Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation
US senators have urged the DOJ to probe Apple's alleged anti-competitive conduct against Beeper.
I don’t get it. iMessage is Apple’s service. Why are they obliged to open it up for everyone to use? Would it be nice? Yes, of course. Should Apple be legally required to open up access to their service?
You can argue that they're unfairly using monopoly power. Same reason why MS was forced to allow windows to switch browsers.
Monopoly on what?
How would you argue that? There’s plenty of other options and iMessage falls back to MMS, which all phones are capable of.
If they're going to default message service to it then yes.
I think the problem is that it's unnecessarily hardware locked. They shouldn't have to "open it up" insofar as anyone can access it from whatever app like beeper is doing. But it's only fair that they support other operating systems. They can still control it or even charge a fee to access it from other OSes.
Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they're "green texters" in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage's connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is "Get your grandma an iPhone". Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they'll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.
Kids don't use imessage, they're on fucking discord
School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones
That’s a people problem, not a market-share problem. From experience, kids will always find something to bully others about — if it’s not the colour of the bubbles, it’s something else: the brand of shoes they wear, the suburb they live in, the sport they play (or don’t play). Bullies will do what they do.
Apple should 100 percent support RCS and Tim's "buy your grandma an iphone" response was stupid and does show that they don't give a shit. However the Beeper situation is something different entirely, if the reports I've read are too be believed it was a security vulnerability or a blatant disregard of apples terms. Also the kids being bullied thing is very overblown, and almost certainly a regional thing. I live in buttfuck no where and I not one kid gives a shit they just want to talk to their friends. My kid has an android and his friend group is like 50/50 on iPhones. Its weird adults and parents who inadvertently say things or give their children the idea that green bubbles are bed. Kids don't give a fuck unless they've learned it somewhere.
Man... Some of the Apple fans in this thread are making me lose faith in humanity. They have no idea how technology works, but they are defending an objectively shitty behavior from the world's most wealthy corporation based on... I don't know... their feelings?
I wonder if this case affects the tug of war Apple has with the EU about opening gatekeeping services up. I wonder if it occurs to some power that be that they might use this case (no matter how stupid it is) to argue Apple is a gatekeeper and has to open up iMessage at some point.
Likely won't happen though since it's not an EU problem really. The thing that's more possible is that California or some other progressive-ish US state follows the EU's lead in busting monopolies as they did with the GDPR, and does something about this in two decades.
Why would they need to look into Apple's conduct here? Investigate Beeper for CFAA violations since they cracked into Apple's internal APIs and ignored large chunks of their ToS in the process.
Of course Apple is going to shut down unauthorized access to their messaging system. They'd lose all customer trust instantly if they didn't.
ToS have almost universally been shown to be unenforceable in court. I'm also not sure what the hell you mean by customers would lose trust. It's not as if they had access to information they shouldn't, all they did was reverse engineer the protocol. They still had to have an account and a login and they still only had access to the data that account should have. There's nothing to lose trust over the only thing beeper was doing was emulating being an iMessage client
Australian legal case on Reverse engineering.
https://www.dundaslawyers.com.au/reverse-engineering-of-software-what-are-the-legal-boundaries/
At the root of this issue is that Google never built a messaging service that could survive Google's management shuffle. I understand people want Apple to bend the knee, but this is not their problem. It's perfectly fine for them to intercede Beeper's reverse engineering.
If you're an Android user and you need a messaging app, Signal is 100% open source, secure, and it works on iOS too, so tell your friends!
And you assume your apple-using friends will listen to you? They are really a part of the problem at least. Google would need to create an app they would want to install by themselves, and this is not exactly easy, if possible at all. Google users are mostly fine with having many apps for communication, apple users are mostly not.
I am fully in the Apple ecosystem, including my phone, work laptop, personal laptop, and an Apple watch. I pretty much exclusively use telegram, and sometimes Discord, not iMessage— and that’s not a niche or unpopular opinion in my experience either. This is absolutely because Google can’t stick with one app or product long enough to gain any market share. Each time they have tried, it’s lasted barely a year or so before they killed it.
I think this is highly dependent on whether you’re still in high school or not. I recently switched to iPhone within the last couple years and everyone I know has an iPhone but almost none of them use iMessage. Facebook messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, hell even IG DMs. It’s all over the place. This sample of people is like 16-60 year olds too, I can’t even find a pattern.
Apples bundling of iMessage is a barrier to entry. See also the findings of fact for Microsoft vs DoJ during the "browser wars"