our walled garden*
Aside from the obvious reasons of competition, Beeper also used Apples infrastructure, that Beeper was then going to monetize. Not too surprising they shut it down.
Apple already knows that iMessage, alone, is a huge selling point for their iPhones. They held out for a few years keeping iTunes away from the rest of us before finally giving in, but I very much doubt that they’re going to open up iMessage any time soon. It’s pretty much the only thing that keeps iPhone users in their ecosystem anymore.
No, they were charging money as they had their own APN to BPN bridge. Plus the usual cost of development and more.
To keep Beeper Mini running, Beeper uses a Beeper Push Notification (BPN) service to connect to Apple’s servers and notify you of new messages.
And it uses Apples gateway service for setup.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe.
At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading vendor locking tactics to distance our brand from other lesser ones.
We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.
We’re not letting anyone breach this walled garden, but nice try.
These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.
By using these tactics we can keep our users away from solutions that have any interoperability whatsoever and keep promoting decade-old features as new, as our sheep ahem user base don’t know any better.
not surprising, but super disappointing. Beeper Mini was a dream come true
You need to dream bigger. That should be the companies (Google, Apple, carriers, etc) working together and using a non-proprietary standard (an open RCS). Mini Beeper, to me, was just a proof of concept to show something akin to what Apple could do.
For those not in the loop, why? It seems like people who want to use Apple products would just buy a iPhone.
Those of use who have friends or groups of friends that use iPhones but us ourselves do not. In the US, iMessage is the #1 way to create a group chat, and if you don’t have an iPhone you’re often just excluded and rely on someone else to update you about plans, etc.
I don’t understand why the article writes that iMessage is the only way for encrypted messaging between Android and iOS. I can thing of several off the top of my head:
- Matrix
- Signal
- Facebook Messanger (very soon)
- Threema
- Telegram
- Viber
- Line
- Skype
And there are surly more …
Then why are we shaming Apple and not the iOS users? I think Apple is totally reasonable here.
Apple’s biggest crimes here are creating a proprietary platform with an exclusive protocol and making it the default messaging protocol on their devices. None of this is really new, though. All that shit is common. We need Signal or Matrix to improve in user-friendliness and even do some marketing to the point where they become viable solutions.
telegram is not encrypted by default, and does its best to make you forget to enable it for each individual contact. if you want to do a group chat, you’re out of luck.
Telegram is only (partially) secure for pedantic power users, which most people aren’t.
so, relative to pretty much all other messaging services, it might as well not be.
You’re saying “by default not everyone can read your messages, only you, the recipient, telegram themselves and anyone who they might decide to share them with, with neither your consent, nor knowledge”
When compared to “nobody except you and the recipient” that becomes effectively equivalent to “nothing”.
also, not end-to-end ever when it comes to group chats
Technically, yes, this is a solution.
Socially, no. This is not a solution. People are just too lazy.
I assume that if people are too lazy to switch to a solution which works for every one then they are not very interested in talking to you anyway.
Apart from online commentary I don’t know a single person that gives a shit about this blue bubble green bubble thing. Is it really such a big thing?
Green/blue bubbles is just a simple way to say sms sucks. Besides those stories about teens getting social pressured, all anyone cares about is basically just sending photos that don’t look like they were taken 20 years ago.
Have teens not moved onto social media based messaging? Are they still using old school phone number based chats?
Yes but Apple has convinced a large swath of them that they must have an iPhone to be able to have any conversation with friends simply due to the conveniences of iMessage.
They also went out of their way to make SMS conversations harder to read the text by making the green just annoying enough of a color that it actually makes it harder. There are other things but that’s the gist.
