661–670 of 1001 posts
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It’s not, and they don’t. This is a cat and mouse game. Apple is free to block these and people are free to keep trying to get around it. Everyone should be acting in good faith
> It’s not, and they don’t. > they don't They (Apple) don't accept requests without a valid serial #, but Beeper Mini is working (for users without iDevices), so there's some kind of exploit, no?
Maybe this came up in the earlier threads (announcement, outage) so I apologize if it's been discussed ... This project is fantastic. The hacker spirit is in full force, and I love a good David and Goliath story. However, all the comments about demanding interoperability and protocols keep confusing me -- I don't consider APNS a protocol (like TCP anyways), it's also not incidental, extra header space to stuff data i…
>Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products? Because I want to talk to my friends without being locked into Apple's ecosystem. Simple as that, I don't need any other reason. This language about "entitlement" feels like when Google complains about people using adblockers on YT - I don't care because they're both $2T corporations, and the only "entitlement" I see is the way Apple and…
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>Why does everybody feel entitled to use it if they're not using Apple products? Because I want to talk to my friends without being locked into Apple's ecosystem. Simple as that, I don't need any other reason. This language about "entitlement" feels like when Google complains about people using adblockers on YT - I don't care because they're both $2T corporations, and the only "entitlement" I see is the way Apple and…
> Because I want to talk to my friends without being locked into Apple's ecosystem. Simple as that, I don't need any other reason. You can't do that now with SMS and a plethora of other messaging apps?
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Is it free? I have it bundled as part of my hardware purchases. Is there somewhere to get it without paying?
It is free even without purchase. I could give someone an old iPhone and they can use it without issue.
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 i…
So many reasons not to use SMS: No indicators that the message was actually received (2023 and SMS is still flaky on deliveries), no read receipts, no presence notifications, no typing notifications, no encryption in transit or rest, no escaping group chat spam... that's just the high points.
Long time ago when I was actually sending SMS messages to real people, then-current phones had a "delivery notifications" setting you had to turn on. Then you would receive a notification when your message has been delivered.
> Messages will be sent and received via your email address rather than phone number. [...] Even worse, when iPhone customers added an Android phone number to an existing iMessage secure encrypted group chat, the Messages app would by default switch the entire group chat to using unencrypted, unsecure SMS. These two Messages features combine to create a terrible UX. When someone starts a group chat in Messages and in…
From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change. The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple i…
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How is this an actionable anti-trust issue? iMessage doesn't even register as a messaging platform in the minds of most users globally. In the US is it dwarfed by at least three other platforms. Globally, do any of the other top ten (Apple is nowhere near the top ten) messaging apps allow third parties to spoof their service? The purpose of anti-trust is to increase competition and prevent unlawful monopolies. Apple…
> iMessage … messaging platform For me, personally, it’s an SMS app not general messaging. And on iOS there is absolutely no competition for SMS by design. I suspect iMessage would enjoy far less adoption if the iMessage features were a separate application from the SMS features, or if a 3rd party app could assume the role of handling SMS (I.E. Signal). If Signal were allowed to handle SMS on an iPhone, ditching iMes…
Instead what an app like Signal does is request all the permissions it can from the SMS/MMS handling service of the phone - to read and send SMS entries, and to get events on an incoming SMS, and then request to be the default handler of the `sms` custom URI scheme.
But you can have any number of SMS clients at once. It is likely if Apple Messages ever came to Android, it would do the same thing - otherwise, the fallback behavior (when talking to an android user without the app installed, for example) would be sub-par.
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…
All Apple needs to do is send a few scary C&D letters from their army of lawyers and this will be done. If they run the infrastructure for imessage, I'm sure there's something in a ToS somewhere that talks about spoofing device IDs and unauthorized use of their services blah blah Apple's sole discretion. In theory I love it but in reality it'll be dead soon as Apple has too much to gain from the walled garden they've…
They’re publishing client software, which is protected expression provided it’s original and doesn’t infringe any trademarks or copyrights.
The end users are the ones potentially violating the ToS by connecting to Apple APIs.
Apple has no basis to tell Beeper to cease and desist from the publication of software that it is legal to publish.
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All Apple needs to do is send a few scary C&D letters from their army of lawyers and this will be done. If they run the infrastructure for imessage, I'm sure there's something in a ToS somewhere that talks about spoofing device IDs and unauthorized use of their services blah blah Apple's sole discretion. In theory I love it but in reality it'll be dead soon as Apple has too much to gain from the walled garden they've…
A $3T monopolist sending scary C&D letters tends to get the attention of the government.
(Whether it is a violation or not, I certainly couldn't say, but my point being that there is a reasonable good faith interpretation of the behavior that would not raise eyebrows.)