrict.
|
| It clearly got them a lot of press, attention, and recognition.
| But also indicated, to me, that they are just not reliable.
|
| The team seems very intelligent and capable. I truly hope they
| find something to do next that doesn't rely on such a fragile
| bridge.
| intrasight wrote:
| > The team seems very intelligent and capable
|
| They (founders/team) will be fine. Young, ambitious, and now
| well-known.
| JoblessWonder wrote:
| This is what I have been saying every time this is posted!
| There is no way they had the runway to continue this and
| alienating their customers by being unreliable.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38649081
| barbs wrote:
| From a marketing point of view, I agree - for a paid product
| it's not exactly reliable. If you take away all the marketing
| fluff though it's a pretty cool open-source project, like yt-
| dlp or adblock origin.
| plarkin13 wrote:
| Mad respect for trying. Maybe there will be some sort of
| litigation on their behalf?
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Apple's behavior on messaging is terrible and they should be
| taking more heat than they are on this. Apple seems to want to be
| seen as the good guy on many issues (like privacy), but on this
| one they are clearly the bad guy. They need to do better.
| _justinfunk wrote:
| Could you explain why you think apple is the bad guy?
|
| They support SMS as the standard carrier-supported messaging
| protocol (in the states, not sure globally). They also have a
| private protocol for apple devices which they fully own and
| control. And they have now announced that next year they will
| be supporting RCS, the next-gen carrier-supported protocol.
|
| I think it's fair to say that Apple has been slow to adopt RCS
| - but I don't think that makes them the bad guy.
|
| (SMS is insecure, iMessage is a lock in that they use to their
| benefit, RCS has been on Android forever, etc etc etc)
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > iMessage is a lock in that they use to their benefit
|
| This is why I think they are the bad guy. They aren't
| passively benefiting from an iPhone network effect, they are
| actively and aggressively prevent workarounds that users can
| do to get around their lock-in.
|
| During the 90s, Apple was the victim of similar behavior by
| Microsoft, and most tech people correctly vilified Microsoft
| for this behavior. Now Apple is acting as the villain and we
| should call that out.
| MBCook wrote:
| What do you mean by get around their lock in? You mean that
| only Apple users can use iMessage?
|
| How do you think Apple pays is for that? It's subsidized
| through device cost.
|
| I get why people hate the App Store rules and no side
| loading, etc. but that's a different situation in my mind.
|
| Why should Apple have to give Android users free service?
| bhelkey wrote:
| > Why should Apple have to give Android users free
| service?
|
| Who said anything about free? Apple could charge Android
| users.
| hraedon wrote:
| Apple restricting a _free_ service to Apple 's own users is
| not even remotely the same as Microsoft's various forms of
| skullduggery and I don't know how you can make the
| comparison seriously.
|
| It has never been easier to switch platforms, and the gulf
| between iOS and Android has never been shallower. Android
| users not having access to one also-ran messaging service
| is not some sort of fundamental injustice, and Apple is not
| a villain for building features that they think will appeal
| to their customers. It's sort of their whole business!
| etblg wrote:
| In case anyone thinks its an overstatement, no, it's not.
|
| The only reason iMessage isn't available on Android, is
| because Craig Federighi explicitly wants it iPhone only to
| lock users in to iPhones.
|
| https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609?l
| a...
| MBCook wrote:
| Right. But it's a service Apple created to add value to
| Apple devices. It's subsidized by people purchasing those
| devices.
|
| Why should they _have_ to give it to Android?
|
| I just don't see that quote as a smoking gun. Why isn't
| that Apple's choice to make?
| etblg wrote:
| Well from some logical point of view I don't know if I
| have a good case to argue off the top of my head, nor do
| I want to come up with one.
|
| On the other hand, its because it fucking sucks. It's the
| largest company in the world (by market cap) which has a
| revenue of a third of a trillion dollars every year. They
| can afford to make it free but they don't for their own
| gain. All their competitors make their myriad of chat
| apps (that only Americans don't seem to want to use) free
| and available on as many platforms as possible. The only
| real reason Apple doesn't is because they want to hoard
| more and more of their money and become an even bigger
| company. That just sucks, it's shitty, it's worse for the
| world. They have hundreds of billions of cash reserves
| that they don't even know what to do with. I don't give a
| shit if it's their right or whatever to do it, I still
| think it sucks and is worse for everyone who isn't a VP
| at Apple.
|
| Open standards are nice, decentralization is nice, having
| options and choice and cross-platform things are nice.
| Having a gigantic company make a choice to create a silo
| where they're the only ones allowed to use it is not
| nice.
| MBCook wrote:
| I totally get the "this sucks it should be better
| argument". And I get people wanting laws to fix it.
|
| What I have trouble with are the people who confuse that
| with existing law say Apple is doing illegal things,
| which has been sadly common in these threads.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| From a legal perspective, they don't have to. From a
| legal perspective, the world's largest corporation can
| aggressively lock out non-iPhone users to try to further
| increase revenue.
|
| But from an ethical perspective, it sucks. I own Apple
| devices and Android devices and I have friends on both.
| Why should my life be more painful just so Apple can
| squeeze out a tiny bit more money?
| MBCook wrote:
| Apple is _ethically obligated_ to give free services to
| people who don't buy their products?
| yellow_postit wrote:
| It also shows that the privacy campaign is just a
| business tactic.
|
| That shouldn't come as a surprise of course, but the
| Apple reality distortion field is real so I think it's
| worth noting.
| criddell wrote:
| Ethical? Say you launch a product that uses cloud
| services (ie servers and storage). If I reverse engineer
| your protocol and launch my own (paid) product on top of
| your service, is it unethical for you to shut me down?
| Isn't it also unethical for me to create a product on top
| of your infrastructure without getting permission or
| providing some kind of payment?
|
| IMHO, Beeper is the one with an ethics problem.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| For me, the issue is it's hostile to Apple users - too.
|
| Ie i can't use the message platform i pay for on many of
| my devices unless every single one of them is Apple. I
| use Beeper to use iMessage from my Linux desktop.
| et1337 wrote:
| I think if iMessage was a separate app that came
| preloaded on iPhones, it would be reasonable to ask why
| Apple has to make it work with Android. But the fact that
| it is _THE_ SMS app built into the OS, in my opinion, is
| the only reason it's so ubiquitous in the US.
|
| You don't get to say, "we compete just like any other
| messaging app, we shouldn't be forced to integrate with
| anything" while also enjoying OS-level integration to the
| point where many (most?) people were onboarded into the
| iMessage ecosystem without even realizing it.
|
| As the Microsoft anti-trust case established, defaults
| matter.
|
| edit: even a separate preloaded app could still be
| considered anti-competitive if it's selected by default,
| cf. Internet Explorer
| MBCook wrote:
| Isn't that what Google did with their messaging things?
| Wasn't the same app as SMS? Isn't that how they've
| deployed RCS?
|
| The MS case wasn't all about defaults. I'm not sure any
| of it was about defaults. The thing that killed them was
| deals saying you couldn't offer competing programs or had
| to pay them regardless of if you put Windows on the
| machine (so it was a waste of money to ship anything
| else). Plus changing code to break competitors.
| nerdix wrote:
| Google doesn't have "messaging things" anymore. The
| default messaging app supports SMS/RCS and that's it.
|
| They tried the unified SMS/proprietary message protocol
| approach with Hangouts but that was short lived. I'm not
| even sure if it was ever at any point installed by
| default on a majority of Android phones.
|
| After Hangouts, they tried Allo which did not support SMS
| and was not a replacement for the default messages app
| which did support SMS.
| MBCook wrote:
| That's kind of why I've been very surprised by this whole
| thing.
|
| Apple made an Apple service for Apple users.
|
| Because no one else has succeeded in the US at taking over a
| large chunk of the market Apple became de facto bad and loses
| their rights.
|
| As almost every thread has pointed out, this situation is
| very unique to the US. Almost everywhere else other apps have
| taken over. So it's not like Apple is PREVENTING people from
| using other apps. People just like it better.
|
| Just like most people like Google better as their search
| engine. It has a huge market share too but no one seems mad
| about that. (Their tying that to advertising IS horrible, but
| not an angle in the iMessage analogy)
|
| And as you said, Apple has announced RCS support. So I wonder
| if any of this will even matter much in a year or so.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Anti green bubble discrimination is directly responsible for
| the rise of large amounts of incels in America.
|
| Make no mistake, it's a meme among gen Z about how if a man
| has an android phone, they better hide it for at least 3
| dates as a woman seeing them having an android phone is
| enough to get them ghosted on subsequent dates.
|
| There are literally hundreds of articles written about green
| bubble discrimination in the dating world. Before the knee
| jerk downvoted, please google my claims and read some of
| them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Idiots who are rejected by women will blame anything except
| their own behavior.
|
| There are plenty of men who have android phones who date
| women with iPhones.
|
| Even if the bubble color were the same those men would be
| rejected anyway for not having an iPhone. I guess the
| government should mandate all phones look the same to
| prevent further discrimination against those without
| iDevices.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| And if this were true and getting a women is important to
| the individual, than just get the iphone until you get
| the girl. People spend money to show their value to mates
| through cars, clothes, jewelry, haircuts, etc ad
| infinitum.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'm picturing a guy on a date who just won't shut up
| about why Android is better and she should get rid of her
| iPhone.
|
| "She dumped me because I use Android!"
|
| Well, that's _partially_ true...
| nerdix wrote:
| That probably does happen.
|
| But, also, some people are shamed for simply using
| Android as well.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-
| ashamed-o...
|
| A lot has been written about the perception of "green
| bubbles". It's well documented.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| No one is entitled to affection from any other person.
| Thinking otherwise is the only thing responsible for the
| rise of incels. Blaming "green bubble discrimination" is
| only one of limitless deflections from that underlying
| problem.
| bbatha wrote:
| > RCS, the next-gen carrier-supported protocol.
|
| RCS is pretty old at this point, almost a decade. But its
| also not as open a protocol as it says on the tin. Android is
| using a ton of extensions, notably end to end encryption,
| that are not standardized and the infrastructure is hard to
| run. Carriers are for the most part using google rcs
| infrastructure or users are accessing google infrastructure
| directly because the only relevant RCS users are android
| users who default to not using carrier RCS servers that don't
| have the google extensions. So its really an "open" protocol
| managed by google.[1][2] Somewhat of an upgrade over the
| closed ecosystem of imessage in principal but RCS isn't the
| open protocol win that many fantasize about; it feels more
| like hoping on to a product that's in the late extend and
| extinguish phase.
|
| 1: https://9to5google.com/2023/09/21/t-mobile-rcs-google-
| jibe/ 2: https://9to5google.com/2023/06/09/att-rcs-jibe-
| google/
| jrnichols wrote:
| That is the thing about RCS.. it seems like a whole lot
| more of it is proprietary Google product than many people
| realize.
|
| I would not be surprised if there was another patent stew
| going on with Google's RCS extensions.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| US carriers only comitted to RCS in 2021
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/20/22584443/verizon-
| android-...
|
| The rollout has been pretty slow, fragmented, and annoying.
| bbatha wrote:
| In large part because of Google's cajoling and creation
| of Jibe. The carriers view messaging as a software
| product. At this point because basically every phone is
| running android or ios thus supporting a lower level
| carrier protocol is of questionable value for them when
| anyone can submit an app and run their own infrastructure
| to support a messaging protocol.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| What's the terrible behaviour Apple has had?
| hraedon wrote:
| Not providing every differentiating feature to Android users,
| primarily
| system2 wrote:
| They made the iMessage popular by creating it. Now you as
| asking them to make it free to use for any competitor? Why
| would any company do that? They are popular for a reason.
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm glad their efforts raised awareness of the Apple's closed
| messaging system and the "bullying" and social friction it
| causes. A company in Apple's position abusing it's power to make
| people, mostly young people, feel bad until they buy an iPhone is
| about as vile of a marketing tactic as I can think of.
| hraedon wrote:
| This is such an insane take to me. Apple hasn't done anything
| but provide a feature that some subset of their customers in a
| single digit number of markets finds compelling.
|
| Do you really think that teenagers in America wouldn't be
| bullying the outgroup--to the extent that they actually are
| frequently ostracizing their peers over this, which is not at
| all clear--over something else if all the bubbles were blue?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Making it harder for bullies to bully is always good. Yes,
| there would be a small net reduction in bullying if apple
| stopped being bully enablers. Stop defending their evil
| practices.
| hraedon wrote:
| This is what I mean! "You, as someone who isn't an Apple
| customer, can't use this one service" is not _evil_ , for
| fuck's sake.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Making cars illegal would make it harder for bullies to
| bully. Your logic dictates that this is always good.
| kcplate wrote:
| Growing up as a teenager in a time where there wasn't iPhones
| it was tennis shoes. My kids dealt with it too--specifically
| backpacks (if I recall correctly). Point is, after we got out
| of high school it didn't much matter and we got on with our
| lives in our off the rack shoes and no name backpacks.
|
| We didn't need special intervention that made all shoes Nike
| or all backpacks JanSport.
| this_user wrote:
| What did they expect would happen? Apple's reaction was more than
| predictable. Why waste money and time on this?
| neither_color wrote:
| For me the desktop version worked fine for months until Beeper
| Mini got announced here. Too bad they weren't able to keep it low
| key. In my use case Im already fully invested in the Apple
| ecosystem. I have a mac, an iphone, and ipad. Beeper allowed me
| to extend my chats to two Windows machines that I have to use.
| bombcar wrote:
| This was the mistake; it could have been a whispered feature
| that those in the know could let others know, but it became
| front-page news and got killed.
