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Beeper Mini is back

blog.beeper.com

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Re: Beeper Mini is back

#461

Post by Sephr »

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…

It isn't generally illegal to publish software that interoperates with third party platforms that don't wish to be interoperated with.

If this uses copyrighted keys then it will be a bit more tricky (although fair use could still come into play).

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#462

Post by airstrike »

snakeyjake wrote: post #374
tapoxi wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't 70% of American teenagers on iPhone because of the iMessage network effects? The whole "green bubble" shaming issue.

>The whole "green bubble" shaming issue. Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy. 70% of American teenagers may have access to iMessage due to it being on their phones but there is a 0.0% chance that, in aggregate, iMessage is in their top five most-used messaging apps.

> Even if that's a real thing and not an imaginary or minor phenomenon hyped up for clicks, it is hardly anti-trust-worthy.

I'm in a group chat with (former) coworkers who repeatedly (albeit playfully) shame the one group member who forces us all to use green bubbles. It's a real thing

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#463

Post by wang_li »

Nextgrid wrote: post #135
mullingitover wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Asking a million people to pay $0.01 per month is a small marginal cost. Asking one company to pay $0.01 for each of a million users per month is not a small marginal cost.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#464

Post by Nextgrid »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #424

This clearly isn't going to be solved through technical means. It makes me wonder - if Apple were to stop obstructing interoperability, how much the resulting market for competition to iMessage and other parts of the walled garden be worth? A couple billion dollars? With today's valuations, probably closer to trillions. Why then VCs aren't willing to spend a fraction of that - say a couple billion - to invest into a…

So much of the current tech companies derive at least part of their profits out of restricted interoperability. A legal precedent allowing adversarial interoperability would be the death of any "engagement"-based business model, aka most of tech nowadays. Alternatively clients would pop up left and right that will strip out all the "engagement" nonsense (as well as the spyware/malware), and those will no longer be stoppable by legal trolling.

Such a move would completely kill off VC's (already sick) golden goose. They would lose more than what they'd win.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#465

Post by haswell »

hraedon wrote: post #457
acaloiar wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer. But I do believe there's reason to consider Apple's policy relative to iMessage clients monopolistic. Apple's behavior is not significantly different from Microsoft's, which instigated US v. Microsoft [1]. That case largely took issue with Microsoft's mandatory bundling of IE with Windows and the extent to which Microsoft created an inorganic monopoly. In addition to how Microsoft's monopoly came to…

This is a silly argument: Microsoft's bundling of IE resulted in real damage to another company (Netscape) that had a viable and independent competitor product. Beeper doesn't have an independent product: they have a hacky workaround that Apple fixed. What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure. This isn't even as egregious as patching i…

> What Microsoft did with IE isn't really analogous to Apple refusing to let another company free ride on their infrastructure.

Zoom out for a moment and take Beeper out of the picture. The issue is not Beeper specifically, it’s the underlying reasons that Beeper even exists.

If you buy an iPhone and want to interoperate with friends/family on Android, the default experience is extremely broken.

Apple’s behavior here is directly driving users away from Android, not because Apple is better, but because it’s the only way to actually use the native experience.

I don’t know if the cases are equivalent, but there’s certainly a case to be made that they’re in a similar category.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#466

Post by kanbara »

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…

this might be the “best outcome” for some nerds or android users, but it certainly isnt the best outcome for most consumers.

iOS has resisted a lot of the crap and cruft of windows and android because of its opinionated nature. sure, siri could use improvement, but at least iPhones never fail to call 911.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#467

Post by FireBeyond »

misnome wrote: post #258
petemir wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US? When has that ever happened in the last 30 years? United States vs. Microsoft Corp, 2001? [0] And ongoing: United States vs. Google LLC (2020) [1] and United States vs Google LLC (2023) [2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2... Edited: formatting

> United States vs. Microsoft Corp, 2001? [0] As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal. > And ongoing: United States vs. Google LLC (2020) [1] and United States vs Google LLC (2023) [2]. Ongoing, so a bit hard to count these as evidence of successful market regulation.

> As the wikipedia page you yourself are citing, overturned on appeal.

So the law says "Don't do behavior X", the government takes you to court, there is a judgment, you appeal, and win the appeal.

I'm not sure "dismissed on appeal" means "this isn't working as intended".

Successful market regulation includes investigating issues, prosecuting them where there is reasonable grounds to do so and it also includes a determination (either in investigation or in court) that something is not an issue.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#468

Post by dadoum »

ceejayoz wrote: post #395
gkbrk wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A security hole existed that permitted Beeper to pretend to be your Apple device. _An_ Apple device. Not _your_ Apple device.

"Hey, I'm /u/ceejayoz's new iPhone! Bwahahahahahaha. Ahem. I promise I'm really the iMessage client you're expecting. Start sending me a copy of all their potentially sensitive messages." Again, how do we not classify that as a security issue?

If you’re referring to the history, then it cannot talk to the iCloud keychain, and even if it could, it would require your credentials. Same thing if you are just talking about incoming messages, they need your credentials. If they have those you’re already fucked. And also, they could just have taken an iPhone and log in there with your credentials.

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#469

Post by hamandcheese »

averageRoyalty wrote: post #349
hamandcheese wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you show an example of an aquisition they've made to explicitly stop an external company using their APIs? I've not heard of one, it doesn't appear to be in their playbook.

You're moving the goalposts. Parent said "Beeper doesn't seem to offer anything that Apple couldn't do themselves."

Re: Beeper Mini is back

#470

Post by deergomoo »

starkparker wrote: post #89
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…

Best-case outcome is that Apple decides engaging in an arms race with a motivated competitor isn't worth the time or effort and they enable some (probably limited) interop. I can imagine a "blue-green" type of message that's encrypted but not from an Apple device; Apple keeps their status symbology and users on both ends get E2E encrypted messages to and from Apple device users without Apple users switching to a thir…

To be honest, given Apple has already committed to adding RCS support next year, the market for this thing is limited anyway. Apple has said they won't implement Google's encryption extension, but your average person doesn't care much about that anyway. They just want to be able to group chat and send media to their friends.
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