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by ClaraForm 805 days ago
I'm confused, because it legally sounds like the opposite right? All these platforms are legally going to be requested to open up sooner or later because of recent EU rulings. Perhaps Beeper just ran out of runway? They thought they'd be making money in December with their iMessage move, and now it's April?
2 comments
basisword 805 days ago
If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these walled gardens we have tools like Pidgin and if they open up those will be viable again.
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lxgr 805 days ago
To be fair, almost all networks that Pidgin could connect to (Jabber/XMPP being a notable exception) used proprietary protocols, and their operators heavily discouraged third-party interoperability.

The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won.

Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/

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pkulak 805 days ago
The bridges are already free and open source and I don't see my friends and family racing to get them running on their laptops. Pidgin is great, but something needs to be running on a server or you don't get notifications. And without notifications, what's the point of a messaging app?
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rw_grim 804 days ago
I wrote more on this topic here https://dev.to/grim/why-is-there-no-mobile-version-of-pidgin...
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eugenekolo 805 days ago
That's a bit of my point. At any time your business model can get interrupted when you're doing things "that the big company isn't, but holds the gate to".

Big company might get more aggressive and make your life harder developing. Big company might get less gatekeeper and open up the gates so now you have more competition. Big company might do it themselves and add interoperability and now your product is almost useless.

It's a business model that works to get to some point, and then exit as soon as possible, IMO.

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ClaraForm 805 days ago
I guess I didn’t think about it like that. If everyone opens up, Beeper’s competition is suddenly WhatsApp, instead of being one of their assets.
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