It was a waste of time beginning to end. If they were smart, they were doing this for a quick cash grab. If they were dumb, then they legitimately thought this would work long-term.
Whatever their motives are I’m glad it brought the interoperability conversation into the spotlight.
It’s a marketing and publicity stunt, kinda like Nothing’s fiasco with the Sunbird app. The goal is to get people talking about them and come out looking like the good guy underdog vs Apple. To be fair their plan is probably working judging by how many people are jumping out in front of Beeper and condemning “Big Apple”, even though Apple is just doing what any service provider should be doing.
I just don’t understand how anyone could base a company on an exploit. That is what it is in the end - the found an exploit and took advantage of it. Seems like the logical thing would be for apple to immediately close the exploit.
The answer is right there. If Apple wanted iMessage on Android it would be there. It isn’t so they don’t want it.
Beeper isn’t relying on this tho. It’s whole USP is unified messaging and it wants iMessage.
Adversarial interoperability is not exploitative.
Yes it is when they’re not allowed to
Would you characterize reactOS as exploitive?
No, it’s not exploiting any active service for Microsoft
Beeper predates this new iMessage thing by a few years. You just hadn’t heard of them apparently.
See news story from 2021:
It was a waste of time beginning to end.
Sounded like the original effort was hobby reverse engineering for fun by a smart school kid and then Beeper went ahead and tried to turn it into a product.
They need to go to the EU and get them to intervene! Only the EU can stand up to apple.
The EU doesn’t care about iMessage. Almost nobody uses that thing over here. Usually Applie die hards try it out after new features have been released, try to convince everyone that it’s the year of iMessage now, and move back to WhatsApp what the vast majority is actually using.
Oh I know… I wasn’t being serious. 😁
I mostly blame Apple for walling off the default text messaging app on the iOS platform. It is ridiculous to me that we are over 10 years into the smartphone era and are stuck in a duopoly with two players that would rather degrade communications between platforms than prioritize interoperability for some base level functionality. I hope that Beeper’s campaign forces regulation that puts an end to the insanity.
Remember when Android was entirely open source?
Why not go whinge to Google to develop a messaging system that Apple users want to integrate with…
They did. RCS. And it sounds like Apple will be adopting it due to regulatory pressure. But the idea of “Apple users will want to integrate with” has a flaw. A lot of their userbase happily drinks the Kool-aid and want their walled garden, even if it’s not in their best interest.
Maybe there is no kool-aid and it is just better, hence why these apps exist. As you said, RCS is coming yet people still aren’t happy. It sounds like Google can’t make a decent messaging app and is mobilising it’s user base to force the issue instead of innovating
Apple definitely came out with the better messaging product first. But RCS has nearly all the same features as iMessage.
Maybe it’s not drinking the kool-aid, Apple does make a good product. But since integrating RCS has no negative impact to them, and allows them to use those features with more people, why wouldn’t they want it?
Maybe, generally speaking on the userbase. I’m personally not interested in promoting Android or Google. I begrudgingly use it, but I’m not a fan. I am interested in interoperability, which this gives us.
Edit: Redundant
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