> Apple is stopping unauthorized access a private network they run.

In order to prevent competition, Apple does not provide services like Beeper an authorized way to pay for access to their messaging protocol.

Apple isn't preventing competition. There are numerous messaging apps available on iPhone. They are preventing non-customers from using a service provided for customers only.

To make a bad analogy, it is like Jack's Auto Repair selling a service that enables Honda owners to use BMW service centers. And then Accord owners expecting to go to their nearby BMW dealer and get warranty repairs to their Honda.

Apple has a simple solution here. Identify how many unique users are coming to the iMessasge service via Beeper's app and send Beeper a bill for one iPhone 15 Max Pro for each user.

I hope that any attempt Beeper made to negotiate authorized access is made public in an investigation, and Apple’s control of the default secure messaging service baked into all iOS telco customer devices is scrutinized.

If they weren’t concerned about competition, we would have seen iMessage on Android a decade ago.

If they wanted to provide iPhone users a default secure way of messaging competitor hardware, they would have pursued an open alternative to SMS before they faced antitrust investigations.

I am not a "non customer". I am an Apple customer who wants to access the same network from my Android devices and my Apple devices.

Don’t make bad analogies. They cheapen discussion.

Stop being anticompetitive and give me access to your infrastructure. I should be able to sell a service running code on your hardware.

I hope cell providers get the option to bundle a secure messaging service that's compatible with all of their customer's devices.

Right now a Verizon iPhone customer can't securely send a message to a Verizon Android customer without forcing their customer to download a third-party app and agree to its terms, and the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers.

Vaguely reminds me a little bit of the web browser antitrust days. Regulators will catch up soon. At least Apple is planning to adopt RCS finally, even though they missed their chance to be part of the formation of the standard.

Edit: Or Apple could release iMessage for Android and for web.

> carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers.

And thank goodness... I can only imagine the resulting flood:

(1) ads in your messaging app; and

(2) messages being scanned for targeted advertising (by the "less scrupulous", of course).

If 1 and 2 happen, that might motivate Apple to implement a secure open standard that bypasses the carrier solution to "all of our customers can securely text each other with just their phone number." Apple will call it an innovation and sell the hell out of it.

Carriers created RCS which is insecure. I don't think carriers care.

Apple had a chance to participate in the foundation of RCS and passed on it. Now according to their legal counsel they have to adopt it.

> the carrier has no recourse to change that on their iOS devices they are selling to their customers

They can just not sell those devices? I find this argument pretty twisted. It’s also based on a false premise. Verizon is also free to implement whatever they want on top of their @vtext.com endpoint.

If they stopped selling iPhones (lol), what would they do for all of their current iPhone customers? Boot them off until they trade-in for an Android phone?

How is the @vtext.com endpoint any more secure than MMS? Default, secure transfer using your carrier phone number through the built-in messaging app on Verizon iOS devices is restricted only to Apple's servers, and the recipients MUST be Apple users.

If you service > 50% of Americans and there is only one other vendor, then yes. Exactly this.

Especially if your thing is the "everything" thing.

Nonsense. Apple does nothing to prevent you from installing WhatsApp, Signal, FB Messenger, or any one of dozens of other messaging services which also don’t allow third-party interop with their protocols!

There’s nothing anticompetitive or even out of the ordinary going on here. You can install competitive services on an iPhone at any time.

WhatsApp, Signal and FB Messenger are all available with feature parity on both iOS and Android devices. Beeper is able to sell subscriptions by reverse engineering entirely due to this not being the case with iMessage.

The power of default apps is significant. Google got slapped for just that in the EU and there is a browser selection screen on setup.

You might note that none of those competitors get the native integrations that only iMessage gets. Not even simple things like OTP autofill.

Considering that Apple has opened up third-party apps to do autofill for things like passwords (I autofill password fields from Bitwarden on iOS all the time), this seems a lot less like an advantage they're gating to their app and more like a potential feature they just haven't shipped yet because it has no use case at the moment (since right now nobody sends 2FA codes over any platform other than SMS). If it became widespread to use WhatsApp, Signal etc. for sending 2FA codes, I'm pretty sure Apple would add it.

There's not really much other system integration with iMessage either, other than some Siri stuff I doubt sees much use. It's surprisingly disconnected from the rest of the operating system.

That's plainly untrue. "The Apple experience" prevents telcos from pre-installing any app.

You just described public clouds.