They can certainly escalate with protocol changes, but they still have to contend with older Macs, iPhones and iPads which are out of the support window losing access-- so if they want to update the protocol they either have to issue out of band patches for these devices or cut them off too.

This is assuming you can actually iMessage on iDevices that are out of software support -- maybe our iOS friends can let us know.

EDIT: This take seems more plausible (that this is intentional by Apple): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38648030

There are millions of people out there running old iPhones like that. If Apple just decided to cut them all off iMessage they would do far more damage to their brand than Beeper could possibly manage.

I get Apple's "this is our toy, you won't be making $2/month/user on us".

But "keeping the spammers out" it's a bit.. weird..?

Can someone please describe the WHAT is the technical advantage of Android users to spam over iPhone/Mac users to spam.

That’d be pretty difficult to get second hand, especially when you can just spam over SMS.

They could even release a new iMessage protocol with another bubble color and let the blue ones become uncool.

Nothing, that's why iMessage is full of spam already.

What scammers do is buying boxes of old half broken iphones and they turn them into relays exactly as you said.

Apple could even be generous and still allow group chats or whitelist existing accounts.

Also, you have to take into consideration that iMessage is pretty US centric, the rest of the world wouldn’t really care about this.

There were plenty of confirmation from other users in this thread having their out of the most recent iOS version iPhones (someone mentioned their iPhone 5 currently running iOS12, with the most recent one being iOS17) working just fine with iMessage.

This is hearsay based on prior threads, but I haven't read a word against it.

Blue / Green bubble is a total non issue.

We use Telegram or Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger and FB Groups are the main form of comms for School networking.

Whats App is huge in the Uk by all accounts.

I have friends in LA who say the blue / green bubble situation is a non issue for them, and they use Android.

However it might be an issue for other non Middle Ages demographics and so on.

Still, I have a suspicion the drama over bubble colour is hyped up but the US media.

Despite that, I am yet to hear about their version of the whole “blue bubble exclusion” controversy. It could definitely be just due to the japanese users not being super active on western internet, and not necessarily due to that controversy not being a thing in Japan. But it could just be a non-issue in Japan.

Can anyone with knowledge of this chime in?

0. https://www.pcmag.com/news/ios-more-popular-in-japan-and-us-...

Thanks to your point, this way we can easily see that despite SK being android-dominant and Japan being iPhone-dominant, both are not heavily into iMessage and prefer their native super apps instead.

Which provides a solid data point in favor of those claiming that the iMessage proliferation and dominance don’t necessarily have a direct causation stemming from iOS/Android dominance in a given market.

So in practice my wife uses FaceTime quite a bit with her siblings, and falls back to KakaoTalk when needed. Her iMessage usage isn't zero either, but mostly 1:1, group chats happen over KakaoTalk, since you know everyone will be there.

I don't know if similar patterns are seen in Japan.

Out of my friends who moved to Japan, pretty much not a single one of them uses LINE aside from rare one-offs. But with Kakao? Hell, everyone I know who even traveled to SK uses Kakao on regular (not even talking about those who moved there) pretty much as the main app in general for so many different things.

EDIT: oh wow, this sent me down a pretty interesting rabbithole. Apparently 85% of people under 30 in SK had an Android as their first phone, with 53% of those people having switched to iOS since then[0].

0. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/30-south-korea...

Whoa, citation needed there. I don't use one, and most people I know don't use one.

Even in the metro you can go days without seeing one.

Regardless, the original point stands regardless of it being 50% or 80%.

The result is that as an iPhone users I feel sometimes feel left out because different friends circles on Android turn to different secured messaging services (WhatsApp, FB messenger, Telegram, Signal, etc...).

I firmly refuse to give my personal ID to all theses companies just to keep in touch so I often default to sms/mail (or I get left out of group chat).

iMessage is not perfect but they did get the sms fallback right and with upcoming RCS support maybe it'll be easier to bypass theses competing closed and incompatible walled gardens.