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't know, it's too big a story. As soon as any tech
| journalist became "in the know" there would be a very strong
| chance that it would become news anyway.
|
| It certainly would've lasted longer than putting out a press
| announcement though.
| axus wrote:
| Move fast and break Terms of Service.
| actualwill wrote:
| That someone has iMessage on android without the remote
| device work around would have blown up regardless.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Has Beeper classics iMessage integration been impacted as well?
| starik36 wrote:
| Works fine for me.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| It's so strange they came to this fight with only the energy for
| 2 counter moves
| chewmieser wrote:
| They really thought that Apple couldn't block it when they
| originally announced it. Obviously that was not accurate...
| MBCook wrote:
| I always thought that was weird. Apple controls every single
| device that accesses the service as well as the design of the
| service itself.
|
| They have effectively infinite latitude to change it to block
| unauthorized access.
|
| Even if it took Apple a month or two to respond every time,
| how many times does it take before basically everyone gives
| up on Beeper anyway?
|
| I can get why they did it the first time for the PR value and
| raising the issue in public consciousness but I can't see any
| value in continuing to fight past that first block.
| athorax wrote:
| Why? Its clear after 2 attempts that Apple is serious about
| continuing to break their business model, so why keep fighting
| a company with unlimited resources that has their sights set on
| you?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| The way you phrase this makes it sound like " why would I
| work so hard to break into this house if the owner is clearly
| more resourced than I am, and insists on breaking my business
| model of using their stuff for free"
|
| Apple owns those servers and has every right to control how
| they are accessed.
| athorax wrote:
| I can't help if that is how you interpreted what I said,
| but I fully agree apple is well within their rights to
| block this type of usage.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Just in case Eric sees this -- We're an Apple household, but I
| have to use a PC for work. Beeper has allowed me to extend
| iMessage elegantly to my work computers and works MUCH better
| than the alternatives. Their new solution works well for me as we
| have a Mac Mini always on at home. Using the registration code
| with Beeper's servers makes the whole thing more performant than
| any other alternative. I'd gladly pay them for the service.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| I've been waiting for the dust to settle, but i imagine i'll do
| the same. Are you able to automate that registration process?
| Does it require anything manual?
|
| I'm also curious to find out how it works for multiple users on
| a single computer.
|
| _edit_ : I also wonder what the cheapest mini i can get is.
| Probably some used market? Hmm
| rsync wrote:
| This is interesting...
|
| Would it be possible for you to ssh into that Mac mini and
| generate imessages from the command line ?
|
| You wouldn't need beeper for that, would you?
|
| Genuinely curious...
| pzmarzly wrote:
| Yes it is possible
| https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageclient
|
| Or if you don't mind disabling SIP
| https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/imessage/mac-nosip/setup.html
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why are people so obsessed about iMessage? If you want to talk to
| iPhone users use SMS which all phones support or buy an Apple
| device. If you want rich options tell the person on the other
| side this and choose one of the dozens of arguably superior
| options or wait for RCS support next year (though that's still
| not iMessage).
|
| Sheesh
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| This has been a bugbear for Android users since practically the
| launch of iMessage and I have never understood it at all,
| especially since now we're simply _drowning_ in messaging
| services that are free, E to E encrypted, and incredibly
| feature rich oftentimes even outpacing iMessage itself.
| turquoisevar wrote:
| The typical counter to this is that they're bullied by Apple
| users (and some go even as far as to claim Apple pushes users
| to bully non-users, which is of course ridiculous).
|
| The answer to the bullying is to end relations with people
| who are childish like that.
|
| And where it pertains children, you need to seek the solution
| elsewhere. Children bully each other not just for bubbles,
| but also for clothing, toys and other stupid stuff that
| doesn't have an easy scapegoat to blame instead of employing
| solid parenting and teaching.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Blah blah our best interest, it's a for profit company same as
| Apple. No one I mean no one will keep looking at the source code
| and to make sure the one on the phone and the code is 1:1, it's
| not a security guarantee.
| Lienetic wrote:
| What do you suggest they do instead?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Find a business model that doesn't depend on the unauthorized
| access of a private API would be a good place to start.
| ItsABytecode wrote:
| By "private API" do you mean undocumented public API?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| yes.
| beeboobaa wrote:
| HN is accessed via an undocumented public API that you
| are using every time you visit this site.
| tedunangst wrote:
| And I would suggest it's a bad idea to base your entire
| business off using that API.
| nabakin wrote:
| I've used 'private API' exactly how you did and some
| pedant told me it wasn't a _real_ term so I empathize
| willseth wrote:
| Nothing. They got great publicity out of this. They also got
| Apple under serious additional scrutiny by Congress. Beeper
| Mini the product never had a chance at actually being
| successful, so I think this is about the best outcome they
| could have ever hoped for.
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| "Never had a chance"
|
| Because of anticompetitive behavior by Apple, yes.
|
| That's literally the whole point people keep missing.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Even if they did, Apple doesn't care about that. If they wanted
| an Android client they'd make one, not allow some random
| company to do it.
| nabakin wrote:
| They are small enough and their blog posts are technical enough
| that for rn they seem to be more technically/ideologically led
| than strictly business led so I'm inclined to believe they
| aren't thinking about how to maximize profit with every word in
| their blog post and are not just another Apple
| sublimefire wrote:
| I might be a minority here who thinks this was a useless waste of
| effort and money. Who paid for it? Whose problems does it solve?
| I doubt if many who use non ios ecosystem would pay for it in the
| first place, not to mention the fact that you need to rely on
| Apple to be friendly. It was destined for failure IMO. For the
| reference my household has multiple different devices and we fall
| back to text messages or some other app.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > Beeper Mini is beautiful, fast and fun. Our main goal with the
| app is to upgrade chats between iPhone and Android users from
| unencrypted green bubble SMS to encrypted, fully featured blue
| bubble chats.
|
| Can someone help me understand a big question about iMessage?
| What makes iMessage so special that it needs to run on android?
|
| There are plenty of other cross platform applications for
| messaging that fit the quoted needs. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram
| are a few examples. If end users care about "upgraded chats",
| they can simply use one of those and ask those whom they message
| to also use those apps.
|
| Am I missing something? What makes iMessage so special?
| jmondi wrote:
| It is the default message platform on iPhones, that is what
| makes it so special.
| chewmieser wrote:
| The US uses SMS/MMS, that won't change. SMS has limitations,
| which is why iMessage and RCS were created. When newer
| functionality is used, the experience between Android and iOS
| is poor - like poor media quality or stickers not appearing
| where they're stuck, etc.
|
| Other issues are limitations by the OS, like Apple doesn't let
| you change the group name for non-iMessage groups. Or Apple
| doesn't let you replace the entire messaging app, so you'd need
| multiple apps to cover multiple channels.
|
| The issues and OS limitations leads to things like kids
| bullying green bubbles (as silly as that sounds).
|
| I don't think Android users have a right to iMessage but I can
| understand the need to properly interpolate with each other
| here and it sounds like RCS will be just that when Apple adopts
| it.
|
| I think that both Google took too long playing with new
| messaging apps and Apple took too long to actually want to make
| this experience better for Android-iPhone communication (which
| they've been pretty clear they'd only do due to pressure, since
| it helps them sell phones).
|
| The pressure is great. Maybe we'll actually have a good
| experience with RCS, but we will see...
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > like Apple doesn't let you change the group name for non-
| iMessage groups
|
| SMS doesn't support the concept of naming a group. That's not
| an OS limitation.
| Hasu wrote:
| And yet I can do it with SMS group messages on Android with
| Google's Messages app.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Are you're sure that's not RCS?
| otachack wrote:
| To me it's just applicable from my end on the Android
| app. It explicitly says the other members don't see the
| group name.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| SMS group messages don't exist.
|
| There's broadcast SMS (where the phone sends the same SMS
| to multiple people) and MMS groups.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Does MMS support naming groups?
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > The issues and OS limitations leads to things like kids
| bullying green bubbles (as silly as that sounds).
|
| That sounds silly, but it's important enough that Apple
| executives were talking about it ten years ago. See the link
| from the article at
| https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1589450766506692609
|
| > In the absence of a strategy to become the primary
| messaging service...iMessage on Android would serve to
| _remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids
| Android phones_
|
| That's from Craig Federighi, who is now the SVP at Apple in
| charge of all operating systems. If it were a minor silly
| thing, you probably wouldn't expect it to be talked about at
| the highest levels at Apple, would you?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If it were a minor silly thing, you probably wouldn 't
| expect it to be talked about at the highest levels at
| Apple, would you?_
|
| Why not? I've been in C-level discussions where dark purple
| versus a slightly darker shade of purple turned into a
| weeklong shit show.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Was it discussing enabling market lock-in via a
| darker/lighter shade?
|
| If so, it may have been important!
| chewmieser wrote:
| I listed it specifically because it sounds silly but is
| actually an important point. Thanks for sharing the link
| though
| cassianoleal wrote:
| My understanding is that there's a weird trend in the US, where
| iPhones dominate, to regard "green bubble" users as socially
| inferior or something of the sort.
|
| Anyone who knows more about this please correct me. This is
| purely from reading Internet forums.
| sevagh wrote:
| I used to believe this wouldn't happen to me (I use Android
| phones without much issue). Then, last week, I was added to a
| group text for some party planning, and the first few
| messages in the group chat were "who here has android",
| "who's the intruder", etc.
|
| Of course it was all jokey and no big deal but I still came
| away from that situation having learned that all this green
| bubble malarkey is very much real, and these were all grown
| adults (like, 30+ with children).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It kind of messes up the functionality.
|
| If you have all iMessage users, then you can do things like
| add more users to the chat, etc.
|
| As soon as one Android user is in the chat, then you can't
| do that.
|
| The other issue, for me, personally, is that I can respond
| to my iOS users from my desktop (where I spend most of my
| time), but I have to actually pick up the phone to
| communicate with my Android friends.
|
| It's not the end of the world, as my Apple Watch tells me
| when I get texts from my phone, but it is a bit annoying.
| psobot wrote:
| FWIW - you can enable Apple's built-in text message
| forwarding to proxy those SMSes via your iPhone to your
| Mac - it's pretty seamless.
|
| See: https://support.apple.com/en-
| ca/guide/messages/icht8a28bb9a/...
| matsemann wrote:
| It's not an Android issue, though. It's Apple gatekeeping
| it. Like for instance if they allowed Android users to
| use this Beeper app, the experience would be good for all
| users.
|
| Apple degrade the user experience to spite their own
| customers. Quite bizarre.
| bronson wrote:
| They degrade the user experience to profit off their own
| customers. Same thing with soldering down storage on
| Macs. It's really effective.
| riscy wrote:
| Then Android users have to download a separate iMessage
| app for groups involving iPhone users, since they can't
| use their default Messages app either and the cycle
| repeats.
|
| Why can't everyone in these situations just ask everyone
| to use one app like WhatsApp? If having good experience
| was important everyone would be on board.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is exactly what would happen, if iphones weren't so
| dominant already. The problem is, many people will not
| add "a second messaging app" just for one "green bubble"
| (which as an aside, is a great way to de-humanize "the
| others", something we humans naturally do. Robert
| Sapolsky's book "Behave" is phenomenal if you're
| interested in that). They'll just cut that person out of
| the group chat.
|
| Also it's not a "good experience" for everyone, not as
| much as just cutting that green bubble loser out. With no
| green bubbles, you get to use the default messaging app.
| With a different app, since you can't change the default
| on iOS, you have to have at least _two_ apps, and many
| people balk at that.
| riscy wrote:
| I just want to know what Android friend groups are doing
| to talk to that one iPhone user? I get that iPhones are
| more popular in the US but in Europe where Android is
| dominant they (supposedly) all use WhatsApp, which is
| also not the default messaging app.
|
| Are Americans just too lazy to download another app?
| freedomben wrote:
| It's not a problem for Android because every messaging
| app _is_ cross platform. The only one that isn 't is
| iMessage, so by definition this isn't a problem that
| exists. But also in the US, it's nearly all iPhones, so
| there just aren't any groups of Android users with one
| iPhone friend.
|
| More I think they are just really susceptible to
| marketing efforts by companies like Apple who tell them
| that it's a bad user experience to have multiple apps,
| and your own personal user experience is supreme, so
| people adopt and believe that. And for the people who
| don't, you can almost guarantee they have at least one
| "Apple fanatic" in their circle who will preach that
| gospel to them routinely.
|
| Then there's the social status symbol of "Apple" that has
| become a big thing in the US. The killer on top is the
| invasion of the social sphere, partiuclarly with younger
| people, where you are bullied and isolated for not having
| an iThingy, and you've got a perfect recipe for Apple.
|
| At some point I think it's got to come back around, but
| unfortunately that time isn't looking soon as it's
| trending _heavily_ in the wrong direction right now. It
| 's so bad now that "iPhone" has come to be a generic word
| for "mobile phones" and "iPad" a generic for "tablet."
| Just a few days ago I heard someone say something like,
| "Oh is that an Android iPad? aren't those just cheap
| knock-offs?" When this is the level of thinking in most
| of society, it's not hard for a company like Apple to
| manipulate to serve their ends.
| dwaite wrote:
| > ... marketing efforts by companies like Apple who tell
| them that it's a bad user experience to have multiple
| apps
|
| Citation needed? Apple has pretty much marketed the exact
| opposite (e.g. the entire App Store concept)
| dwaite wrote:
| In a group of ten people in the US, you may potentially
| be asking nine others to install WhatsApp.
|
| Thats ignoring that some people (like myself) have
| philosophical reasons not to support Meta via WhatsApp.
| Just like others will not install Signal since it
| requires them to know your phone number (at least
| currently).
|
| Then try a couple APAC countries, and people will ask why
| you aren't using LINE.
|
| This has been going on for decades, ever since we saw
| AIM/MSN/ICQ and so on divisions country-by-country. In
| some cases it was simply who localized their app first.
| dwaite wrote:
| > Like for instance if they allowed Android users to use
| this Beeper app, the experience would be good for all
| users
|
| They have not restricted Android users to use third party
| messaging apps like Beeper. But Beeper isn't using their
| own infrastructure - they have reverse engineered third
| party API and are hacking them to work.
|
| Apple's argument against iMessage being covered by DMA is
| that there are more popular third party products already
| running on Apple's platform in the EU e.g. WhatsApp.
| k8svet wrote:
| Funny, I don't have that problem with Facebook Messenger,
| Instagram Chat, WhatsApp, Matrix, etc. I hope Apple can
| hire some smart folks to help them with these totally-
| not-self-imposed challenges!
