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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
741–750 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#742Good advertisement for beeper. Now we'll see if they're true.
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find this a bit confusing though. It seems like this was an inevitable outcome, but what do they gain from this technical investment aside from exposure. Their website doesn't steer users to anything other than the now cut-off Beeper mini?
> from this technical investment What technical investment? They bought an open-source project from a high-school student. Beeper Mini is an app they would have built anyway. They simply implemented the bare minimum of iMessage functionality there. Which is a couple of days worth of work, maximum. Maybe a week. And some for testing. I’m somewhat certain it cost them less than 5 figures. And if it did, what a great ma…
More like a few weeks to months since there‘s also emoji support and endless scrolling etc, but yeah. I agree it’s doable by one developer and that’s quite affordable to do, considering the scale Beeper is at now.
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where is the hacker spirit here? The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use. It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business , or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense. > Myself for example owns a Macbook, but an Android phone. Am I not allowed to use iMessage? I paid the toll. Of course you can. It's sitting there on y…
Use WhatsApp - it works on both platforms.
The hacker spirit uses Signal. Promoting WhatsApp over the more open community-supported alternative is worse than gloating over Beeper.
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#745The way Beeper-mini addressed the "criticism" that Apple would shut them down in their show HN post to me seemed like their were either completely naive, or far more likely that they understood that it would only last a short time and that it was all a PR stunt to get you to notice their product and become a user to try it out, and maybe switch to it.
It's not bad marketing strategy at all, I'm sure they gained a huge number of new users, and some percentage of them will stick around even without iMessage support (because there's not really someone else to switch to), but it seemed a bit too manipulative for my personal taste. They could have just said "try us out and see if you like us, we'll keep iMessage support going as long as we can" but instead they dodged the question entirely.
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#746As usual, Gruber was right on the money. Via Threads yesterday: "My prediction is that Apple will make changes—fixing bugs and/or closing loopholes—that break Beeper Mini. It’s untenable that there’s unsanctioned client software for a messaging platform for which privacy and security are a primary feature. It’s a very nice app, remarkably clever, and for now works like a charm, but if Apple wanted an iMessage client…
The primary feature of iMessage is lock-in. Everything else is secondary.
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#747Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#748Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s also at severe risk of ruining the fun for numerous other hacker-spirit communities like hackintosh or opencore. Apple can come down on this in ways that potentially make it much more difficult for hackintosh to operate, or for people to update their legitimate apple systems after the end of official support. Which was pointed out in those threads too. See also geohot taking some other PS3 exploits that were alr…
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That’s not quite or hardly at all what they said. Nuance is a thing..
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where is the hacker spirit here? The hacker spirit is the fun of reverse engineering. The hacker spirit is about personal use. It's not expecting to be able to turn it into a business , or a popular app, that wouldn't quickly be shut down. That's just common sense. > Myself for example owns a Macbook, but an Android phone. Am I not allowed to use iMessage? I paid the toll. Of course you can. It's sitting there on y…
No. Hacker spirit is owning your machine to its full extent. For fun, for profit or just for mayhem. Apple using instant messaging, where no meaningful innovation happened for decades to build their moat is pathetic and disgusting.
What is the meaningful innovation in messaging that happened elsewhere?
Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access
#750Where is the hacker spirit here? The number of Apple apologists that have crawled out to say "see? I told you so!!" is saddening. It is a bit dicey when you're charging for it, but since Mini was entirely client-side it would be feasible for a free version to exist. Apple claims iMessage is E2EE, do we have proof they aren't siphoning the messages from the client once it's been decrypted? The level of trust we have t…
Apple customers are the fur wearers of the tech world.