So from my point of view, the whole "blue bubble" tyranny look like a joke. Apple kept conformance with SMS/MMS standards from the beginning and added a secure layer on top. I wish others services just did the same.

You're not left out because of what kind of phone you use. You're left out because you refuse to use messaging apps that are available for your phone.

iMessage is not a "secure layer on top", it's a totally separate proprietary protocol and it requires an Apple account to work. It just happens to run in the same app as SMS/MMS messages, which has its pros and cons.

> I wish others services just did the same.

Signal did, then someone convinced them that the risk of accidentally sending an SMS which you thought were an encrypted message, was bad enough to break messaging integration on Android.

I wonder if whoever convinced them of that maybe didn't want it to be so convenient to use.

I think bundling different protocols in the same app is a bad idea in general. Besides the security and functionality problems, it just creates confusion. The whole iMessage/bubble-color mess wouldn't exist if Apple made it clear to their users that the iMessage protocol is different from SMS and incompatible with most phones.

Signal always warned me very clearly if it was forced to send a message via SMS, and even pushed me to invite the recipient to Signal. It made sense to support it still, because it's the second most basic service in the Android world (after calls), and now that Signal doesn't offer it, it can't be the default service any longer.

Signal's task as I see it isn't just to protect your communication, but encourage widespread use of strong encryption so that you don't stand out for using it. For that, there are tradeoffs. I think being able to handle the forced insecure communication for the user, clearly marked as such, was a great tradeoff for the sake of wider adoption.

What % of iPhone users do you think understand the difference between SMS, MMS and iMessage protocols? I bet most don't. But if iMessage had its own separate app, they would know it's an Apple-only protocol. And that would make them less likely to exclude non-iPhone users and more likely to use cross-platform alternatives. It's not like all iPhone are jerks, they're being mislead on how "texting" in the default iPhone app really works. That's what I meant by confusion.

Did they though? It’s unreliable.

Other than this point, I very much share your position.

SMS is a disaster, so it’s best just to leave out the green bubbles.

The videos are genuinely useless, I don't know why Apple bothers. It sends like 240p "90s security camera" quality video. I can't tell who anyone is, I once thought a bear in a video was a wolf.

Iirc, Android pops up some kind of "this video is too large, do you want to share it with Photos instead?" modal that converts it to a Photos link instead of sharing directly. That's not perfect, but it's a damn site better than sending a video that you know is useless.

This is what people were saying before Apple cut Beeper off the first time. It would be great if there was just one mistake that they made and fixed, but I'm not holding my breath.

Those were not protocol changes. The iMessage protocol remains unchanged as far as I know. What I'm referring to above is changing the protocol and updating all clients to use the new protocol so that Beeper is left catching up. This could involve adding new DRM mechanisms or even adding cryptographic remote attestation requirements.

I don't want an over the top chat app, I just want to text people.

what? sms is a basic phone function, how is supporting sms "embracing" anything?

If you, as an iOS user, don't want to use iMessage you simply go flip the toggle. If you "just want to text people", it's just that easy. Really.

Got stats to back this up? I have 3 friends who use iPhone's that do have that toggle flipped.

- 1.36 billion iPhone users

- 1.3 billion iMessage users

https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/

https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/imessage-stats

How do you want Apple to indicate if this chat participant is costing you money by the message or free?

Everyone's concerned about teens. Presumably teens know that T-Mobile and the other carriers give the family plan adults the ability to read their dependents text messages. As a teen I would want to stick with the encrypted bubbles your parents can't read and tell my parents about, thank you very much.

It's not punitive product design. It's seamlessly integrated and meaningful, both on chat leaks and on costs of messaging: Blue sky, text safely. Green could literally cost you.

Teenagers know that blue = iPhone and green = non-iPhone/SMS and that blue offers significantly more features and functionality vs SMS (delivered/read receipts, group chats, stickers, rich media, memojis, etc), which is the overwhelming reason why blue is preferred.