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| You can enable text message forwarding on your ipad/mac.
|
| On your iphone, in settings go to messages > text message
| forwarding and select the devices you want to allow.
| bronson wrote:
| I've enabled it, both iPad and Mac, and found it only
| works maybe 80% of the time. When it fails, Messages
| shows the message successfully sent, but the recipient
| never gets it.
|
| It fails often enough that I can't rely on it.
| bronson wrote:
| This is exactly right. Green bubble chats require more
| effort and are less fun.
|
| You can't leave a green bubble chat. You can't send
| messages from your computer or non-iPhone devices (Apple
| has message forwarding, but it's unreliable). Pictures
| look awful, videos look worse. Read receipts don't work.
| Tapbacks/emoji/stickers/memoji/etc don't work. It's a
| drag to remember all these limitations.
|
| I grudgingly got an iphone in 2019 for work. I no longer
| work there but now I'm locked into blue bubble chats with
| family. I've been trying to use Beeper to solve this it's
| not reliable enough yet.
|
| (if RCS wasn't such a dog's breakfast, I might make more
| of an effort. Even when Messages supports RCS, the
| experience will still suck)
| worble wrote:
| Why not just use whatsapp?
| ethanbond wrote:
| No reason not to except it's just not very big in the US.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Because in US, it's just not a common application
| everyone has so you get a ton of "I don't have whatsapp,
| just text me!" from friends.
| standardUser wrote:
| I've gotten almost everyone I know to use WhatsApp. Not
| switch necessarily, but use. There's only a few
| stragglers left. It's not a hard sell, at least in a big
| city where you're bound to know a lot of foreigners or
| people with foreign friends/family, so adoption starts
| well above zero.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| The other replies already brought up that WhatsApp is not
| common in the US, but I'll also add that if your beef
| with iMessage is the evil corporate overlord, moving to
| WhatsApp kinda seems like jumping out of the frying pan
| and into the fire.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Pictures look awful,
|
| The CTIA recommended allowing up to 5MB for pictures back
| in 2013. That would handle full-size JPEGs with
| reasonable compression most DLSRs. What does your carrier
| support?
|
| https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/360018832773-Tw...
|
| > videos look worse.
|
| Same as above.
|
| > Read receipts don't work
|
| MMS read receipts have been a thing since _at least_
| 2004. Wanna bet your carrier still doesn 't support them?
| ryandvm wrote:
| What's funny is the Stockholm syndrome aspect of this
| behavior.
|
| "Oh no, our chat is acting weird because there is an
| Android user in here."
|
| It's like hostages complaining that somebody left the
| door open and is letting in cold air.
| standardUser wrote:
| This is why most of the world prefers WhatsApp or
| Telegram. It can do all of what iMessage does, and a lot
| more, without forcing you to give one shit about what
| hardware another person decides to use.
| nerdix wrote:
| And next time they'll just exclude you from the group chat
| altogether.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| It's real. I remember bracing myself every time I got
| someone's number off a dating app for the inevitable comment
| about my "green bubble". These are people in their 20s in
| NYC. And (for most people), a rant about ecosystem lock-in
| and being able to do what I want with my hardware etc
| wouldn't exactly make me come off as more attractive...
| barbs wrote:
| Not to invalidate your frustration, but if someone rejected
| me based on the colour of my chat bubble in a messaging
| app, that would be decisively unattractive to me.
| quarkw wrote:
| Like jmondi mentioned, its' the default app for messaging on
| iPhones.
|
| On top of that, switching to upgraded chats by switching
| platforms is not as easy as it sounds because you need to
| convince your friends to switch platforms. And that can be a
| hard ask, especially for friends and family that are less tech-
| savvy.
|
| You could have people only message you via text, instead of
| iMessage, but doing that reliably is harder than switching
| platforms, unless you ask someone to disable iMessage in the
| messages app altogether, and no one wants to do that
| k8svet wrote:
| You're missing nothing. Other than the fact that we've
| systematically decided that the average person is too lay to
| actively care about privacy and interoperability, and thus we
| all have to embrace the Stockholm Syndrome of acting like
| iMessage is respectable, at all.
|
| My friend sent me the Beeper Mini article the other week and
| said "Look, you can have blue bubbles now!". I immediately
| scoffed - even if it wasn't going to break in a few days, I
| will never lift a finger to support what Apple is doing with
| iMessage. Absolutely absurd, even more so absurd the way folks
| talk about it.
| freedomben wrote:
| Same. I've been considering ways to do whatever
| (infinitesimally small) things I can to help change the
| culture around "blue bubbles." I _love_ being a "green
| bubble."
|
| Green bubbles are not just "a broke Android user" even though
| the Apple masses like to spread that image.
|
| Green bubbles are a sign of a technological badass, a power
| user who does things with their devices that Big Gray doesn't
| think they should be able to. It's the sign of a person who
| thinks lock-in strategies are gross and an anti-pattern, and
| is principled enough to vote with their wallet. It's the sign
| of a non-conformist, a free thinker who makes their own
| decisions, rather than following the group-thinking masses. A
| green bubble is the badge of honor that identifies a person
| who thinks differently.
|
| In the end, Apple's strategy will probably win because
| Machiavellianism works, but that doesn't mean we can't give
| it a hell of a good run.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I also love being a green bubble, and telling people to use
| one of the several other secure, cross-platform messengers.
| I would _personally_ never use Beeper Mini, because anyone
| in _my_ social circle who cares about "blue bubbles" would
| be mocked mercilessly.
|
| But I also hear all these stories about kids being bullied
| for having Android phones, and see Apple executives talking
| about locking entire families into the iPhone ecosystem
| using iMessage [1] on that basis.
|
| To me, this is pretty evil, monopolistic behavior which
| needs to be regulated out of existence. I'm glad Beeper is
| bringing it to light. The fact that it doesn't affect me
| personally is unimportant.
|
| ----------------------------------------
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/15894507665066926
| 09/ph...
| freedomben wrote:
| Agree completely. My kids are facing this now. The
| bullying is obscene and ridiculous, and very real.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > * My kids are facing this now. The bullying is obscene
| and ridiculous, and very real.*
|
| The worst part is that the company knows about this and
| could simply end it by changing a single color in their
| app.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| There isn't much special about iMessage you can't find on other
| messaging platforms. Since iMessage is the default messaging
| app, few iPhone users bother installing anything else. Apple
| doesn't want good messaging compatibility with Android devices
| because they want to retain iPhone users. For the last couple
| years, Apple's iPhone innovation has stagnated, and one of the
| ways they can maintain their market share is by keeping
| customers in the walled garden.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Globally, most iPhone users install another messaging app.
| dwaite wrote:
| > Since iMessage is the default messaging app, few iPhone
| users bother installing anything else.
|
| Moreso, there's no such thing as a default messaging app,
| just like there's no default phone dialer. The system handles
| telco messaging and calls.
|
| But there's also no real limitations elsewhere as long as you
| aren't requesting SMS/MMS specifically. I can send an image
| to someone via Signal just as easily as I can via iMessage -
| they show up in the same lists.
|
| This is different from cross-vendor standard protocols like
| email, where you may want a mailto: link to compose a mail in
| the app the user actually has configured. For mail you can
| configure a default application.
| GabeIsko wrote:
| A bunch of hacky comedians deemed it a social fopaux to not be
| able to afford an iPhone for some reason. I hope they got their
| tik tok engagement out of it at least.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| The biggest issue is in the US, most phones are iPhones, so
| most people are using iMessage by default.
|
| Because of Apple's actions, this has led to android users being
| ridiculously ostracized and discriminated again[0][1].
|
| It's not that there are not alternatives, it's that iPhone
| users are unlikely to switch to those alternatives, leaving
| Android users no choice but to continue to be discriminated
| against if they want to talk to the majority.
|
| This a uniquely US thing. It's very strange.
|
| [0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-
| winning-...
|
| [1]https://www.techdirt.com/2015/02/12/green-bubbles-how-
| apple-...
| IshKebab wrote:
| It kind of makes sense though. The dominant messaging app has
| always varied by region. The US is just really unlucky that
| the one that won there happens to be owned by Apple. And I
| say "unlucky" - it's not really luck. iMessage could only
| ever dominate in the US really because iPhones are very
| popular there and because SMS is free.
|
| In most of the world iPhones aren't nearly as dominant so
| nobody would use iMessage or they wouldn't be able to talk to
| half their friends, and there was a much bigger incentive to
| just ditch SMS-related systems entirely.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| I think part of the issue is Apple didn't really indicate
| to users they were using iMessage, so most people thought
| they were just using SMS anyway.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| People are so weird: it used to be that using the Internet a
| lot was seen as anti-social, now everyone's addicted to
| phones and if your message bubbles aren't the right color
| _you 're_ the weird one. It's just a stupid chat app.
|
| It's completely awful we're strong-armed into having 6
| different chat clients that send text messages because of
| gate-keeping. Chat has been fully commoditized since about
| 2000 or so.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > it used to be that using the Internet a lot was seen as
| anti-social, now everyone's addicted to phonesv
|
| This is so true, I think about this a lot sometimes. As
| someone growing up in the 90s who was considered weird for
| finding the internet amazing, I'm online substantially less
| than many of those people who made a big deal about it back
| then.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Being an Android user in the US typically comes with getting
| left out of group messages because most people here just use
| iMessage. There's not enough users of WhatsApp, Signal, or
| Telegram.
| danShumway wrote:
| For me, it's just security, no other reason.
|
| > There are plenty of other cross platform applications for
| messaging that fit the quoted needs.
|
| Absolutely, and I encourage people to use them. Unfortunately,
| I can't force people not to use iMessage.
|
| It's not about bullying (I've no doubt that it happens, but
| it's never happened to me). It's not about social pressure, I
| couldn't care less if someone wants to make a big deal over me
| having a green bubble -- don't let the door hit you on your way
| out. What it is about is the fact that I can't change my family
| members' behaviors, and the consequence of their behaviors is
| that all of their messages to me get sent unencrypted.
|
| I would like those messages to be encrypted. I can't force them
| to use a better messenger, so it would be nice if I could on my
| end make a change that seamlessly, with zero friction on their
| part, causes their messages to suddenly be encrypted. No, I'm
| not buying an iPhone, heck off with that garbage. But I would
| be willing to install a separate app if it meant that my family
| members on iPhones could instantaneously have their messages
| encrypted.
|
| Barring that, I can keep subtly encouraging them to use any of
| the other much more secure messaging services available, but...
| I mean, I don't control their phones. They are adults and they
| make their own decisions. And Apple doesn't really help here by
| marketing the Messages app as if it's secure while leaving out
| the fact in its marketing that a huge portion of the messages
| it sends have zero security at all. I tell people that we
| should swap to something else, their response is, "I don't need
| to, iMessages is secure." It would be secure _if you were using
| it_. But when you message me, you 're not using it, you're
| using SMS.
|
| > If end users care about "upgraded chats", they can simply use
| one of those and ask those whom they message to also use those
| apps.
|
| Like everything else in security, this boils down to the fact
| that people are apathetic and the people who are security
| conscious have to try and bend to meet them halfway. Beeper
| would have been a way for me to bend and meet some of the
| iPhone users in my life halfway. I'm not buying an iPhone, I'm
| not giving my family members an ultimatum that I'm going to
| stop responding to their texts if they don't use the messenger
| that I want them to use; that would be wildly antisocial
| behavior for me to engage in. So they'll send all their texts
| to me in plaintext.
|
| As anyone who's tried to use Signal can attest, there is
| nothing simple about asking people you message to use a
| different app. And security in specific is a really hard sell
| for getting people to switch.
|
| This is what I keep hammering when I talk about this -- Apple's
| position on iMessage makes iPhone users less secure. For anyone
| in my life who is security conscious, we couldn't care less
| about iMessage, we use actually secure cross-platform messaging
| services that allow us to actually encrypt 100% of what we send
| to each other. Emoji reactions do not matter, the problem is
| that iMessage can't send cross-platform encrypted chats, and
| Apple's position is that it cares more about whatever weird
| platform-exclusivity lock-in it _thinks_ its getting than it
| cares about making sure the messages that iPhone users send are
| actually encrypted.
|
| The motivation here isn't complicated, I want the iPhone users
| in my life to actually be secure rather than pretending that
| they're secure.
|
| I'll note that the same problem also exists for Android. I'm
| not singling Apple out here, in practice Android users also
| send all of their messages to me in plain text regardless of
| whatever proprietary garbage Google is trying to pass off as
| message security nowadays. The same problem exists there, I
| can't get them off of the default messaging app. But on
| Android, there's not the potential of an app I could install
| that with no changes to their OS or setup would cause their
| messages to suddenly start being encrypted.
| _justinfunk wrote:
| > They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market, and
| lock customers into using Apple's official app for texting
| (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way people communicate).
|
| Beeper is on the iOS App Store.
