> Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday.
Really have to wonder what their play here is. What did they think would happen?
Isn't it always going to be a cat and mouse game with Apple? Who would want to use a messaging service that works some days but not others, much less pay for it?
There's something funny about Warren posting on Twitter while shouting about antitrust. I really wish government wouldn't make public announcements on closed platforms.
-----
That aside, it seems like an easy way around that would just be for Apple to adopt RCS in addition to iMessage.
Let's not turn mountains into molehills here, Twitter isn't really closed, it's just authwalled. So, burner email is all you need to read all the tweets, errr, X's?, that you want.
Also, far simpler to take care of beeper, just make all the message bubbles the same color. They'd lose their entire userbase if that happened.
But I agree with the earlier point, that it is a closed platform. If you want to respond, I thought it requires a phone number now in addition to email? It used to at least. And if Twitter doesn't like you, why is your ability to communicate with an official regulated by this private company? And Nitter is likely to get shutdown by Twitter any moment now in the same way as Apple is trying to shutdown Beeper.
Senator Warren would be a lot more effective if she or her staff understood how technology actually works. Senator Markey is another person who cares about this stuff but is also incompetent to regulate it.
I don't think it's just a matter of not understanding technology, but not having any sway in politics. Most of their peers care more about personal brands and culture wars and virtue signaling than doing the boring day to day task of regulating minituae for consumers.
People like Warren and Bernie are like the determined sergeants in the trenches, while most of Congress is busy grandstanding and trying to become the next Napoleons or Trump.
They just don't care to actually do anything useful, instead focusing on optics and pork barrels and revolving doors.
Well, you can't pass legislation to shut down the school shootings factory or invade climate change's homeland. However, Europe has shown us that tying your economy's profitability to a basis of digital standards can easily compel more open behavior.
Given that Apple is quite literally the Largest Company, they're somewhere on that list. Maybe not next to abortions and climate change, but Apple antitrust is an inevitability unless they get smaller or the economy gets bigger.
> If Apple continues to cut off Beeper's access, it makes an antitrust argument stronger
I'm not sure why everyone thinks it is an antitrust issue when it isn't. There is no legal obligation to support your services and software on third party platforms.
I'd argue that's not the right framing of the issue. Taking active steps to prevent your services from being used on competing platforms is more than merely "not supporting" them.
it would be incredibly easy for apple to frame this as a security issue, because, even in my mind, it is. I pay for apple devices because I trust apple with my data. I do not trust most companies with my data. I trust my data to only flow through Apple's servers, and to get a clear indication when my data is _not_ flowing through apple's servers (e.g. green bubbles). A company bypassing this causing messages to show up blue when they are in fact traveling outside of Apple's control is a security risk (to me). Clearly if it's e2e encrypted that's not the case, but that's not what apple is going to argue. They're going to argue exactly what I just did. And I honestly agree with them. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't need to allow other companies onto the platform, just that BLUE BUBBLES mean something to apple customers and bypassing that is something that apple needs to block.
Apple really needs to get that RCS implementation rolled out though. Wonder if it's still going to be green bubbles or something else.
I think this pypush method uses Apple servers. I think the key aspect was the author figuring out how submit public keys and request public keys for other Apple users from Apple servers. From that point it seems to be as secure as public key cryptography.
i mean... will the court understand that? Or will they understand the argument I framed (however dumb it is)? I think apple would easily be able to convince the court that anything exiting their servers is less secure, or gives the appearance of lower security, to their customers. Anyway, apple is implementing rcs next year so hopefully none of this matters.
Apple has always made services primarily for the users of their hardware. They are a hardware company that makes their own software and services. The hardware purchase funds the software development.
Who decides which platforms get support, if it's not the company making and supporting the service? When BBM was popular, I know a lot of people without Blackberries would have liked to use it, but Blackberry didn't offer it, and no one was threatening legal action against them (that I know of). I don't see how this situation is any different.
There are a lot of exclusive services out there, which are locked to specific platforms. Affording legal protection to anyone who hacks their way into a system, and telling the company they can't do anything about it, would create chaos in the tech world. There might be some cool projects, but business models would fall apart, companies would fail, security would be worse than it already is, and I'd question why anyone would try and start something new when they wouldn't be allowed to control it in a way to ensure profitability. Having everything free and open is great, but at some point these services need to be paid for.
The developer of the software supporting those platforms. In this case, Beeper.
I suppose if Apple wants to say certain users are not allowed to access iMessage unless they've bought an iPhone that's fair. (Maybe you could argue its anticompetitive to bundle services together like that, but I won't assert that point here.) But if that's all this was about then I ought to be able to buy an iPhone, import the access token from that into Beeper on my Android, stuff the iPhone in a drawer, and go about my business. The problem is that Apple wants to dictate not only who has access to iMessage servers, but also how they're allowed to access it. And that is unacceptable in my opinion.
"Security" is a poor excuse. If server side software has to rely on trusting the client then it was never secure in the first place. And if client side software wants to "secure" itself against the person who owns it... that's a form of "security" I could do without.
In the event Apple loses in Europe, I wonder what would happen. Would they really open up iMessage worldwide? Just in Europe? Shut it down there altogether since WhatsApp is already so popular there anyway, and their US market is bigger?
And what does this do for Beeper, anyway? If they open it up, wouldn't Google and Samsung just integrate it into their first party messaging clients?
It seems as precarious a position as Trillian was back in the day: only usable if the source protocols don't shut them out, but only valuable if those protocols don't open up completely. The moment either happens, they die.
Whatever legislation they face, they will implement it in the most hostile way towards non-Apple services/users/companies.
See how they implement off-App Store payments in the Netherlands and/or South Korea.
Apple is not giving up on iMessage. And, given the legislation becomes to cumbersome to deal with, they will withdraw from countries - they threatened to withdraw iMessage from the UK already.
The EU is already becoming a second-class market for technology companies (see Meta's Threads, and many more will follow).
The comment from the author's original post is quite the non-answer.
"Side note: many people always ask ‘what do you think Apple is going to do about this?’ To be honest, I am shocked that everyone is so shocked by the sheer existence of a 3rd party iMessage client. The internet has always had 3rd party clients! It’s almost like people have forgotten that iChat (the app that iMessage grew out of) was itself a multi-protocol chat app! It supported AIM, Jabber and Google talk. Here’s a blast from the past: https://i.imgur.com/k6rmOgq.png."
> Our Play Store ranking dropped precipitously on Friday.
Really have to wonder what their play here is. What did they think would happen?
Isn't it always going to be a cat and mouse game with Apple? Who would want to use a messaging service that works some days but not others, much less pay for it?