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Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

techcrunch.com

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Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#911

Post by graphe »

azubinski wrote: post #899
im_thatoneguy wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because iMessage users won't let you join iMessage group chats. They don't want to lose features. So your choice is to just not be friends anymore or have an iphone device. I have an ipad just to chat with people who refuse to use anything other than imessage. I don't want anything to do with iMessage, but I have to.

This is the first time I've heard that people who put features above friendship are called friends. Well, the time has come.

I use features of programs with people who can use it. I don't want to call friends that have bad audio quality as often and I'm not as comfortable on unencrypted services. I prefer facetime for the quality. We all use something Android users can use when we want to include them, but it degrades the experience.

Most people don't talk to people they don't communicate as well with.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#912

Post by thomastjeffery »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #771
thomastjeffery wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit redundant to mention "is a human" separately, since humans are made by... wait a minute

Reproduction isn’t really a human making a human. Where making means using your cognitive power to apply focus to a creative task. It is more akin to natural biological processes. Do humans make poo, or hair?

OK, what about IVF?

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#913

Post by vagrantJin »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #343
pjz wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the obvious attention play, he might be going for an acquisition play... "Why bother writing our own iMessage for Android when we can just buy this little company that's already done it?" There's obvious issues with that plan, but that doesn't keep delusional founders from being delusional.

Apple chose not to support Android on purpose. They know iMessage exclusivity drives hardware sales. The emails have come out proving as much. It's the same reason they dragged their feet supporting RCS, until regulatory pressure started mounting.

I must be an idiot. Never even heard of iMessage before this debacle - I wouldnt even know I was using it.

On a more serious note regarding the Hardware sales- Apple inc does not make that much profit based on "what" they sell, its "who" they are selling to.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#914

Post by nickorlow »

winterqt wrote: post #621
nickorlow wrote: post #180

I'm guessing the binary they use from Apple (IMDAppleServices) to generate part of the registration information probably adds metadata to the "validation blob" that gets sent to apple when registering beeper mini as an iMessage device. If the metadata includes the OS version, Apple probably blacklisted any new devices registered in the past few days with validation blobs generated from that binary. (The binary was so…

It doesn't look like that binary is used for Beeper Mini, unlike pypush: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works

I wouldn't be surprised if whatever they reverse engineered from the binary had similar behavior

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#915

Post by lolinder »

MBCook wrote: post #142
etrautmann wrote: post #99

Earlier 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?

Exposure is something. The fact the developer had the chops to do this is now on the public record. That could be very valuable for getting a job or a college scholarship (since they’re in HS).

What do the Beeper investors get out of the kid having better job prospects? I don't think anyone is questioning that the whole situation has been great for the kid, the question is what the Beeper execs were thinking.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#916

Post by lolinder »

sgjohnson wrote: post #549
etrautmann wrote: post #99

Earlier 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…

I still have no idea what Beeper is, because beeper.com only talks about Beeper Mini. I'm getting from some people here on HN that there's another product... somewhere... but if the purpose of the whole exercise were to draw attention to that product shouldn't they be doing that somehow?

As is all I know about is the chat app whose primary sales pitch is the now-broken iMessage interop.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#918

Post by system2 »

StressedDev wrote: post #143

One thing which is really confusing is why are Android users obsessed with iMessage? Android users can send text messages to iPhones, the can call iPhone users, and they can use third party messaging apps to communicate with iPhone users. It really isn’t clear to me why so many people are so angry they cannot use iMessage on Android.

I have a group chat with mainly female iPhone users. One of the users switched to Android. They created a new group without her. Bizarre but real.

Re: Apple cuts off Beeper Mini's access

#920

Post by LeafItAlone »

doctoboggan wrote: post #89

My guess is Beeper calculated this was likely to happen eventually (maybe not this fast), but that they would get good press on the initial launch and on the shutdown announcement and that press would be worth the technical investment they made. They do have a different service they still offer and some percentage of people are looking at that now.

That seems like a possibility. But if I was a user (and I am admittedly not), I would be _less_ likely to continue with their services after something like this. This experience would not instill confidence in me that any of their services would be stable.
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