| somethingsidont wrote:
| Apple ships iMessage in the default messaging app. A large
| portion users are probably unaware what "iMessage" even is,
| just that blue bubbles are "better."
|
| Microsoft got dinged for shipping IE by default, and so should
| Apple. Maybe you can argue Apple's not big enough yet, but I
| reckon we just need to wait a few years (87% of US teens use
| iPhones [0]).
|
| [0] https://www.axios.com/2021/10/14/teen-iphone-use-spending-
| ha...
| etchalon wrote:
| Microsoft didn't get dinged for shipping IE by default. They
| got dinged because, to promote IE, they engaged in a lot of
| fairly nefarious things, forcing their OEM partners not to
| install other browsers, for instance.
|
| It wasn't just "you can't have a default web browser in IE",
| and reducing that case to that is ahistorical.
| somethingsidont wrote:
| You literally cannot install another default messaging app
| on iOS with SMS integration. There are no OEM partners to
| speak of on iOS. If iOS reaches 90%+ market share, why
| shouldn't it be treated the same as Microsoft?
| turquoisevar wrote:
| It seems you're missing their point.
|
| MS was prosecuted because they pressured OEMs into not
| installing a different browser by making that a
| requirement to be able to buy Windows licenses.
|
| The alleged illegal act here was the combination of them
| 1) leveraging the power they had over OEMs to 2) prevent
| them from installing a different browser in an effort to
| 3) kill competing browsers.
|
| It was never just about having a default browser, it was
| about the combination of 1, 2 and 3. There were some
| other incidents other than the browser that involved
| elements 1, 2 and 3, but the logic behind it was similar.
|
| I say "alleged" because MS won on appeal and the DOJ
| decided to settle.
|
| Apple on the other hand, just has a default messaging
| app. They're not using their power to block other
| messaging apps with the intent to kill them, nor are they
| pressuring other parties to do or not do an act to
| protect their default messaging app.
|
| The only thing that comes closest to the MS case is that
| Apple told carriers that they can't have their bloatware
| preinstalled from the get go with the first iPhone. The
| problem however is that Apple, when they imposed that
| restriction, had no power over carriers, they were just
| entering the phone market after all. If anything the
| carriers had power over Apple, but they still choose to
| play ball despite this restriction.
|
| I'd they'd tried to do that now, then it'd be a different
| story, because now Apple has quite some market dominance
| and it could be an antitrust issue.
|
| That's why carriers are free to impose limitations on
| certain functionality like hotspot use, because if Apple
| would force carriers, especially in a heavy handed way,
| then it could be explained as abusing their power.
|
| Apple is mainly lucky for always having done Apple
| things, even when they were small in the respective
| market.
|
| A lot of what Apple does, Apple has done from the
| beginning when they were insignificant in the context of
| a market. They couldn't do introduce many of those things
| now while they're so big.
|
| So for all intents and purposes Apple is treated the same
| as MS.
| etchalon wrote:
| If iOS reaches 90% market share, I'm sure more companies
| will push the DOJ to go after Apple to open up iOS more.
|
| I don't think Apple would care too much if they were
| forced to allow other applications to be designated as
| default SMS clients for the phone, though.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| They also got dinged for baking IE into Windows such that
| it couldn't be removed, much like Safari and iMessage on
| iOS.
|
| They ultimately got sued for leveraging their dominance in
| the PC operating systems market to dominate the browser
| market.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I'm baffled by the claim that Apple locks users into
| iMessage. I use iPhone and Macs and I haven't used iMessage
| in years.
|
| Apple doesn't lock anyone into messaging apps (they have
| pretty great system intergration for alternate apps!) -
| social groups do.
| somethingsidont wrote:
| Fair enough, agreed that social groups dominate the dynamic
| more-so (e.g. any country other than US). But being the
| default, pre-installed, and only app with SMS integration
| on iOS is an unfair position to compete from, especially
| when iOS is now slowly gaining dominant market position in
| the US.
| csydas wrote:
| It's not really how it works for a lot of users in the
| US. As I get it with the more social demographics, most
| use different apps for messaging for different contexts.
| social media like twitter or instagram for more public
| casual chatting with strangers, maybe private messages on
| said apps for growing relationships, then for more
| personal stuff some mutual messenger app.
|
| social demographics just use the chat that is closest to
| whatever they like to do online. iMessage is more of a
| "it's always there if I need it" thing as I get it, not
| so much something chosen out of confusion -- the social
| demographic is quite good at compartmentalizing their
| lives across many apps.
| username190 wrote:
| I agree. Something other people aren't mentioning - the
| default iOS Contacts app will automatically switch your
| messaging and voice call shortcuts to use an alternate
| platform, per-contact. There's no user interaction required
| to do this. A lot of people in these threads conflate
| iMessage, SMS, and MMS - the idea that iPhone users are
| "locked into" iMessage is absurd. This feature has been in
| place for many years. [0]
|
| IMO, the buy-in for iMessage is an iPhone. If you contrast
| a $429 new iPhone with the buy-in required for other
| mainstream apps (share and license your private data +
| metadata with advertising companies in perpetuity), $429
| doesn't seem unreasonable at all; but if you prefer to pay
| with your data instead, all platforms (including the
| iPhone) provide an option to do so via options like FB
| Messenger[1] and WhatsApp[2].
|
| If Apple were to remove these alternative options, along
| with SMS/MMS, and support only iMessage communication -
| there would be a much better support for the claim that
| they "lock in" their users.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/PuPIrvf.png
|
| [1] https://bgr.com/tech/app-privacy-labels-facebook-
| messenger-v...
|
| [2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/whatsapp-instagram-
| facebook-...
| somethingsidont wrote:
| iMessage is competing unfairly, as the default, pre-
| installed, SMS-integrated app on iOS. Being hardware-
| attested and limited to the dominant US smartphone OS
| exacerbates this.
|
| Most other countries are using some other messaging app,
| so clearly these aren't super significant hurdles. I
| agree "lock-in" is strong wording that probably doesn't
| apply to iMessage. But you cannot argue that iMessage is
| competing fairly with the likes of FB Messenger /
| Whatsapp / Telegram / Signal.
| pornel wrote:
| Apple's APIs for 3rd party apps are always more limited, and a
| few steps behind what Apple allows their own apps do.
| commoner wrote:
| Apple doesn't allow any apps on iOS other than Apple's own
| Messages app to use the phone's native SMS/MMS functionality.
| Due to Apple's restriction, Beeper (Beeper Cloud) does not
| support SMS/MMS from iOS devices like it supports SMS/MMS from
| Android devices.
|
| https://beeper.notion.site/a96db72c53db4a9883e1775bcb61bb80?...
| okdood64 wrote:
| Don't forget the hubris from just 2 weeks ago:
|
| > Side note: many people always ask 'what do you think Apple is
| going to do about this?' To be honest, I am shocked that everyone
| is so shocked by the sheer existence of a 3rd party iMessage
| client. The internet has always had 3rd party clients! It's
| almost like people have forgotten that iChat (the app that
| iMessage grew out of) was itself a multi-protocol chat app! It
| supported AIM, Jabber and Google talk. Here's a blast from the
| past: https://i.imgur.com/k6rmOgq.png.
|
| Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531759
|
| To now:
|
| > As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic
| product that really should exist, the truth is that we can't win
| a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth.
|
| I really do wonder what they genuinely thought was going to
| happen...
| erohead wrote:
| I think those quotes still stand for themselves. Normalize 3rd
| party clients!
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Adversarial interoperability needs to be explicitly
| legalized.
|
| The fact is these clients never face much in the way of
| market fitness tests, as they often use the threat of legal
| action to deter any other clients.
|
| This is not what computing should be. We've pretty much just
| let every rando user who doesn't really give a care about how
| this stuff goes down decide things for us.
| beeboobaa wrote:
| What's the supposed hubris that you are talking about?
| okdood64 wrote:
| Perhaps the wrong term, but it seemed rather dismissive of
| the rather valid concern that Apple won't take kindly to what
| they're doing and try to stop them.
| aresant wrote:
| "At this stage, Apple's actions to block Beeper Mini look
| increasingly hard for them to defend."
|
| That is 100% accurate from the technical perspective.
|
| As an iPhone mobile / windows desktop user I would love an
| interoperable protocol so I could respond to texts from my
| desktop
|
| But from the business side Apple's decision is totally defensible
| and clear
|
| The blue bubbles are a luxury item / luxury signal that let's
| apple differentiate their products
|
| I assume an internal assessment of that "brand" value from blue
| bubbles is in the many billions of dollars
| willseth wrote:
| Not really? iMessage isn't a peer-to-peer network. It's
| dependent on Apple's massive global messaging service. Beeper
| Mini simply doesn't work without co-opting Apple's servers.
| Unless you start from the premise that it's okay for one
| business to siphon off resources from another one without
| authorization or compensation, then Beeper Mini's solution is
| technically infeasible.
| regularjack wrote:
| Beeper says in the article that they'd be willing to pay
| Apple for use of their resources.
| sgerenser wrote:
| If I broke into your house and started sleeping on your
| couch, would you be OK with it as long as I promised to pay
| you rent?
| seizethegdgap wrote:
| If my house was the size of twelve Tesla Gigafactorys
| stacked on top of each other, every other door was
| locked, I could track your movements throughout the
| house, you had your own private door and couch to sleep
| on, and I was worth 3 trillion dollars, sure.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Apple is running a hotel, not a house
| endisneigh wrote:
| Even if we accept the terrible metaphor it would be a
| hotel solely for Apple users
| dingnuts wrote:
| Beeper says that, but they probably don't have the amount
| of money that Apple thinks is worth using their services.
|
| I'm willing to buy all of your property for $1, but that
| doesn't give me the right to come use it all, just because
| in theory there is a price I would pay to have it all.
| ItsABytecode wrote:
| So no 3rd party client software unless the company running
| the service gives explicit permission?
|
| No 3rd party batteries in devices or 3rd party ink cartridges
| either
| zamadatix wrote:
| It generally doesn't cost e.g. the printer manufacturer
| anything when you use a 3rd party cartidge. This is
| separate from the value/loss described above. I still think
| once you reach a certain size there need to be some interop
| requirements though but I can also see why many would say
| these points are unrelated to iMessage.
| sbuk wrote:
| > So no 3rd party client software unless the company
| running the service gives explicit permission?
|
| That's about the strength of it. Unless the protocol is
| open, paid or otherwise. iMessage is closed and
| undocumented.
| layer8 wrote:
| As far as "siphoning off resources" is concerned, it's not
| that different from sending emails to an iCloud Mail address,
| which also makes use of Apple's servers. Beeper's purpose is
| not for Android users to communicate among themselves, but to
| communicate with Apple users. It's only natural that this
| would involve Apple's servers, as it does with email.
|
| This is not to say that this entitles anyone to do so without
| Apple's consent, but the argument about resource usage is a
| straw man here, IMO. This is not about who pays for the
| servers. Even if Beeper would offer Apple an appropriate
| portion of their revenue (edit: and they actually do in TFA),
| Apple would not agree. For Apple, this is about keeping the
| garden wall up.
| riscy wrote:
| That's not how email works. Your email provider maintains
| servers to send and receive messages on your behalf, and
| your email client checks in with your provider for
| messages. iMessage not like email.
| layer8 wrote:
| Sending an email will connect to Apple's SMTP server and
| make use of Apple's resources that way. (I happen to run
| my own mail server that does exactly that.) Yes,
| receiving iMessage messages presumably works differently
| from receiving email, in that it's probably pull rather
| than push, but that doesn't change the basic argument.
| sbuk wrote:
| The fundamental difference is that iCloud email is based
| on a 41 year old plain-text _open_ protocol which was
| designed to be federated and lacks any real security or
| E2EE built-in.
| layer8 wrote:
| It seems that you agree that resource usage isn't the
| issue. Which was the point of the analogy.
| sbuk wrote:
| Agree, but it _is_ a closed service. Hacking for shit-n-
| giggles is fine. Doing it for security research and bug
| bounties is also fine. Offering another service (and
| planning to charge, no less!) that uses that closed
| service without concent isn 't, irresepective of motive
| or ethics. _Ethically_ , whether you advocate FOSS or
| not, it is wrong. I'm no Stallman fan, but I admire his
| ethics here; if it's closed, he won't entertain using a
| service.
| tedunangst wrote:
| But why do you run your own mail server if you can just
| use Apple's?
| riscy wrote:
| Same reason I don't use Gmail: I don't want all of my
| emails on a big tech company's servers. I pay for
| Fastmail.
| riscy wrote:
| It's not just that: for email providers, they're
| responsible for storing messages that their customer has
| received. Your server you pay to maintain holds your
| messages.
|
| On iMessage, all messages are stored on Apple's servers
| (at least in-transit), even those that would be destined
| between two Android users communicating via iMessage.
|
| At least with email it's a bit easier to filter out spam,
| but iMessage is also E2E encrypted so automatic spam
| detection is much harder.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > As far as "siphoning off resources" is concerned, it's
| not that different from sending emails to an iCloud Mail
| address, which also makes use of Apple's servers.
|
| Which is the intent of running those email servers. These
| are the "public-use" servers. The iMessage servers are
| private.
| willseth wrote:
| It's completely different. Email is a decentralized
| network. iMessage is centralized. Email servers, like
| Mastodon, Usenet (RIP), etc. implicitly agree to federate
| (usually!) with other servers. All iMessage traffic sent or
| received has to go through an Apple owned iMessage server
| and propagate through the iMessage network, so every
| additional iMessage client has a direct cost to Apple that
| Apple didn't agree to.
| rockskon wrote:
| The resources are negligible and not worth mentioning. Chat,
| encrypted or not, is not an expensive service for Apple to
| run.