So lowering the cost of 3G made it more economical if your friends had iPhones as now you could spend €20/month for '1GB' (which was mostly iMessage & web browsing at the time) and avoid spending that simply on SMS. (excuse the price inaccuracies if any, it's been a while since I had that iPhone 3GS)

And even now, on T-Mobile (as that’s the one I use, so the only one I can verify myself), if you have an account with multiple lines (e.g., a family plan), you can go into your account, click “Usage”, then “Text messages”, and it will show you all text info for all lines on the account (but no actual text content). And not just for “kid lines”, but for all regular lines as well. You can look by individual line or download that data as a bulk file.

I just checked my t-mobile account, and despite it not showing the text content (which t-mobile certainly has access to, unlike imessage; t-mobile cannot even track metadata for those individually), it shows an entry for each text with the phone number with info on who was the sender vs receiver, timestamp, and other metadata.

Luckily, T-Mobile only shows that I had 8 incoming messages (all of them were just automated verification code texts) and no outgoing messages this month, because pretty much all my messaging these days is either on discord or imessage.

Even without the actual text content though, that metadata is still some very sensitive info that teenagers almost definitely wouldn’t want their parents to track. Hell, I am not a teenager, have nothing interesting in that data (doubt anyone would care to know about existence of those 8 automated verification messages, and neither would I be embarrassed if someone did), and still absolutely wouldn’t want anyone else to be able to see that info.

I'm not convinced that handing everything to a different company is a solution, but I'm glad you found a plan you're comfortable with.

I stand corrected though, you are right, i don’t think the content of messages has been ever obtainable. At least not since 2006 when it became explicitly illegal for carriers to provide that info to anyone (including the customer paying for the phone line) outside of special circumstances like a court orderc subpoena, etc. (so practically it isn’t an option for the heavy majority).

However, it is factually true that i can get metadata (datetime of each text, phone numbers of both parties, who sent who how many messages, etc) about texts being exchanged from my carrier by just clicking through a couple of menus in the app today. I checked that right before posting my earlier comment. And it is also factually true that despite the carrier not being allowed to disclose to me the content of those messages, they themselves indeed have have full access to the content in plaintext.

> Why does everyone care so much?

You seem to both care about it, and also wonder why other people care about it ?

Otherwise, looking from the sideline it's fascinating seeing Apple fighting this battle that they brought upon themselves and have no chance of winning.

I think Apple will almost certainly win on a purely technical game of cat and mouse.

I think you need to adjust your definition of winning. Blocking 5% of messages is a 'win' for Apple. I won't use a messaging service with a 95% success rate. I won't migrate from iMessage to Beeper. I will submit, Apple would have liked a more decisive victory.

Right now, they blocked a part of Beeper mini, and nobody expecting a rock solid service would join Beeper Mini so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.

But the news cycle keeps going on, Beeper Mini is still there for those the group of users that wants it alive, and I wouldn't be surprised if next week for instance actual iMessage users came out to complain about getting kicked out of the service as colateral damage from the whole additional filtering.

And of course this whole publicity for Beeper is a door opened to any other company to give it a shot, as Apple is playing the cat and mouse game, and not taking any more drastic option.

Apple isn't losing either, but they're now dragged into guerrila like battle with no upside for them.

They won't be losing _any_ of their customers. For the most part[^], nobody using Beeper Mini has paid Apple for anything... otherwise they wouldn't need to use Beeper Mini.

[^] Yes I'm sure there's at least a few people with an iPhone and a Windows PC or something that see this as "iMessage on Windows".

For instance if you have a mac and an iPad but use an android phone, iMessages will go to both Apple devices but not where you want it the most, on your phone. That's the kind of pain point that pushes a group to fully move to another service if the android members have enough weight, but would be fine if there was a reliable android client.

based on the history of tech-related cat and mouse games, then Apple will probably lose.

Just like Sony could not prevent people from pirating Playstation DVDs, Apple itself could not prevent iOS jailbreaks, music labels could not prevent CD ripping, etc etc etc

if there are enough people who are strongly motivated to bypass whatever protection, eventually they will probably bypass it.

