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.