|
| There are much better business arguments to make here then
| "oh no! The 3 trillion dollar company might have slightly
| more overhead managing _text messaging_! "
| ddol wrote:
| iMessage supports attachments up to 100Mb and groups of 32
| participants. It's certainly more resource intensive than
| 140 byte SMS.
| rockskon wrote:
| Sure, but let's not fool ourselves. It isn't exactly a
| cost center for Apple to run the service nor would it be
| to scale up usage to include Android users. The cost
| would be a rounding error to Apple.
|
| From a business perspective, I'm much more sympathetic to
| arguments that iMessage is a perk Apple wants to keep as
| incentive for more users to switch to Apple's ecosystem
| and, likely more important, lack of cross-platform
| interoperability raises the cost for existing Apple users
| to transition to Android.
| willseth wrote:
| Another way to look at it is that there would always be a
| fixed cost to operating any global messaging network that
| would probably be at least a million dollars a year.
| Piggybacking on Apple's already-built network and
| focusing only on marginal cost sidesteps the reality that
| standing up a service that big from scratch is very
| expensive. Even if iMessage were a decentralized network
| like email that allows federation, Beeper Mini would be
| on the hook for a much bigger bill.
| rockskon wrote:
| .....?
|
| Are you claiming Apple would have to pay fixed costs a
| second time because new users were added to the already
| existing service?
|
| And are you claiming that 1 million dollars is a lot of
| money to Apple, a company worth over three million
| million dollars?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| The unauthorized access is the problem, not the amount of
| resources used. If you hack into a system and use it "just
| a little" you've still committed a crime.
| ItsABytecode wrote:
| This hacking is more DMCA than CFAA
| rockskon wrote:
| Okay? Not sure why you're bringing up a what-if that
| didn't happen. Beeper Mini didn't hack into Apple's
| servers.
|
| I was responding to someone who said the extra overhead
| for running a chat service that has more people use it
| would be notable for Apple. A business argument - not a
| legal one.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| what do you mean co-opting? Unless you're referring to beeper
| mini to beeper mini communications, sure, but the majority of
| the comms are going to Apple users.
| willseth wrote:
| On a messaging network, work must be done to both send and
| to receive messages. For Beeper Mini to iPhone
| communication, cost is added to the network, but only one
| of the devices has paid for the privilege of using it. At
| best you could argue that Beeper Mini only steals half of
| the resources needed to communicate with iPhone users.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| This is the one and only argument needed. Everything else can
| be met with some degree of philosophical discussion and back-
| and-forth. The bottom line is that Apple didn't invite them
| to use their (Apple's) resources.
| Moomoomoo309 wrote:
| The article literally responds to this...they said if Apple
| wants reasonable (key word, reasonable) compensation for
| the resources used, they're more than willing to pay that.
| standardUser wrote:
| Apple could simply sell iMessage. They don't because iMessage
| is not a product, it's a stealth marketing tool and a wildly
| successful one.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > The blue bubbles are a luxury item / luxury signal that let's
| apple differentiate their products
|
| It's also an abuse of their market position to discriminate
| against the competition, and they have done so very
| successfully.
|
| There are far more subtle, less othering ways to indicate a
| participant in a conversation isn't capable of the same
| functionality as others.
| asylteltine wrote:
| It's not an abuse any more than Google doing the same damn
| thing with Google messenger! Your phone number is registered
| there too by the way.
|
| Google is pushing RCS only because they are completely
| incapable of making their own protocol and lord you know they
| have tried (gchat, hangouts, allo, and now messenger)
|
| And by the way, RCS is entirely carrier dependent. It's
| awful. I wish my friends could also use iMessage but Apple is
| well within their rights to stop people from using their
| network against their terms of service.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| It's more abuse because of a) the market position and b)
| the extent of the othering.
| x0x0 wrote:
| 100% accurate elsewhere.
|
| Who is auditing Beeper's code for security issues? How big is
| their security team and their response SLA? How are they
| encrypting messages at rest? How much money are they prepared
| to spend on attorneys to defend these stances against various
| governments? What can their servers see, what do those servers
| retain? etc etc
|
| Apple makes commitments about encryption and security, shown
| in-app via message colors, that Beeper has no right to subvert.
| beeboobaa wrote:
| > But from the business side Apple's decision is totally
| defensible and clear
|
| Sure, many atrocious acts are _fantastic_ business decisions.
| Slavery? Great for business. Massive ROI. Incredibly evil.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| The ability to differentiate blue and green bubbles isn't
| inextricably tied to keeping iMessage closed. Apple could allow
| iMessage to interoperate and still only allow apple users to
| have blue bubbles. But they choose not to. Requiring an iPhone
| for a blue bubble is reasonable. Forcing everyone to use
| insecure chat just because one of them isn't an Apple customer
| isn't.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Blue vs green bubble isn't about iPhone vs Android - It's
| about iMessagevs not-iMessage. If Apple did have an Android
| client with feature parity, I would strongly imagine that
| would show up as blue bubbles.
| starik36 wrote:
| > so I could respond to texts from my desktop
|
| You can. I've been using Beeper Cloud for a year on a Windows
| desktop. It's fantastic. I also use WhatsApp in that same
| application.
|
| Before that I had all sorts of workarounds that mostly worked.
| Like having a Mac VM running in the background with an
| AirMessage server and then using their web client to access
| messaging from Windows. Beeper Cloud removed all this nonsense
| from my life.
| quarkw wrote:
| I've been using it for a few months, and even if iMessage gets
| removed from Beeper (cloud) I'll keep using it, alongside the
| Messages app. And this is coming from an almost-exclusive mac-
| iPhone user.
|
| Having all my chats in one place have helped me better keep in
| touch with friends and family.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Just in case Eric sees this -- We're an Apple household, but I
| have to use a PC for work. Beeper has allowed me to extend
| iMessage elegantly to my work computers. Their new solution works
| well for me as we have a Mac Mini always on at home. Using the
| registration code with Beeper's servers makes the whole thing
| more performant than any other alternative. I'd gladly pay them
| for the service.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate for
| open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP) and has been highly critical
| of services closing their integrations with 3rd party clients
| (like Reddit and Twitter).
|
| Yet the moment it's an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the above
| matters.
|
| I remember the late 90s / early 00s when we had MSN, AOL IM, ICQ
| and others. People got so fed up with different people using
| different services that a whole slew of 3rd party clients were
| available that supported everything. Like Pidgin, libpurple,
| Bitlbee (an IRC server that supported IM protocols), and Trinity
| (or something named like that).
|
| Now we are stuck with vendor lockouts and crappy 1st party apps
| that are usually little more than a web container.
|
| It's weird how open source has taken over the world and yet our
| messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.
| chewmieser wrote:
| There's a ton of open protocols that could have been the
| messaging standard. But beeper took a always-closed protocol
| and tried to open it.
|
| I'm not in support of Apple here but it's pretty obvious which
| way this would go.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Beeper doesn't have any control over the protocol Apple
| implement. They do have control over whether they reverse
| engineer that protocol.
| chewmieser wrote:
| Beeper could have come up with a new messaging app for iOS.
| They didn't have to reverse-engineer iMessage.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > Beeper could have come up with a new messaging app for
| iOS.
|
| But the point of Beeper was to bring iOS compatibility to
| non-Apple devices. There's a literal XKCD comic about
| creating new standards.
|
| > They didn't have to reverse-engineer iMessage.
|
| Sure. But that's not a reason not to do something. The
| literal same remark can be used against Apple too:
|
| "Apple didn't need to break support for Beeper"
|
| "Apple didn't need to make iMessage proprietary"
|
| Etc
|
| For what it's worth, I'm not against Apple per se. In
| fact I'm typing this on an iPhone. I'm just commenting
| about how locked in messaging has become and how it's
| weird that people are ok with that (or more precisely,
| only ok with it when it's an Apple protocol).
| chewmieser wrote:
| I'm just not sure what your point is? That beeper should
| just be allowed to do this, just because they wanted to?
|
| I don't have a dog in this fight. I'm an Apple user and I
| don't really use iMessage deep enough to have issues
| talking to Android users.
|
| I've just seen Beeper being incredibly entitled about
| another company's service that they're not paying for
| throughout this whole process.
|
| As a previous startup founder and a developer (which is
| HN's primary user-base), I just think it was obvious
| which way this was going to go.
|
| And saying that making a service closed is equitable to
| reverse-engineering said service is a weird take. Should
| every non-public service be allowed to be attacked like
| this?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Honestly, I'm not sure I have a point. I was just
| commenting on what I've observed as a double standard on
| here.
|
| If I were to comment on the Beeper thing specifically, I
| think they were wrong to make it a commercial project
| (something they've now rectified). But I think Apple are
| wrong to break Beeper too (though I get _why_ they did).
|
| I think there is enough blame to go round to all parties
| involved.
| chewmieser wrote:
| Ok, that's fair. But what should Apple do in response? If
| they did not break it the first time, Beeper would be
| making $2-3/month off of their services.
|
| It would have also shown that Apple's platform isn't as
| secure as they position themselves to be if someone other
| than them can utilize their services without their
| permission.
|
| There was no winning move here for Apple except to close
| access off to secure their closed protocol. It was just
| inevitable at that point.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Is it really a security problem though? Something can be
| secure _and_ support 3rd party clients. More likely this
| is just a walled garden problem. Because if it was just a
| security problem then Apple would have released a 1st
| party iMessage app for Android before now.
|
| This doesn't answer your question though. I guess what
| I'd have liked to have seen is Apple release a public
| iMessage API. I know that would never happen, but one can
| dream. The approach Apple took was certainly predictable.
| I have no sympathy for Beeper either.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Your comment is the one that's weird. HN is not a hive mind,
| and hacker news itself is a proprietary site that doesn't
| implement any open standards or protocols.
|
| Even if we accept your faulty premise, the solution would be to
| encourage the open protocol, not build on top of closed ones...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| https://github.com/HackerNews/API
| endisneigh wrote:
| Which open standard is implemented? Not XMPP, not Mastodon
| or Matrix. And unless something changed, you can't even
| make posts using that API, again to the point.
|
| iMessage does have an API as well, it's just not publicly
| available. Hence the current debacle
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > Which open standard is implemented?
|
| I never said anything about the protocol needing to be a
| standard.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
|
| > iMessage does have an API as well, it's just not
| publicly available.
|
| That's a hell of a "just" ;)
| endisneigh wrote:
| > The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an
| advocate for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP)
|
| > It's weird how open source has taken over the world and
| yet our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary
| than ever.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| ...and not one mention of the term "standard".
|
| Something can be open and not a standard. Like the HN
| API.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Is the HN api proprietary?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Im not here to discuss HN and I'm not getting dragged
| into your strawman arguments. So ending our discussion
| here.
| turquoisevar wrote:
| It might seem weird to you, because most of what you're talking
| about are false equivalencies.
|
| > The comments in here are weird. HN is normally an advocate
| for open protocols (like Mastodon, XMPP) and has been highly
| critical of services closing their integrations with 3rd party
| clients (like Reddit and Twitter).
|
| You're comparing companies who had open and public APIs and
| then closed them, with one that was never open to begin with.
| Apple didn't suddenly tell hundreds of third party developers
| to pound sand, they made a thing for themselves and never
| pretended it to be something different.
|
| > Yet the moment it's an Apple protocol, suddenly none of the
| above matters.
|
| Again, that's not because it's suddenly about Apple. It is
| because it's an entirely different premise.
|
| Generally HN and others with similar expertise will applaud
| hacking and tweaking things for the sake of hacking and
| tweaking things. If you'd want to do a deeper analysis on it,
| I'd say it's primarily applauding the skills that are at
| display.
|
| This, however, was a bit different. For starters Beeper tried
| to monetize it, it being someone else's services and resources.
|
| While many are put off by monetization, no manner the skills
| involved on the basic premise that it loses its "rebellious"
| and "counterculture" edge, even more are put off by recurring
| monetization schemes. Add to that the fact that it is recurring
| monetization of empty air (or Apple's resources if you will)
| and you lose even more people.
|
| Then there's a subset that simply is of the mindset that they
| can recognize accomplishments but don't condone subsequent
| usage of said accomplishments in the manner Beeper tried to do
| as opposed to individuals doing it themselves in a grassroots
| way.
|
| There are also many that fall within a spectrum of all of the
| above. I don't speak for all of these people, I'm merely
| attempting to describe the mindset of some people here on HN
| and the subsequent lack of incongruity you seem to think exists
| here.
|
| > I remember the late 90s / early 00s when we had MSN, AOL IM,
| ICQ and others. People got so fed up with different people
| using different services that a whole slew of 3rd party clients
| were available that supported everything. Like Pidgin,
| libpurple, Bitlbee (an IRC server that supported IM protocols),
| and Trinity (or something named like that).
|
| I can be wrong here, but I don't recall any of those efforts
| trying to charge people $2/mo for using their creation. That
| alone makes this situation not analogous. Another would be that
| the ones I recognize from your list were licensed under FOSS
| licenses, as opposed to being the pet project of a SaaS
| startup.
|
| > Now we are stuck with vendor lockouts and crappy 1st party
| apps that are usually little more than a web container.
|
| iMessage clients on iOS and macOS aren't web containers and are
| more and more becoming fully native SwiftUI projects so I fail
| to see the relevance of that remark. As for vendor lockouts,
| you say that as if it's a dirty thing.
|
| Personally I take more issue with something that was open and
| then squeezed shut after everyone's inside, less so with things
| that were closed off from the get go and people still adopted
| it despite that fact, provided later down the line, after
| significant growth, there wasn't an abuse of power.
|
| > It's weird how open source has taken over the world and yet
| our messaging protocols have gotten more proprietary than ever.
