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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#131

Post by altairprime »

qrohlf wrote: post #29

I’m curious what their best-case outcome is here. It’s fully transparent at this point that Apple has no appetite for a third party iMessage client on any platform and will take whatever technical steps needed to prevent this from happening. I’d wager heavily that even if Beeper plays cat-and-mouse to the point where they’ve exhausted Apple’s budget for blocking them and somehow managed to avoid Apple’s legal team pu…

I think they’re a lawsuit startup, as in funded in service of the speculative opportunity of favorable court case and/or political outcomes stemming from their intentional behaviors. Think Uber being funded to set case precedent versus taxis, in order to pave the way to deprecating humans taxi drivers in favor of robots. VCs love speculation and Beep’s PR has been quite effective at riding the coattails of pre-existing beliefs to push for their desired legal outcomes, from which they would profit.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#132

Post by philomath_mn »

LordKeren wrote: post #26

I think one of the underlying issues is that many are now going to be hesitant to even bother with Beeper Mini anymore. I don’t think there is going to be a high tolerance for this game of cat and mouse from the end user perspective I also don’t think goading apple is going to do much here either. Regardless of the current feelings around apple’s walled garden, they are not going to suddenly keel over and give up on…

Yeah I was super excited to try it out last week, but then it went down and I didn't receive important messages from my wife (didn't even realize the app was down).

I probably won't try it again until it has a few months of uninterrupted service.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#134

Post by smt88 »

rpmisms wrote: post #2

I have a feeling they're not going to stop being a thorn in Apple's side for quite a while...

They only thorn they're creating for Apple is forcing them to do anticompetitive things while they're being investigated for anticompetitive practices in places like the EU.

In terms of technical problems, Apple will likely be able to keep up their end of the arms race with less than 1/2 of a single developer's time. The cost to continue patching Beeper out of their systems will be a fraction of a rounding error for them financially.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#135

Post by Nextgrid »

mullingitover wrote: post #94
martinky24 wrote: post #13

These Beeper folk sound a bit entitled. As was repeatedly mentioned in the other thread [1], building production applications on top of an undocumented and unsupported (in terms of backwards compatability, etc) API is a nightmare that should be avoided. Apple has every right to change their API, if they do Beeper will go down, and Beeper will blame Apple. I understand Apple's incentives to not want to be in this situ…

The part that's wild to me is that Beeper is collecting revenue from their users for this. Apple doesn't charge for iMessage, and instead that service is funded by device purchases. Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices to help them parasitize the infrastructure of the service, and instead of contributing to Apple's operational expenses, they're pocketing the money. There's no scenario where this st…

The marginal cost of an extra user on the APNS server is extremely small. Hell I bet the overall barrage of spam push notifications across the iOS landscape causes orders of magnitude more load than Beeper users, and Apple doesn't complain (despite push spam being against the App Store rules).

Of course, Apple is welcome to start charging a reasonable fee for the service.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#136

Post by nickthegreek »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #97
micromacrofoot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's valid feedback from Beeper, but to insinuate that this gives them to right to force Apple to run their reverse-engineered access is where things go a bit too far for me. Apple's customers are not Beeper's customers. They have completely different incentives. I guess the approach is to try and force Apple's hand or push some legislation for interoperability, but Apple is working on RCS so it's not like th…

Apple's RCS implementation is meaningless unless they cut out the blue/green bubble shit.

It will be far from meaningless if I can send a high resolution image easily to a groupchat containing a mix of android and ios users.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#137

Post by mareko »

albelfio wrote: post #62
martinky24 wrote: post #13

These Beeper folk sound a bit entitled. As was repeatedly mentioned in the other thread [1], building production applications on top of an undocumented and unsupported (in terms of backwards compatability, etc) API is a nightmare that should be avoided. Apple has every right to change their API, if they do Beeper will go down, and Beeper will blame Apple. I understand Apple's incentives to not want to be in this situ…

Devil’s advocate: does Beeper opens up iMessage to spam bots?

Spam bots can already use the Mac version of iMessage. I doubt Beeper will change spam levels for iMesssage users.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#138

Post by jxf »

vineyardmike wrote: post #116
matsemann wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did HN get so anti-consumer, anti- hacker , anti-freedom, pro-proprietary? Them taking the fight with Apple should be applauded. A walled down proprietary message platform only a few can use is stupid to fight in favor of.

A walled down proprietary messaging platform is so common as to be unremarkable. Google has probably 5 in the works right now. Meta has a few, and there’s dozens of others to choose from. It was really cool news when they reverse engineered the API. It was less cool when they sold paid access to this unofficial API. Beeper is barely pro-consumer because again, they’re charging for something open sourced by a 16yo kid…

> The green bubble blue bubble story is really tired. Yea it’s real, but it’s not a technical problem it’s a social problem.

It's both. For example, Apple degrades the experience for "green bubbles" even though it doesn't need to. That's not, strictly speaking, a social problem.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#139

Post by mab122 »

CharlesW wrote: post #59
radlad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what metric? Arguably, users are less secure since "fixing" Messages (i.e. breaking Beeper) means Apple and Android users lose a secure communication channel. Beeper isn't "hacking" Messages... they've implemented the protocol.

> Arguably, users are less secure since "fixing" Messages (i.e. breaking Beeper) means Apple and Android users lose a secure communication channel. If you hack a secure communications channel so that unauthorized client software/hardware can pretend to be authorized software/hardware, how does that make the channel more secure?

> If you hack a secure communications channel so that unauthorized client software/hardware can pretend to be authorized software/hardware, how does that make the channel more secure?

How does it make more insecure? It doesnt, security should be accomplished by the protocol, messages themselves not by blockong access to a communication channel. Otherwise its just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#140

Post by Nextgrid »

glasshug wrote: post #119
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not entitled at all, they are filling a void in the market that Apple doesn't want filled. As I understand it this is explicitly legal under the DMCA and the EU DSA,

Anyone have some detail on the copyright law connection here?

Copyright law is often abused to prevent adversarial interoperability, so it's relevant, even if it might not actually apply.
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