This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.

I doubt that. iMessage is a free service if you have almost any Apple OS product (iOS, iPadOS, macOS). You aren't making ongoing payments for the iMessage service.

You could say you paid for iMessage in that you bought a device that worked with it. But you do not pay for iMessage.

On what is paid and what is free, Beeper mini is free, iMessage is free (as we've learned from the whole saga, you don't even need an icloud account). Using someone else's public facing API without consent is rude, but hey, our whole industry started with kits to plug into the AT&T network with unauthorized material, and as of now no money is changing hands.

Yes I’m sure “can anyone use other services as their product backends for free, directly against the TOS of said service” is going to be a really interesting and complicated legal question…

That being said, the reactions in this thread are way over the top. A lot of Android users in this thread seem to think there are a huge number of Apple users who refuse to talk to Android users or that iMessage is some sort of messaging nirvana. Both are not true.

The other elephant in the room is Apple created iMessage, Apple pays for the service's costs, and therefore Apple has the right to decide who can use it. Third parties do not have the right to use it. It's sad that sone non-Apple users feel entitled to use iMessage.

Happy to explain. First thought, why do you care so much?

> Nor do I want it.

Why? What about exclusivity makes the world better? Why shouldn't I be able to communicate well with someone using an Apple device? Why should someone using an Apple device not want someone to communicate well with them?

Sure there are other systems. But switching costs are so high. Especially with iMessage, folks are going to use what's provided them out of the box. It doesn't seem like a reasonable ask to get everyone en masse to agree to & switch to a lone cross-platform system. What's really needed is standards & interop. You should be able to use what you like, be that iMessage or RCS or Signal or XMPP. But none of these options should be locked out of working with others.

I'm so baffled by the strident defenses against possibility. From someone whose name is @unstatusthequo at that, going to bat for status quo lock in seems like a low and dark comedy. Un status quoer, un status quo thineself. Don't triple down on the fixed & limited!

Or CASL in Canada?

Or the "Spam Act" in Australia?

Or the PECR in the UK?

Yeah, what we need is more regulation. That's been solving the problem.

I think you got it in the reverse order.

“User has an android phone” doesn’t indicate “possible spammer”. However, “spammer” typically indicates “user has an android phone.”

iMessage is apples system, we live in an app world, you don’t have to use it, most people use WhatsApp so just download that, Google users have to download it too because it’s a third party service. How is downloading a free app a high switching cost? You can use it alongside iMessage. Most people use

There is plenty of freedom of choice without a third party app hacking into another system. Get a grip.

> most people use WhatsApp

I only know of one person who uses WhatsApp and it's to keep on touch with folks in Brazil. No one uses it here, from what I can see, and no one has offered to share WhatsApp ever.

The ease with which you suggest yeah everyone can just use an obvious easy to agree upon other central alternative is so facetiously ridiculous and painful. Everyone has a mish-mahs of preferences & existing accounts. It not just that you've deeply shirked what the actual switching costs are (since everyone will pick different things), it's that having these crazy anti-cirumvention laws is stupid, that not having adversarial Interoperability like what Beeper is doing is a sad corporate lichdom sucking the lifeblood of what should be the most vibrant sector of our age: communications technologies. Babel fell, and these merchants of disconnection have been keeping us from communicating with each other ever since, to make a couple more sales. Vulgar pieces of anti-human garbage, just disgraceful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38533775

If you don't receive iMessages it will automatically fall back to SMS (unless the sender specifically turned that feature off).

While neither mechanism is perfect, the RCS model treats lack of delivery to the handset as a potential problem, whereas iMessage ignores it. iMessage assumes your phone is just off, which for most people you are texting, is an unlikely scenario.

For users who actively turn off their device for certain activities, you have the opportunity to just wait, and when it arrives the error will clear, or send it as SMS and it will pick it up when the handset does turn on. But while the message is in flight for any length of time, the UI treats it as "something is wrong".