|
| What's weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open
| source as if it's a staple value for you, yet here you are
| carrying water for commercial SaaS startup. Comparing their
| efforts to the likes of those who created Pidgin and libpurple.
| eredengrin wrote:
| > What's weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open
| source as if it's a staple value for you, yet here you are
| carrying water for commercial SaaS startup. Comparing their
| efforts to the likes of those who created Pidgin and
| libpurple.
|
| Beeper has done a ton of open source work on matrix bridges,
| both themselves and through sponsoring other developers. I
| don't see how it's out of place to compare them to libpurple
| devs at all.
| turquoisevar wrote:
| Be that as it may, the _Beeper mini client_ wasn't licensed
| under a FOSS license and they tried to monetize it with a
| monthly recurring subscription.
|
| And by the looks of it, many of their matrix bridges were
| created by their, now Lead Architect, before they joined
| Beeper. Those are under GPL so Beeper doesn't has much
| choice but to keep them open source.
|
| So it's kind of like me bragging about doing good for
| society by virtue of me paying my taxes.
| eredengrin wrote:
| Okay, so? Are you implying they would make the bridges
| closed source if they could? Then why do they still
| maintain the open source bridges instead of forking or
| writing their own, and why do they sponsor devs to make
| new open source bridges instead of contracting them to
| create closed source ones, and why do they dump a bunch
| of money into the matrix foundation with no immediate
| benefit to their business? Not sure why it's so hard to
| believe that people might try to support themselves while
| improving the open source ecosystem.
|
| Yes, the clients (both beeper mini and beeper cloud) are
| closed source. That's their business model - open source
| bridges that anyone can run if they wanted, then they
| just make it more convenient if you use their services by
| hosting it all for you and giving a nice polished client.
| The comparison was to libpurple devs - bridges are the
| equivalent of libpurple. This is like if libpurple devs
| decided to write a closed source client based on
| libpurple and then charge for it. Sounds good to me if it
| lets them keep working on the open source stuff.
| enobrev wrote:
| MSN and AIM were not open or public APIs
|
| AOL / ICQ's proprietary Protocol (ICQ moved to it after being
| acquired by AOL):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol
|
| I don't really care to look up the details of MSN, but at the
| time Microsoft was not "open" friendly by any means.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > You're comparing companies who had open and public APIs and
| then closed them, with one that was never open to begin with.
|
| I don't see that as a false equivalency. Plus AOL IM, MSN and
| ICQ weren't open either.
|
| > I can be wrong here, but I don't recall any of those
| efforts trying to charge people $2/mo for using their
| creation.
|
| There's been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and
| Reddit that weren't free. They were seen as the good guys
| when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they
| didn't want 3rd party app support.
|
| > iMessage clients on iOS and macOS aren't web containers
|
| I agree but iMessage is the exception in that regard. Pretty
| much every other messaging app on iOS and Android (and even
| desktop applications too) are little more than Electron or
| web views.
|
| > What's weirder, to me anyways, is that you talk about open
| source as if it's a staple value for you
|
| It's not. My comment there was that Android, iOS and macOS
| are all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are
| more closed than ever. I just find that a little ironic.
|
| > This, however, was a bit different. For starters Beeper
| tried to monetize it, it being someone else's services and
| resources.
|
| I saved this to the end because I do actually completely
| agree with you on this. At least they've done the right thing
| now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have been a
| commercial product to begin with.
| turquoisevar wrote:
| > I don't see that as a false equivalency.
|
| To me and perhaps others, those elements matter when making
| a comparison, so it seems we'll disagree on how equivalent
| the examples are.
|
| > Plus AOL IM, MSN and ICQ weren't open either.
|
| I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit you
| gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren't amongst your examples,
| presumably because they're not equivalent to Twitter and
| Reddit (open to third parties and then not anymore).
|
| But I feel I've covered the initiatives "against" AIM, MSN
| and ICQ and why I think they're not equivalent to Beeper
| extensively enough further down that comment.
|
| > There's been plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and
| Reddit that weren't free. They were seen as the good guys
| when those apps broke after Twitter and Reddit decided they
| didn't want 3rd party app support.
|
| So now we're going from one false equivalency to another?
|
| Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players on the
| board are:
|
| A) Grassroots selfless non-profit initiatives vs.
| corporations, the former having the goal to enrich
| community as a whole instead of enriching themselves
|
| B) Small for-profit indie developers + grassroots non-
| profit selfless initiatives which tried to help people with
| disabilities to participate in online discourse + well as
| researchers trying to contribute to general knowledge who
| all were paying a fee for API usage commensurate with
| market value and financial capabilities vs. corporations
| who in actuality wanted to kill third party API access but
| instead of outright saying that and doing so, instead
| decided to hike their prices to ridiculous astronomical
| levels in a surprise with not enough time to even digest
| the changes, all while making duplicitous comments
| throughout even going as far as reassuring developers right
| before, only to follow it up with derogatory comments and
| in one case defamation and utter disrespect to both the
| affected developers, the people with disabilities that got
| excluded and their everyday users l, and all but ensuring
| the death of both third party apps (if not outright
| bankrupting them) as well as grassroots projects for the
| benefit of the community as whole
|
| C) A for-profit SaaS startup using fake credentials to
| receive authentication blobs, violating the CFAA's computer
| trespass statutes by accessing another corporation's
| servers unauthorized and facilitating unauthorized access
| by third parties with goal of selling the other
| corporation's services for $2/mo
|
| A) came about without any profit motives and in cases, like
| Pidgin, didn't even involve reverse engineering[0], but
| were created with public documents and even help from
| people of the company they were trying to connect to[1].
| Let alone spoofing credentials to circumvent
| authentication. They weren't owed anything, but were being
| selfless
|
| B) Has mostly to do with poorly treating paying customers,
| closing up something that was open, having benefitted from
| third parties' work to grow, and even then the "normie"
| backlash only really gained traction after abysmal and
| unprofessional communication by the people in charge at
| Reddit and Twitter. They were owed something (at the very
| least decency) but didn't get it, with a small portion
| being selfless.
|
| C) Is mainly a company trying to make a buck, wrapping it
| in some moral stance and feeding it to the masses. They
| weren't owed anything and acted wronged.
|
| A, B and C are not comparable in the slightest. All three
| are wholly different scenarios.
|
| > It's not. My point was that Android, iOS and macOS are
| all built upon open source technologies. Yet things are
| more closed than ever. my point was just that it's ironic.
|
| I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the
| opposite. Granted I haven't looked into this, and perhaps
| this is because repos are more readily accessible than
| ever, but I have the feeling there's more open source stuff
| available than ever before.
|
| So much so that 9/10 when I'm thinking of creating
| something because "it would be so darn handy to have" I
| check if someone beat me to it and often times this ends up
| being the case and there's a GitHub repo available with a
| permissive license that does the very thing I was about to
| waste my time on.
|
| > I saved this to the end because I do actually completely
| agree with you on this. At least they've done the right
| thing now and open sourced Beeper. But it should never have
| been a commercial product to begin with.
|
| It seems we can at least agree on some things. That said, I
| was mainly trying to explain why people on HN might not be
| fully on Beeper's side.
|
| Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little workaround
| they bought (pypush), but didn't think it was smart of them
| to try and sell it.
|
| As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY thing
| for people to do themselves then I would've probably leaned
| more towards Apple being petty by trying to block it. But
| by it being a company doing it and trying to profit off of
| it, I immediately skewed more against Beeper.
|
| In particular because I saw the writing on the wall. Not
| only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent "woe is me"
| by Beeper as well. Whereas I'm more of the mentality that
| if you're gonna fuck around like this, at least take it on
| the chin if it doesn't work out.
|
| But that's just me I guess.
|
| 0: https://web.archive.org/web/19990210175349/http://www.ma
| rko....
|
| 1: https://archive.ph/2012.12.08-193508/http://www.forbes.c
| om/2...
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > I was replying to the examples of Twitter and Reddit
| you gave. AIM, MSN and ICQ weren't amongst your examples,
|
| Yes they were
|
| > So now we're going from one false equivalency to
| another? Perhaps it helps if I break it down. The players
| on the board are: [...] Pidgin [etc]
|
| I'm not talking about FOSS when I say "There's been
| plenty of 3rd party clients for Twitter and Reddit that
| weren't free."
|
| Apollo is a great example of a paid 3rd party app that HN
| were sympathetic to:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312122
|
| > I guess I misread what you were going for. I feel the
| opposite. Granted I haven't looked into this, and perhaps
| this is because repos are more readily accessible than
| ever, but I have the feeling there's more open source
| stuff available than ever before.
|
| I agree there is. And commercial operating systems are
| taking advantage of that too. Yet our walled gardens are
| more restrictive than ever. Messaging protocols are more
| locked down than ever (libpurple is a pale shell of what
| it used to be, Facebook and Google used to use XMPP).
| There's ongoing legal disputes about Apple's App Store
| and how restrictive that is. Windows and macOS both treat
| any unsigned 3rd party programs as suspicious. Our
| hardware itself is become more locked down than ever too.
|
| It's a better story on desktop Linux for sure. But I'm
| stuck with Android and iOS for phones because building a
| FOSS handset is almost impossible (and I've tried!). Even
| the hardware on modern phones are full of closed binary
| firmware, SoCs and closed Linux drivers.
|
| But I digress. My original complaint was the, in my view,
| double standard happening about people shouting for
| greater openness yet also supporting Apple in locking out
| 3rd party iMessage clients.
|
| > Personally I thought it was a pretty cool little
| workaround they bought (pypush), but didn't think it was
| smart of them to try and sell it.
|
| > As illogical it might sounds, if this was just a DIY
| thing for people to do themselves then I would've
| probably leaned more towards Apple being petty by trying
| to block it. But by it being a company doing it and
| trying to profit off of it, I immediately skewed more
| against Beeper.
|
| > In particular because I saw the writing on the wall.
| Not only of Apple mitigating it, but the subsequent "woe
| is me" by Beeper as well. Whereas I'm more of the
| mentality that if you're gonna fuck around like this, at
| least take it on the chin if it doesn't work out.
|
| Yeah I completely agree with you regarding Beeper. That
| said, I don't think that should really change things on
| Apple's side. It just means both parties are at fault
| rather than it being a hero vs villain story. I guess I
| just view this debacle as more nuanced than a lot of the
| comments on here would like to claim. People are
| definitely picking sides but, personally, I don't think
| either company has come out of this looking particularly
| great.
| pvg wrote:
| You can write this comment without the weird HN meta the
| guidelines ask you to skip and it would be a much better
| comment.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| My comment _is_ about what I believe to be a double standard
| in what was a popular comment in this thread. It 's not a
| meta argument because it's directly responding to the
| comments being made that are Beeper are in the wrong / Apple
| are in the right and it would be hard for me to make that
| point without, well, referencing those comments :)
|
| In my view it has been a very one sided discussion and I
| wanted to shine a light on that fact. It definitely isn't a
| sneer at the wider community (I mean why would I? as a
| prolific commenter myself, I'd be tarring myself with that
| same brush!)
|
| So I do not believe I'm breaking any of the guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
|
| I do want to shine a light on one of the guidelines though:
|
| "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith."
|
| I appreciate your comment is well intentioned but it's not
| taking my post in good faith.
| pvg wrote:
| It might be about that but that kind of about is off topic
| on HN as you can see in the guidelines and numerous
| moderator comments. It strictly turns reasonable comments
| into bad comments which end up getting moderated.
|
| If you want to respond to a comment, respond to the
| comment. If you want to write about some broad sentiment,
| just write about it without attributing it to the forum or
| thread as a whole, it avoids all the tangential umbrage and
| counterumbrage.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > It might be about that but that kind of about is off
| topic on HN as you can see in the guidelines and numerous
| moderator comments.
|
| I don't see any moderator comments. Though isn't Daniel
| (dang) the only mod left since Scott departed?
|
| > If you want to write about some broad sentiment, just
| write about it without attributing it to the forum or
| thread as a whole, it avoids all the tangential umbrage
| and counterumbrage.
|
| I do appreciate your point of view, I honestly do. But it
| feels the only issue you take from my comment was that it
| had two letters in it: "HN". I could write my comment in
| a way that infers the subjects without saying "HN" but it
| wouldn't change anything about the tone nor content of
| the post. So I don't agree with your interpretation of
| the guidelines on this occasion because Hacker News isn't
| like Voldemort -- it's ok to say "HN" in a comment on HN.
| You just can't be derogatory about the HN community,
| which I wasn't. And the high quality of the discourse
| that followed should demonstrate that.
|
| Anyway I don't wish this to become a tangent. Perhaps
| it's better to agree to disagree. Your point is valuable
| generally speaking though. That much I do completely
| agree with you on.
| nkcmr wrote:
| This whole fiasco is hogging US Congress' antitrust attention is,
| IMO, a huge fail.
|
| Chat apps is largely represented by iMessage, but dwarfed by
| WhatsApp. But for the most part there is _some_ competition. And
| Apple requiring that you _purchase_ their product in order to use
| its services is not harmful to consumers. Been crazy watching
| people do mental gymnastics trying to make that sound like a huge
| problem.
|
| Meanwhile, Google has effectively sterilized all competition in
| the browser market and is definitely, willfully using their
| market share to push around other companies and make purely self-
| interested, consumer-hurting choices. _This_ is where antitrust
| scrutiny needs to be aimed at.
| twism wrote:
| how so? firefox exists ... and you can't run (real) chrome on
| ios
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| I actually read a whole book on the weaponization of human
| rights, and how some groups portray their cause as "noble" to get
| around the sticky questions such as motive and self-benefit. I'm
| not saying this exactly that, but there's a lot of, "we're doing
| this for you!" speech here that's a bit out of line with the
| stakes of the problem...
