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

Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 665 posts

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#571

Post by filoleg »

pjerem wrote: post #489
chongli wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father has an iPhone 8 which did not receive the latest iOS update. I can iMessage him just fine. There are millions of people out there running old iPhones like that. If Apple just decided to cut them all off iMessage they would do far more damage to their brand than Beeper could possibly manage.

I’m not talking about your father but I really doubt that the millions of people running 6+yo phones would care a lot about this. They could still send SMS, it’s not like they would became suddenly unreachable. Apple could even be generous and still allow group chats or whitelist existing accounts. Also, you have to take into consideration that iMessage is pretty US centric, the rest of the world wouldn’t really care…

The whole point is moot, even though I agree with your take.

There were plenty of confirmation from other users in this thread having their out of the most recent iOS version iPhones (someone mentioned their iPhone 5 currently running iOS12, with the most recent one being iOS17) working just fine with iMessage.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#572

Post by filoleg »

Grustaf wrote: post #507
vintermann wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice of you, but by all accounts from the US (where iphone is dominant): Yes, it's a problem. The visual marking and decreased integration/service towards users of non-iphones is pretty obviously part of why Apple has such a big phone market share in the US - if not, they wouldn't fight tooth and nail to keep those anti-features. There's plenty of examples of Apple being quite open and friendly to integration…

It’s not just about market share. In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones, but this whole blue-green bubble nonsense is a total non-issue. We have group chats in whatsapp, fb messages or sms, nobody cares.

This makes me wonder, what’s the iMessage situation in Japan? Their smartphone market is also majority iOS, sitting at above 60% (while it is only a little bit above 50% for the US)[0].

Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that controversy not being a thing in Japan. But it could just be a non-issue in Japan.

Can anyone with knowledge of this chime in?

0. https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#573

Post by Wingy »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #370
dylan604 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at some point Serial Box will have a list of valid/invalid hardware serial numbers. or, someone will crack the code to generate valid codes. oh wait. i drifted off back to the 90s software cracking days.

if apple checks an online database for "you authenticated and paired this hardware ID to this apple ID", is that a "Beeper Mini" killer?

I have Apple devices that are allowed to use iMessage including some that I don't use. If my computer can impersonate one of them to allow me to message from my workstation that's success.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#574

Post by jonhohle »

Miner49er wrote: post #244
jonhohle wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of infrastructure and operations do you think is necessary to handle 8.4B messages per day. So far, the cost of those systems and teams has come from hardware sales. The benefit is that it is effectively a paid for service and doesn't need external support from advertisers or by selling user data.

A couple hundred servers, and like 5 engineers.

Minimally that’s a few million dollars per year for KTLO. At least a few million more for ongoing development. Why should it be free for everyone?

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#575

Post by expensive_news »

StressedDev wrote: post #477
standardUser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, it is beyond depressing to imagine Apple bigwigs sitting around discussing ways to make absolutely certain teens keep getting ostracized until they buy their overpriced product.

If someone is ostracizing you because you do not own an iPhone, you probably want to avoid that person. I have never met anyone who would do this and frankly, only an extremely nasty person would do this. I am mean seriously, why ostracized someone because they use a different type of phone?

I have met people that will do this, and trust me, they are worth avoiding.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#576

Post by redwall_hp »

cunidev wrote: post #539

It seems like the effort Apple is putting in stopping this is an indicator of how many people buy iPhones just for being in their iMessage circles. Which is only possible as long as Apple keeps snubbing RCS and making messaging painful to non-iPhone users. If, say, a random cheap Motorola with Beeper could keep them in the same groups as before, Apple would probably lose a (small) chunks of its clients.

If any company with a restricted service exposed to the internet found someone illegally gaining access by spoofing device IDs or API keys, the engineers who noticed would immediately shut down access and inform management, so they can run it up the chain to legal. There need be no other motivation beyond preventing illegal access to a computer system.

I doubt Beeper Mini is on the radar of anyone high up at Apple. Some engineering team responsible for the services that back iMessage is just spotting and dealing with one of probably many malicious actors.

