141
Beeper ready to wave white flag if its latest iMessage fix gets shut down
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
141 points (96.7% liked)
Android
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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:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/21/22242143/beeper-universal-chat-app-imessage-whatsapp-signal-telegram-pebble-founder
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.
It's almost like when companies try to build a wall, some people will try to break in, even for the sake of it, maybe the thrill of it, even if it worked for a minute.
Whatever their intentions, I'm glad they did. Apple got to strengthen their infrastructure (somewhat, users are still using it with access to a Mac), and it brought messaging interoperability conversation to congress.
People seem to forget Apple founders were doing this shit too. They build a blue box and sold it too.
https://espnpressroom.com/us/press-releases/2015/11/the-phone-phreaks-and-steve-jobs-wozniaks-discovery-of-the-little-blue-box-recounted-in-fivethirtyeight-espn-films-short/
That's why nobody thinks the 16 year old who found the method is in the wrong here. It's really cool they found that, especially at that age. Now to build an entire product off of an exploit while loudly announcing it is just stupid.
And a lot of people went to jail for phreaking, I guess the beeper guys are lucky.