This means whenever you return to the conversation to check for a response or text more, you'll be reminded strongly that the message never arrived for them. And you always have the opportunity to resend on SMS during that time.

1. The sender cannot connect to the imessage server 2. The receiver does not connect to the imessage server, on any of the devices registered to receive at that particular address.

I know both methods happen since I didn't used to have data and I would receive SMSs when someone sent me an imessage and I was out and about.

See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8063349?sortBy=best

It is self-seviced https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

And what you link to is what I meant by

> assuming you forget to go through Apple's iMessage deregistration system.

That’s the whole point. You’re using it for non-critical things.

What data made you make that association? Seems unlikely. If that happens, then apple would have to be routing messages incorrectly, but that would be a massive bug/security issue... especially considering how E2EE works.

The only way to submit a claim was to click on a button in my icloud account that did not exist. I live in a big city and visited 3 Apple stores and spent about 15 hours in them in total, but none of them were able to help me get the claim filed so I had to give up. One of the supervisors did refund the ~$15/mo that I had paid for the AppleCare+ insurance, but I had to buy a new phone.

It's pretty easy to see why they wouldn't include theft + loss coverage unless you pay for it...

And what are the chances that the actual recipient ends up being the spouse of your expected recipient? Sounds more like they logged into each other's phones or something.

> suggesting it's related to their group carrier plan

Extremely doubtful it has anything to do with their plan. iMessage is over the top: only the first SMS activation message has anything to do with your carrier -- after that it's all sent through Apple's servers.

I call shenanigans.

I worry that sounds accusatory but that’s not my intention, I’m curious and too tired to attempt to reword it.

I could’ve expanded, I’m pretty much de facto “IT Support” for a lot of the friends/family I’ve spent those years communicating with using iMessage so I can pretty confidently say it has never happened to any of them either. I could go on to say that if it was a widespread issue this wouldn’t be the first we are hearing about it, and it absolutely would’ve been covered in some sort of tech news - possibly even the regular old news.

But sure, let’s go with self centred.

It's a little weird to so strongly believe that a rare, intermittent bug (no one suggested it's "widespread") couldn't exist with a messaging service that gets a ton of traffic and has to support nearly a billion and a half people across the globe. May want to examine what biases lead you to having such a negative response to something like that.

Also consider that even if you have 1000 friends for whom you are "IT support guy", you've still interacted with fewer than 0.0001% of all iPhone users. You are several orders of magnitude off from a representative sample, especially if we're talking about a rare bug.

They're explicitly claiming "this happens all the time."

Doesn't feel like some rare issue. Googled it by curiosity, and there's a ton of "help" articles and support post on people randomly seeing messages disappear or not getting delivered.

I would bet there is at least one overlap or misconfiguration there.

I have never, to my knowledge, had a message sent to me lost (which I would have found out because my family members, who would have been the ones to try and fail to send it to me, would have mentioned it), nor lost a message I sent (except for obvious cases where I had insufficient signal, and the app clearly notified me of it).

I have never received a misdirected message, had mine misdirected, nor heard of anyone else doing either.

In all the criticisms of iMessage I've seen recently—in this Beeper situation, and a little longer ago when Apple decided to support RCS—I have seen no one else say that they've had issues like you describe.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that these things can't happen. But it does suggest that Your Experiences Are Not Universal.

I expect message loss is actually a pretty regular occurrence, in absolute numbers. I wouldn't be surprised if thousands or even hundreds of thousands or millions of messages are dropped every year. But in the end that means that the delivery rate would be something like 99.99999999999%, which is actually pretty damn good (and it probably isn't that good; I'm just throwing around numbers here).

>Apple previously issued a (somewhat uncommon) statement about Beeper's iMessage access, stating that it "took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage." Citing privacy, security, and spam concerns, Apple stated it would "continue to make updates in the future" to protect users. Migicovsky previously denied to Ars that Beeper used "fake credentials" or in any way made iMessages less secure.