| mrtksn wrote:
| Apple is doing it for our security and save the environment. If
| Apple can do it, others should be able to do it too.
|
| After all, the whole SV is trying to make the world a better
| place, make humans interplanetary species, protect freedom of
| speech, democratise stuff etc.
| batch12 wrote:
| I really can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, I can read it
| both ways. Is it?
| mrtksn wrote:
| It is. The intent is to demonstrate that motives of the
| Beeper developer are not better or worse than those of the
| rest of the industry.
| WendyTheWillow wrote:
| I opt in to Apple's work, whereas Beeper Mini was done on my
| behalf, which is the striking difference.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Why is Apple obligated to support iMessage for people who aren't
| customers? This seems to be at the root of the discussion, not
| this silly blue bubble thing. The costs of iMessage are included
| in the high price of Apple devices. Why should Apple customers
| subsidize non-customers?
| endisneigh wrote:
| So why are people obsessed with iMessage again? Are android users
| suffering without it or something?
|
| At the end of the day beeper is trying to make money, just like
| Apple. I find it hilarious that they're trying to act like some
| saint here.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| From what I understand, it's annoying for iPhone users to text
| Android users and vise versa. When an Android number is in a
| group chat it degrades all of the iPhone users' experience.
|
| Likewise, as an Android user myself, whenever an iPhone person
| texts me a picture or video it's always a potato. This makes me
| not want to text iPhone users.
|
| I wonder if there are any studies on how this causes people to
| subconsciously exclude Android users.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Even if iMessage were available for android that situation
| wouldn't be fixed because iMessage can be disabled on iPhones
| and you'd have to use the iMessage app anyways, but if you're
| willing to do that, why not just use one of the dozens of
| apps already available?
|
| I honestly find it baffling you would even care what phone
| the other person has to the point you'd avoid texting them
| because they have an iPhone for example.
| ItsABytecode wrote:
| I think iMessage is a great example of "Embrace, Extend". Apple
| didn't build a standalone chat app because everyone (in the US)
| was already using SMS on their phones and "hey if you happen to
| be SMSing another iPhone user you get these extra features"
| robust-cactus wrote:
| At this point, I'd pay for iMessage on Android. There's a lot
| of conversations android users are not a part of because of
| iMessage.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Yes, Android users do suffer without it, which is why so many
| were willing to pay for it.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why and how do they suffer? I hear things like exclusion, but
| that's always possible.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Exclusion, bullying. Exclusion is because they don't have
| iMessage.
| spogbiper wrote:
| This whole Beeper situation has increased awareness that the
| limitations of "green bubbles" are created by Apple, not by
| Android devices. At least in my small social circle there seems
| to be a change in perspective about the problem.
| riscy wrote:
| Google's RCS encryption extensions are proprietary and not
| standardized. The limitations of "green bubbles" also apply to
| Google's actions. Apple has at least announced that they plan
| to develop a standardized end-to-end encryption extension of
| RCS with the GSMA. It'd be great if Google also worked together
| with Apple to put this nonsense behind us.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I guess I'm the only one here that remembers BBM. That was before
| WhatsApp, Signal, RCS, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, or any of
| the other options we have today. It was also one of the few ways
| to message someone internationally without paying for
| international texts.
|
| People wanted to be on BBM, but you couldn't without both a
| BlackBerry and having BBM services activated on your cell plan
| (often for a premium).
|
| Iirc, BB Messenger was centralized and managed all accounts
| (email, sms, BBM) and could upgrade sms to BBM if contacting
| another blackberry user. RIM was sitting on a gold mine but they
| didn't use it right and then released BBM on Android (and iPhone,
| I think) only after the world had moved on and no one cared.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Why would you think you're the only one who remembers that?
| paxys wrote:
| Blackberry thought BBM was their moat, and for a while it did
| seem that way. Teenagers worldwide were buying what had been a
| boring business phone just to get a BBM ID. Then some shinier
| phones came along and turned out no one really cared about
| which app they used for texting.
| dfox wrote:
| BBM on the BB devices used efficient transport separate from
| the normal IP support of the network, which is why it was
| viewed as premium service by the carriers. iOS does something
| similar as a transport for APNs (and thus iMessages) with two
| important differences: Apple has somehow managed to convince
| most carriers to not bill that as premium service and can
| sidestep the carriers that would want to bill that as a premium
| service (that is the core of what the "Additional rates may
| apply" message in the iOS activation/onboarding process refers
| to, it involves few round-trips to Apple servers over SMS). BBM
| on Android did not do any kind of these optimizations and thus
| was somewhat of a battery hog (that would not fly on iPhone, so
| I assume it used APNS there).
| sambull wrote:
| Apple blackholed my SMSs from certain people for years.
|
| I'll never forgive them for that. From the very beginning they
| decided to be hostile to users.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Apple blackholed my SMSs from certain people for years._
|
| Are you sure it's Apple?
|
| I had a similar problem for years, and it turned out to be
| AT&T.
|
| I mentioned it to an AT&T rep when I was on the phone
| correcting a billing error. He was able to do something on
| AT&T's end, then send a signal that actually rebooted my iPhone
| remotely (!), and ever since then I get every SMS perfectly
| fine.
| FriedPickles wrote:
| Sweet, they open sourced their iMessage connector. I was shocked
| to see that Apple is using Hashcash in their oauth header! (I see
| now hashcash.js when I login on the website too). I assume this
| is to make password testing more expensive, and probably explains
| why I've never had to bother with a captcha when logging into an
| Apple ID.
|
| https://github.com/beeper/imessage/blob/2c45fc5619cbc33f2441...
| gorkish wrote:
| Thanks for pointing out the use of Hashcache.
|
| Since there are many projects apparently using this name, for
| anybody else like me wanting to search it up, it's the proof of
| work one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| manmal wrote:
| For anyone interested, mCaptcha is a drop in solution:
| https://mcaptcha.org/
| toddmorey wrote:
| I've always figured one of the driving motivations behind
| corporate blogs is to generate interest in your company and
| product. I'm fascinated why so many companies blog on substack or
| similar with no links to their own website. I actually wanted to
| learn about Beeper but couldn't find any links to their site.
| There are a ton of links to learn about substack.
| k310 wrote:
| I offer old Apple gear to friends so that they can iMessage and
| FaceTime.
|
| If I were mainly on linux, I'd do the same with open messaging
| apps. (admittedly, not mobile ones. YET)
|
| Except that I already gave away all my old PC hardware.
|
| There's actually a benefit of using software that's not tied to a
| phone number, a drastic decline in spam. I really don't intend to
| apply for a laborer position in Alameda.
|
| And let's face it, the unreadable white type on a bright green
| background punishes only the Apple users who have to squint at
| it. (Will rose-colored sunglasses work?).(pulls out No. 25
| photographic filter) YES!
| batuhanicoz wrote:
| It's sad to see how Apple behaved here. Kudos to Beeper for
| fighting the fight, their entire team spent sleepless nights to
| find solution after solution.
|
| Although personally I thought Apple wouldn't try to block them
| because it might look bad with with a potential antitrust case,
| this is sort of why we haven't tried moving to Windows or Android
| at Texts.com
|
| I'm glad to see Beeper getting back to focusing trying to make
| the best chat app in the world, we aren't Apple but we'll fight
| like Apple for that claim ^^
| comradesmith wrote:
| It's apple's own private system and infrastructure and they're
| within their rights to control content delivered using that
| system. It's not free for them to operate.
|
| I have seen lots of comments like "well we need some kind of
| solution to this problem, whether it's Apple launching an
| android app or a 3rd party", and to be honest with you, I don't
| even understand the problem. Maybe it's cause I'm not from the
| US and can't wrap my head around the social implications of
| message bubble hues?
| sbrother wrote:
| It's not about the button color, other than the fact that a
| green bubble means your group message is degraded and a bunch
| of expected functionality stops existing. It's hard not to
| feel some annoyance if someone is added to a group and that
| causes the experience to be degraded for everyone else.
|
| I use Whatsapp for all my European friends, but getting
| Americans to adopt a different messaging platform is as
| unlikely as getting the Dutch to start using iMessage... So
| we're left with this situation, and it will continue until
| Apple/Google adopt RCS and cross-platform messaging becomes
| as seamless an experience as iMessage.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > that a green bubble means your group message is degraded
| and a bunch of expected functionality stops existing
|
| ...because the functionality is a _paid product feature_
| that exists on their hardware and software? Because it's
| a...product feature??
| sanex wrote:
| But they purposely make the green bubble messages worse
| than they need to be. Videos get sent with a lower than
| necessary resolution.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Even when I used Android phones this would happen if you
| were misguided enough to send something over MMS lol.
|
| MMS was dated when I had a Motorola flip phone in high
| school, I'm not surprised it doesn't handle 4K video lol.
| sanex wrote:
| I don't expect 4k but I would expect that when my wife
| sends a video green with mms and then used Whatsapp to
| share it with me and I use my android to send the same
| video to the same group they should be the same
| resolution but mine is _higher_ even though she took the
| video.
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| That's not accurate. The "green bubble" is SMS/MMS. They
| operate on a standard protocol of decades as a fallback,
| which absolutely has lower quality.
|
| You can blame your carrier for that.
|
| It wasn't that long ago that MMS too large simply failed,
| or lived in limbo. I'm not a big fan of low res either,
| but it's absolutely an improvement and beyond what they
| need to do.
| Grustaf wrote:
| That is simply objectively false. They can't make the
| experience any better than it is. In a mixed group, they
| have to resort to the greatest common denominator which
| is SMS/MSM. They literally can't do anything else.
| Grustaf wrote:
| So Americans hate the iMessage experience, but for some
| reason they refuse to use any of the numerous free
| alternatives? And that is Apple's fault.
| saurik wrote:
| > It's apple's own private system and infrastructure and
| they're within their rights to control content delivered
| using that system.
|
| I dunno: to me, Apple's "rights" stop at their doorstep, and
| if they don't want their service to be accessible to third-
| party clients, they are more than welcome to just not build
| such a service (as we honestly don't have any reason to
| provide legal defense for this one specific business model).
|
| We don't merely generally avoid extending rights over other
| people... usually we _protect_ people from incursions into
| _their_ rights by companies, whether by contractual or even
| by technological means: we have many laws and legal
| precedents designed to ensure interoperability, fair markets,
| and basic things such as "legal ownership" (see the right of
| first sale doctrine, for example).
|
| When Beeper sues Apple (which I do hope is their next step),
| it is not at all obvious that Apple will get to keep doing
| what they are doing here... and, even without Beeper's
| involvement, we're already seeing government regulators and
| politicians rightfully poking around at the situation, ready
| to provide some clarification to the rules in order to
| prevent this kind of thing.
| comradesmith wrote:
| So Apple changed the locks on their front door, what's the
| big deal?
| Grustaf wrote:
| > and if they don't want their service to be accessible to
| third-party clients, they are more than welcome to just not
| build such a service
|
| That is exactly what they did. Or rather didn't. They
| haven't sued beeper, or retaliated in any way. They merely
| blocked beeper from hacking into their network. It is crazy
| to think that beeper could sue them for that.
| jdjdjdjdjd wrote:
| I see iMessage as simply the default texting app that comes with
| apple. It can text to any other type of phone and any other phone
| can text to it. It does have other features/perks that are only
| available to apple users, but why do android users feel they have
| the right to this too? It's not like apple only allows iphone to
| iphone texting.
| nerdix wrote:
| No one on Android really cares. It's actually iPhone users
| either complaining or excluding Android users from group chats.
|
| It's iPhone users creating the social pressure to use iMessage.
| anonporridge wrote:
| I'm an Android user who cares.
|
| Not necessarily for myself, but more generally for the damage
| Apple is doing to society by creating a divisive wedge
| between people for the sake of luxury signalling.
|
| Like you say, there are lots of iPhone users who pressure and
| exclude outsiders to try to force them to get iPhones.
| Android doesn't do anything like this.
| confd wrote:
| > the damage Apple is doing to society by creating a
| divisive wedge between people for the sake of luxury
| signalling.
|
| Would you be able to elaborate on this and provide some
| examples, please. With respect to iMessage, that is.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Some people are apparently so torn up about their text
| message bubbles being a different colour, they'll
| apparently wage a holy war for it in the comments.
|
| Spoiler alert everyone: if you want the product feature,
| buy the product.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Android users do not want iMessage. What they want is their
| friends to stop telling them to buy an iPhone because Apple
| ignores the RCS standard and does a purposely shitty job of
| integrating SMS group chat into iMessage.
|
| I'm generally pretty laissez faire about technology, but when
| it comes to things that have achieved high market adoption, I
| am more sympathetic to the EU's position of enforcing
| standards.
|
| I have no idea why people support corporations creating these
| weird little walled garden fiefdoms that are actively user
| hostile. This seems to be a relatively new phenomenon. Imagine
| how stupid it would be to have to have an Apple phone to call
| another Apple user. Or to have to go to a Ford gas station to
| fill your car. Or if you could only send/receive email with
| other Gmail users.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Since Beeper has stated that they're done if Apple doesn't like
| their latest solution, what are other options? Two I know of are
| AirMessage1 and Texts2, both of which seem to support this in a
| way that doesn't bother Apple.
|
| 1 https://airmessage.org/ 2 https://texts.com/
| KomoD wrote:
| bluebubbles
| jaywalk wrote:
| AirMessage requires you to run a server on macOS, and Texts
| only supports iMessage on macOS. That's why Apple doesn't mind,
| because neither of those services is hacking iMessage itself.
| maipen wrote:
| The iMessage "social pressure" is mostly a USA problem. Europeans
| use whatsapp and some eastern use telegram. Which is not
| surprising since iphone is and always was one of the most
| expensive phones to get.
