So Beeper is piggybacking off Apple’s servers that facilitate iMessages and is charging $1.99 per month to users and they thought Apple would be okay with this?
You could make a somewhat similar argument about an email provider sending emails to iCloud email addresses, thus “piggybacking” off Apple’s iCloud servers. Granted, Beeper probably doesn’t prevent it being used between two Android users, but the primary function, and why people would pay for it, is to communicate with Apple users.
The primary difference is that in one case it’s a closed proprietary protocol and in the other an open protocol. But who pays for what is not the main concern. Apple would still disagree even if Beeper would be willing to share an appropriate part of their revenue.
I don’t understand your point. The user with iMessage that the Android user wants to communicate with is an Apple customer as well, and arguably pays Apple to be reachable via iMessage. And in the iCloud Mail example, the non-Apple user who is sending an email to the iCloud user also is not an Apple customer and doesn’t pay for Apple’s iCloud Mail infrastructure.
> You could make a somewhat similar argument about an email provider sending emails to iCloud email addresses
No. They don't work the same way. Your email provider has to maintain a mail server to send and receive emails on your behalf. Your email client connects to that email server to do all its work. Beeper Mini directly connects to Apple's Push Notifications servers to do all send/receive.
People arguing for an open iMessage system like email are completely forgetting how much spam and bad actors have ruined the openness of email. It use to be the case that you could run your own email server, but due to spam, many major email providers like Gmail will reject emails from untrusted IP addresses, for example.
I never said the Messages app was free from spam or bad actors, only you did.
SMS and iMessage spam that is handled by the Messages app are considerably less of a problem precisely because they’re less open protocols. They’re not at all comparable; the vast, vast majority of email is spam.
Or: Apple's servers are serving APIs on the public internet and which clients a user chooses to connect to them with is no concern of Apple's, and any attempt to block certain clients is clearly anti-consumer and anti-competitive…
The "paid" aspect is seemingly not the problem. Automattic does what Beeper does (without unauthorized access to Apple services) and charges $15/month. https://texts.com/subscription
It looks like their service only works on MacOS, which means they're probably just using the local iMessage db like others have done. They're not integrating with the API or providing access for other platforms, it's a totally different (and limited) solution.
If you have a Mac sitting around, airmessage.org has made this work cross platform for a while now.
My feeling is that Beeper leadership saw the kid's hack and adopted it without thinking it through. They could've designed it in a way that didn't depend on unauthorized access to Apple services.
That's not really the issue at play here, it's at what point does forbidding 3rd party clients to your service become anticompetitive. Right now the answer is basically "never" but I think the technological landscape would be healthier if the bar was significantly lower.
The real situation is that you've granted me SSH access to your server but block anything than the OpenSSH client and I would like to use Go's crypto/ssh.
And it's one thing when they're two OSS implementations but when those alternative clients are your competitors it starts looking anticompetitive.
You giving me SSH access to your machine gives me the ability to use your infrastructure and resources for my purposes. Make the example instead you giving me access to an internal API.
You're focusing on the mechanism of my example rather than the effect. Apple hasn't given Beeper (or me or you) free access to their infrastructure. Shutting down Beeper using an exploit is well within their rights.
Oh shit, a wild nuance appears. The yt-dlp (and all alternative YouTube clients) are accessing open endpoints into YouTube. While YouTube can choose to block these things the clients are not accessing some non-public API. Having been following various yt-dl forks for the past few years, YouTube blocking them is annoying but within their rights as the hosts of the service. If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.
Apple does not offer any sort of public access to iMessage, Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity. Beeper can keep up their cat and mouse game but whining to regulators and pretending they are doing something noble is ridiculous. They're trying to grab headlines to get either bought out or investment dollars.
If they want to reverse engineer iMessage they can take their licks and keep up with Apple's efforts to lock them out.
> The yt-dlp (and all alternative YouTube clients) are accessing open endpoints into YouTube
Kind of, but I can't completely agree to this. There is circumvention work that went into these projects. Youtube has public, but "protected" endpoints, not exactly just open video streams.
> If yt-dlp was charging money or whining to regulators about YouTube's actions around their own service I'd feel differently towards them.
So your main issue is not Beeper Mini, but the surrounding situation and "activism" they are attempting to do? Based on your SSH comment it seemed like your main issue was unauthorized access.
> Beeper has to not just reverse engineer the iMessage protocol but also spoof their client identity.
If this is the main issue, then I think Aurora Store or microG are better exemples of currently existing similar apps. Revanced (and other unofficial yt clients that offer sign-in) I think should also qualify for this, and reddit clients with hacked in private API keys.
The primary difference is that in one case it’s a closed proprietary protocol and in the other an open protocol. But who pays for what is not the main concern. Apple would still disagree even if Beeper would be willing to share an appropriate part of their revenue.