RCS support has also already been announced by Apple for 2024.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#577

Post by redwall_hp »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #542
cunidev wrote: post #539

It seems like the effort Apple is putting in stopping this is an indicator of how many people buy iPhones just for being in their iMessage circles. Which is only possible as long as Apple keeps snubbing RCS and making messaging painful to non-iPhone users. If, say, a random cheap Motorola with Beeper could keep them in the same groups as before, Apple would probably lose a (small) chunks of its clients.

> how many people buy iPhones just for being in their iMessage circles This is news only in the US. Literally everywhere else in the world (where iPhones don't have a supermajority market share), third-party apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Line, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, etc have been used for the past decade, with no problems whatsoever. My own WhatsApp account has been active for a decade , with chats going back ex…

My experience is that third party applications are the norm in the US, too. Everyone I know uses Facebook Messenger or Discord, and that situation has been the norm for at least a decade (and Discord itself is nearing a decade of existence now). Facebook Messenger is easily the default multi-platform option.

90% of my Messages app is SMS threads, and the vast majority of my messaging activity is Slack, Discord and Facebook Messenger.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#578

Post by filoleg »

stonogo wrote: post #361
Terretta wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you want Apple to tell iPhone users whether their messages to someone are being recorded by that person's telco and made available to other plan holders on that phone plan? How do you want Apple to indicate if this chat participant is costing you money by the message or free? Everyone's concerned about teens. Presumably teens know that T-Mobile and the other carriers give the family plan adults the ability to…

T-Mobile does not give primary account holders access to messaging content of other lines, regardless of the relationship between users.

It doesn’t anymore, but it used to for pretty much all phone carriers in the US.

And even now, on T-Mobile (as that’s the one I use, so the only one I can verify myself), if you have an account with multiple lines (e.g., a family plan), you can go into your account, click “Usage”, then “Text messages”, and it will show you all text info for all lines on the account (but no actual text content). And not just for “kid lines”, but for all regular lines as well. You can look by individual line or download that data as a bulk file.

I just checked my t-mobile account, and despite it not showing the text content (which t-mobile certainly has access to, unlike imessage; t-mobile cannot even track metadata for those individually), it shows an entry for each text with the phone number with info on who was the sender vs receiver, timestamp, and other metadata.

Luckily, T-Mobile only shows that I had 8 incoming messages (all of them were just automated verification code texts) and no outgoing messages this month, because pretty much all my messaging these days is either on discord or imessage.

Even without the actual text content though, that metadata is still some very sensitive info that teenagers almost definitely wouldn’t want their parents to track. Hell, I am not a teenager, have nothing interesting in that data (doubt anyone would care to know about existence of those 8 automated verification messages, and neither would I be embarrassed if someone did), and still absolutely wouldn’t want anyone else to be able to see that info.

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#579

Post by hocuspocus »

filoleg wrote: post #572
Grustaf wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just about market share. In Scandinavia about 90% of middle class people use iphones, but this whole blue-green bubble nonsense is a total non-issue. We have group chats in whatsapp, fb messages or sms, nobody cares.

This makes me wonder, what’s the iMessage situation in Japan? Their smartphone market is also majority iOS, sitting at above 60% (while it is only a little bit above 50% for the US)[0]. Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that con…

LINE absolutely dominates the Japanese market in instant messaging and beyond (it's a super app like WeChat or KakaoTalk).

Re: Apple partly halts Beeper's iMessage app again, suggesting a long fight ahead

#580

Post by turquoisevar »

beeboobaa wrote: post #140
turquoisevar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle? Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well. The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences a…

> Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave More proof that Remote Attestation is evil and does not exist to serve the user.

Like any tool, it can be used for good and for evil and the perspective of which is which depends on who you ask.

You can use device attestation to combat spam by making sure only authentic devices connect to your service.

You can use it to facilitate contact key verification together with a hardware key to ensure contacts know who they’re talking to.

I’ve used it to make sure that introductory promotions are only offered once per device.

On the other end of the spectrum you can use it as a DRM of sorts to make sure ads on your website aren’t blocked.

Post reply on HN