Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#211

Post by hamandcheese »

jkubicek wrote: post #80
foxhill wrote: post #30

the optics are already less than ideal for apple. beeper mini dismisses the any technical challenge apple may claim a hurdle to android having iMessage. i don’t doubt this will also get shutdown in the near term, but i’m 70% confident in a surprising acquisition & continued support from apple in the longer term. it will be hard for apple to continue to claim they are pro-user when they appear to be this hostile towar…

I'm 0% confident in a surprise acquisition by Apple. Beeper doesn't seem to offer anything that Apple couldn't do themselves.

With that logic you would expect Apple to never make acquisitions. They've got the money in the bank to do just about anything.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#212

Post by micromacrofoot »

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.

The colors of the bubbles are the least important aspect of this

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#213

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #173
madeofpalk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's anti-competitive with what Apple does with iMessage? iMessage's lack of popularity everywhere else in the world is proof that competition is able to flourish. Apple is under no obligation to make an Android app, and it's silly to pretend not making an app for another platform is somehow anti-competetive. The market simply chosing a preference is not anti-competive. iPhone and iMessage is able to compete on it'…

If I have a computer that's technically capable to interoperate and talk with someone else's computer, why should we intentionally restrict that ability? The answer isn't to say that in other locations we have a different gatekeeper so all is well, the answer should be that Apple's gatekeeping should be broken, and then other gatekeepers' gatekeeping should be broken too. We should all have one messaging client that…

[deleted]

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#214

Post by dimitrios1 »

lacker wrote: post #148
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…

The best case outcome is to get publicity leading to US and EU antitrust regulators to file a lawsuit against Apple, both of which Apple loses. The conclusion of this lawsuit is that not only must Apple allow access to iMessage, they also must allow changing the default for every component of iOS - messaging app, browser, app store, let you replace Siri with other voice assistants - and to lower the 30% app store fee…

The actual best case outcome is consumers become increasingly educated on these issues and use the market to not reward Apple for these practices, rather than relying on the coercive apparatus of the state that easily falls victim to corruption and regulatory capture, until such the time where we can have an actual functioning government again that isn't strangling small businesses, close the revolving door and get money out of politics and, yeah.. pigs flying and all that.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#215

Post by mschuster91 »

misnome wrote: post #179
lacker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best case outcome is to get publicity leading to US and EU antitrust regulators to file a lawsuit against Apple, both of which Apple loses. The conclusion of this lawsuit is that not only must Apple allow access to iMessage, they also must allow changing the default for every component of iOS - messaging app, browser, app store, let you replace Siri with other voice assistants - and to lower the 30% app store fee…

US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years? I’d buy the EU stepping in to mandate interoperability though. I’d welcome that! But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

> But… shouldn’t mostly everyone here view needing the EU to force the behaviour of a US company kind of against the entire supposed benefit of the US system and the purpose of the domain this forum is hosted on?

European here. From my POV it seems as if the USA have forgotten that for a truly free market to exist, there needs to be serious oversight to prevent capitalism from devolving into "corporate Darwinism" - aka the strong ones staying strong because they (b)eat all the competition by being so strong in the first place or because they impose their externalities upon everyone else.

There is many an argument to be had if a free-market system is better than one more oriented on the government running things (obviously, I'm in the latter camp), but the problem is y'all don't have a free market at that point.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#216

Post by summerlight »

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…

> Apple’s next move would likely be to release some kind of official iMessage Android client rather than cede control of the space to Beeper.

This looks like a great outcome?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#217

Post by misnome »

Nextgrid wrote: post #125
misnome wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t anti-freedom and pro-proprietary to have a view on what you think the law says and what you think Apple’s right to respond is. The original kid who reversed: Great hacking, I think we can all applaud. This is a for-profit (VC funded?) company charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for (and using apple binary blobs?). If they used the protocol they reverse engineered on their own…

> charging users by piggy backing off of servers they don’t own or pay for Apple is free to charge for them. In fact, I think it would be the best outcome and a mitigation to the upcoming spam onslaught now that the protocol has been documented. > But that wouldn’t be profitable for them. Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create (since Apple is mo…

> Apple is free to charge for them

But I don’t think anyone disagrees that Apple is (currently) free _not_ to charge for them.

> Is it a problem to profit off creating a tool that some other manufacturer intentionally doesn't want to create

I’d say ethically no - not a problem - up _until_ the point where they are actively, continuously using resources of that manufacturer. Legally? If you or your customers have agreed to a TOS then that’s probably bad either way.

Nobody would care about (or be interested in) beeper if they were running their own servers.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#218

Post by mlindner »

afavour wrote: post #108
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 way I see it Beeper are deliberately poking the bear. They knew Apple would block their implementation (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had this replacement ready to go). You don’t have to trust them, if you don’t want to use the service then don’t. They’re highlighting the closed nature of Apple’s messaging system more effectively than anyone has in a long time. I support them in doing that.

> They’re highlighting the closed nature of Apple’s messaging system more effectively than anyone has in a long time. I support them in doing that.

Every major chat app is closed though? For example, I use LINE regularly, there's no way to access that chat system through anything but LINE apps.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#219

Post by Nextgrid »

madeofpalk wrote: post #98

> Messages App is the default chat app for all iPhone customers. Not only is it the default, iOS makes it impossible to change the default chat app. In the US, where the majority of people have iPhones, this means that the easiest way to chat is by tapping on your friend’s name in your contact list and hitting the ‘message’ button. This is not true. On iOS - iOS has APIs for third party messaging and voip apps to int…

Default option is still usual phone call/iMessage in a lot of places - in some you can long press and select another option, but not all.

Also, merely opening a separate app doesn't really help. How about instead of having 5 different apps (that the system one sometimes generously allows you to open), you had one app that can seamlessly speak all protocols?

You can add multiple e-mail or contacts accounts (even from different providers) and it'll seamlessly merge them in the system Mail/Contacts apps - why can't we have the same for messages?

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#220

Post by lopkeny12ko »

Beeper has caught a ton of media attention in recent weeks but I truly do not understand it. The SMS protocol has been around for decades and works perfectly fine with iPhones. If you want rich media and other bells and whistles, use WhatsApp. How often does someone whine so loudly about insisting on using the closed, Apple-proprietary protocol that their friends need to pay a monthly subscription for a third party interop app?
Post reply on HN