| tempodox wrote:
| > ...made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple...
|
| What a brazen characterization. They try to take a free ride on
| someone else's infrastructure by a process akin to breaking and
| entering, charge their own users for it, and when Apple fends
| them off, they call it interference. I'm speechless.
| m00x wrote:
| Apple is such a shitty organization. They make excellent
| hardware, but everything they do is just an attack on its
| customers.
|
| They want to keep people in their walled garden so bad, that
| they'll transparently attack attempts to make things better for
| everyone.
| graftak wrote:
| Google is doing the exact same with RCS that has their
| proprietary e2ee layer on top that no one is allowed to use
| besides Samsung and themselves.
|
| On top of that they're acting like spoiled children used to
| getting their way, pointing fingers, because they 'lost' the
| instant messaging war.
| m00x wrote:
| Google has tried to get everyone on board with RCS for years
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23883609/google-rcs-
| messa...
| graftak wrote:
| Google made a e2ee extension on top the standard that
| deviates from the RCS spec thus it might as well be
| considered another spec all-together as it's no longer able
| to communicate with adopters of the plain RCS protocol in a
| meaningful way.
|
| Their extension is proprietary and unavailable to anyone
| except themselves and Samsung. This means that Google is
| making a bad faith argument as they're not advocating for
| RCS, but their own incompatible version of it.
|
| [0] https://www.phonearena.com/news/rcs-support-on-iphones-
| what-...
| davidcollantes wrote:
| I am an Apple customer. I don't feel attacked. In this case,
| specifically, I feel protected.
|
| Using an analogy from a person I follow on Mastodon: "For $1.99
| per month, I will give you a QR code that tells 24 Hour Fitness
| that you are their customer when you really aren't. You can
| work out for free whenever you want."
|
| And:
|
| "The Department of Justice is investigating 24 Hour Fitness for
| banning the people I charge $1.99 per month for access to all
| 24 Hour Fitness locations without actually being a member. What
| a world!"
|
| Thread: https://fedia.social/notes/9n0w48tiq887x0bp
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's a terrible analogy. Per the OP, Beeper users are Apple
| customers:
|
| > Beeper uses real registration data from real Macs and
| iPhones. These credentials are being used by real people,
| with real Apple accounts, to send real iMessages.
| selykg wrote:
| To be fair, that was JUST added in the most recent change.
| It has _not_ been like that the whole time, and it's a bit
| disingenuous to imply that it has.
|
| I doubt it'll have an impact though, and this will likely
| get shut down just as other methods have been.
| Grustaf wrote:
| This only changes today. Until now they have used various
| workarounds to avoid this.
| badrequest wrote:
| Protected from what, end-to-end encryption?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| to be fair they have their upsides, security and encryption,
| refusal to hand over customer info to government agencies that
| ask, refusal to comply with built-in back doors
|
| this hasn't changed, has it?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| We are literally talking about Apple _removing_ a system that
| allows seamless E2E encrypted chat with Android users. The
| result is _less security and encryption_ for iMessage users!
| selykg wrote:
| Not necessarily, and I see this from Apple's perspective
| though.
|
| When iMessage is under their control (it is their creation
| after all), they (Apple) can be sure that what is happening
| is exactly what users expect. We can know that the messages
| are encrypted E2E without someone in the middle.
|
| With Beeper, there are no guarantees of that anymore. I
| could be messaging a person that is using Beeper, or some
| other tool, and the messages are being intercepted by that
| other tool's server and decrypted there. I'd be _expecting_
| E2EE but not getting it.
|
| Perhaps Beeper has the best of intentions, but if you
| _allow_ Beeper you will need to allow everyone or then it
| gets even messier than it already is.
|
| When I see a blue message, or know I'm in an iMessage chat
| I have certain expectations. If you allow outside apps to
| interface with it like Beeper is doing then my expectations
| would need to be adjusted and I would no longer be able to
| trust that what I expect to be happening is always
| happening.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Did you even read the post?
|
| Beeper's integration is open-source. _Anyone_ can audit
| it. That means that Beeper requires _less trust_ from its
| users than iMessage does! Nobody gets to audit iMessage.
|
| > Perhaps Beeper has the best of intentions, but if you
| _allow_ Beeper you will need to allow everyone or then it
| gets even messier than it already is.
|
| And if iMessage's protocol is E2E encrypted, then that is
| already guaranteed to be secure from MITM. The only new
| attack surface would be the endpoint, AKA the messaging
| app itself. The only way to guarantee coverage for _that_
| attack surface is to audit _every_ messaging app,
| _including iMessage_. That is not the case, so there is
| no change in expectation.
|
| ---
|
| Your entire argument boils down to this: You trust Apple,
| and _distrust_ everyone else: therefore, as an iMessage
| user, you should just throw E2E encryption out the
| window, and use unencrypted SMS instead!
| selykg wrote:
| I'd appreciate if you were less combative in your
| discussion. "Did you even read the post?" Give me a
| break, read the rules of this discussion forum, please.
|
| Beeper is only ONE of the concerns I mentioned. As I
| said, Beeper may have the best of intentions, but not
| every solution will be. And if you allow Beeper, you're
| going to have issues with others doing the same.
|
| iMessage is end-to-end encrypted. Here's how you can MITM
| it though, if you allow third party tools like Beeper.
|
| For an app like this to work it uses a 3rd party app,
| because it has to fill the gaps of work being done by
| iMessage, which means it's handling keys, handling
| encryption, as well as all the user facing functionality.
|
| How do we know that all of these tools are not MITM'ing
| the solution? It could just as easily not E2E encrypt the
| data and decrypt on the server, before sending it to you
| via the app on your device (an Android device, or web
| app, or whatever you're using to interact with Beeper as
| a non-Apple device user). I understand Beeper operates
| locally, but even in that scenario a malicious app
| utilizing this same functionality and code could send the
| decrypted data elsewhere, requiring no server MITM, just
| a modified client side app.
|
| To an Apple user, we would have no way to tell that the
| user on the other end is potentially compromised. This
| _does_ change the trust model, does it not?
|
| Again, Beeper may have the best of intentions, but
| allowing Beeper to operate would mean allowing others to
| operate and they may not have the same intentions.
|
| Allowing these types of tools absolutely changes the
| trust of the solution.
|
| And to be clear, yes, we can view the Beeper code since
| it's open source. The real concern is other tools
| utilizing the Beeper code but in a modified way. Just
| because Beeper's code is open does not mean all solutions
| are open. And on my end, as an Apple user, I have no way
| of knowing someone is using a "best of intention" app
| like Beeper, or a maliciously modified fork of it.
| esskay wrote:
| > They want to keep people in their walled garden so bad
|
| Many of us willingly pay a premium for that. It has its
| benefits and nobody forces you to lock yourself into their
| ecosystem. Crying about it when you willingly pick something
| outside of their defined ecosystem and have some weird
| expectation of access is baffling.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Many of us willingly pay a premium for that_
|
| Cool, stay in the walled garden if you want to. That doesn't
| mean other users need to be forced within in it with you,
| too.
| Grustaf wrote:
| That's the thing, nobody is forced to buy an iphone.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 99% of people buy hardware unaware of the how the
| software locks them into a walled garden.
|
| The vast majority of people aren't thinking "Wow, I love
| how Apple takes away my freedom and forces me to use apps
| even if I might want to use something else", they're
| buying an iPhone because it's shiny and is what they're
| familiar with.
|
| Those people deserve to be afforded user freedom and to
| own the devices they purchased.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| When you encounter a non-Apple user and you have to interact
| with them with your iDevice (video calls, messaging, file
| transfer, etc.) do you do everything in your power to make it
| a good experience? Otherwise you're peer pressuring other
| people to enter the ecosystem.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _It has its benefits and nobody forces you to lock yourself
| into their ecosystem._
|
| Network effects absolutely do and Apple knows this. Otherwise
| they wouldn't go out of their way to distinguish non-Apple
| users in chats.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| In my opinion, it was the App Store and iCloud services era of
| Apple that made the company so user hostile to Mac users.
|
| One of the things I liked about earlier OS X and Macs was the
| potential to do hacky things, and the plethora of tools to
| accomplish just that on your Mac.
|
| Turns out hacking and tinkering has the potential to impact
| their bottom line, so no more of that without Apple getting in
| the way to make it inconvenient to impossible.
| sotix wrote:
| Apple was founded by members of the Homebrew Computer Club[0].
| They had a different philosophy and outlook on their products.
| As they gained more money, their image started warp. By the
| time the founders were out of the picture, we're left with
| people that joined Apple primarily for monetary gain. That's
| the current Apple under Tim Cook. It's a shame to see such a
| decline because they absolutely have room to be wildly
| profitable while bucking the greedy ethos of other
| corporations, but they have settled down that path and
| implemented numerous decisions that are hostile to their own
| users.
|
| There are too many hardware and software decisions they have
| made in recent years to list, but one decision I think
| representative of the company's pursuit of profit in spite of
| its users interests is the fact that iPhone cases do not fit
| models from year-to-year, even for the small refreshes.
|
| [0] https://techland.time.com/2013/11/12/for-one-night-only-
| sili...
| binkHN wrote:
| I'm sorry to see them pull the plug so quickly, but it was mostly
| expected.
|
| As a developer of a "companion" communications app, I understand
| Beeper's frustration all too well. I really look forward to a
| world of interoperable instant messaging one day; email is
| amazingly ubiquitous and it's because of open standards. There
| are pros and cons to this and, sadly, the biggest "con" is one
| can't completely control this to monetize the hell out of it
| (although Google did a pretty good job with Gmail?) and that's
| why IM is so siloed.
|
| Google is pushing the hell out of RCS, but there is still no API
| on Android for developers to hook into this. Why am I not
| surprised?
| Arch-TK wrote:
| >If Apple wants to accuse us of being insecure, they need to back
| that up with hard evidence.
|
| No, as history has shown, apple can just make up and spread
| arbitrary FUD about your business, and a lot of customers will
| believe them. Apple lobbyists will then use the FUD to push laws
| which put your business at risk.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Reminds me of this: Go all the way back to 2009. The Palm Pre
| spoofed USB ids (I guess) so it would work with iTunes. Apple
| updated iTunes a time or two to block it. Palm gave up.
|
| https://www.networkworld.com/article/758811/palm-gives-up-la...
| poisonborz wrote:
| With all the drama surrounding this, isn't the actual root of the
| problem that most US Apple users just can't be bothered to simply
| install another messaging app?
| danShumway wrote:
| Pretty much. There are other messaging protocols that do
| basically everything iMessage does (and outside of the US,
| they're fairly ubiquitous). A better resolution to all of this
| would have been for everyone to just switch to Matrix/Signal --
| heck even WhatsApp would be an improvement.
|
| It seems to be a uniquely American problem that I can't get any
| of my contacts (on Android too, by the way, users there are
| just as apathetic) to switch to secure cross-platform messaging
| services. In a better world all this talk about RCS and SMS
| bridges wouldn't matter because we'd all have already abandoned
| SMS entirely.
| system2 wrote:
| What did anyone expect? They did all this to get attention to
| release their Beeper App. They knew how it would end from the
| moment they came up with the idea.
| Hortinstein wrote:
| Does anyone have a consolidated timeline of the counters by Apple
| and patches by beeper with technical details? It would be
| fascinating to read
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| > Just one year ago, Tim Cook had this to say about RCS: "I don't
| hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at
| this point. [...] Buy your mom an iPhone."
|
| He said the quiet part out loud, and _no one did anything about
| it_. That moment (or any time before then) is when the battle was
| lost.
|
| If our governments had any sense of justice, Apple would be
| facing anti-trust enforcement over that statement alone.
| turquoisevar wrote:
| What would be the cause of action in this hypothetical
| antitrust case you speak of?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Apple is using the vertical integration between its software
| business and its hardware business to prevent competition
| with both.
| xg15 wrote:
| I didn't really believe the Apple fanboy effect was real before,
| but I'm honestly just blown away by this thread.
|
| If they were up against any other company, I'm absolutely certain
| this thread would be rooting for Beeper hard, with all the usual
| arguments about interoperability, open source, the right to
| control your own devices and own your data.
|
| Only for Apple, suddenly all of that falls out of the window and
| the most blatant anticompetitive behaviour is ok because of
| "security".
| invig wrote:
| Perspective shift, there's an axis of responsibility:
|
| Hacker - It's my stuff and I'm responsible for how it works.
| User - I'm using this and it's the suppliers job to make sure
| it works.
|
| Where you sit on this spectrum from Hacker to User defines your
| opinion on this.
|
| Neither end is wrong, they just want different things.
| epolanski wrote:
| Serious, why people use iMessage so much in the us?
|
| Nobody does in southern Europe, not even iOS users do, everybody
| just uses WhatsApp.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| iMessage probably just came first for enough people with enough
| other people using it that it just stuck. I think most often in
| other countries the iPhone was too expensive so a cheap Android
| was the only option, with alternative messaging apps therefore
| being much more useful for those people.
| rsanek wrote:
| You could ask the same thing -- why does everyone use WhatsApp?
| maratc wrote:
| Historically, the US had (rather expensive by the RoW
| standards) "unlimited" plans very early on, so most of the US
| users would not bother to think about the cost of SMS before
| sending a message. The rest of the world at the time was mostly
| on pay-per-SMS plans.
|
| Then WhatsApp appeared, with an offer of $1 per year for an
| unlimited amount of messages.
|
| As can be seen, the value proposition of that was _tremendous_
| in e.g. Europe, but _non-existing_ in the US, as it just was $1
| over what the US users already had. Most of the world got
| sucked into WhatsApp pretty quickly. The US never followed
| suit.
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