Not commenting about the ethics of all this, just wondering why technically Apple can only block ~5% of Beeper Mini users instead of all of them? Could this potentially be tied to the use of an email id as the iMessage handle?

Apple could block 100% of the people using Beeper and throw Hackintosh users into that as a bonus as well.

The reason they’re not doing that is because it could have unintended consequences as some are using someone else’s actual device serial number and those people would be inconvenienced.

It’s nothing that can’t be easily solved, the moment they reach out to support either in person or via phone/chat Apple can immediately verify if they’re using a legitimate Apple device, but even if it boils down to a small percentage of users you still need to prepare for the influx of support requests.

To do this, Apple uses a scoring model to determine if they can access iMessage and historically they’ve been pretty generous by allowing clearly spoofed serials if the Apple ID involved is in good standing and has a positive history, think of it as a credit score. They can tweak the threshold score and probably are testing this out as we speak to find a sweet spot they’re content with.

Apple could also push out an update tomorrow that would end this once and for all by utilizing device attestation and leveraging Secure Enclave, but this would potentially lock out older devices, something they were willing to do when they upgraded the FaceTime protocol a couple of years ago, but they might not want to do that this time around.

Just give it a couple more hardware generations to ensure the largest % of older hardware upgrades. Anything pre-secure enclave chip would need to be in the low digits I'm guessing. Then again, if they are going to block Messages, that might be the incentive to get these older device users to upgrade.

One is supposed to try to find a plausible (follows certain rules) but invalid serial to use for hackintoshing and not use real serials, but of course in practice there’s always some number of careless users…

But like you said, there are always people who don’t care about others as long as they have theirs.

There is, so far anyway, no reason to go against this best practice because, even though Apple can instantly detect a bogus serial, their currently used scoring threshold still allows you to use iMessage provided you’ve got a non-fresh Apple ID in good standing.

There's been some talk that blocking this for Beeper will also block this for Hackintosh, but are we just talking about iMessage?

Because I have a hard time believing that (A) Apple can't just block this for iMessage without affecting whatever other system services rely on it and (B) That Apple would care if Hackintoshes lose iMessage.

If those two are true, and assuming Beeper Mini also tries to find plausible but invalid serials to use, then Hackintoshes definitely aren't the reason they aren't blocking based on this.

Apple should easily be able to tell when someone has done this.

Not too long ago, however, they moved to a completely randomized serial format, perhaps partly because of iMessages shenanigans.

Server-side there’s a bunch more information used from the Apple ID.

Together it results in a score and the server then decides if it meets the threshold before deciding to play nice.

Why they allowed it is anyone’s guess, but the leading theory is that they valued not hindering established customers over locking iMessage completely down and perhaps the bad PR that comes with banning someone’s Apple ID over this.

As far as I know, it's not actually known what model numbers, serial numbers, and disk UUIDs Beeper Mini is sending (and no the POC repository doesn't really tell us)-- if you have a source that talks about this I'd love to read it!

More proof that Remote Attestation is evil and does not exist to serve the user.

You can use device attestation to combat spam by making sure only authentic devices connect to your service.

You can use it to facilitate contact key verification together with a hardware key to ensure contacts know who they’re talking to.

I’ve used it to make sure that introductory promotions are only offered once per device.

On the other end of the spectrum you can use it as a DRM of sorts to make sure ads on your website aren’t blocked.

More charitably, perhaps you are saying spam will increase over previous levels. From what I understand, Apple does not have any spam prevention technologies in Messages at all, neither for incoming iMessages, nor for SMS messages-- so the only thing keeping your iMessage conversations free of them is the obscurity of the protocol. Perhaps they should just add anti-spam tech like other texting clients have had for years.

The solution to spam is to petition your government to crack down, or do server side filtering. Banning random phones is like playing whack a mole.

I will give you that remote attestation does help anticheat. However, the current state of anticheat in games is so invasive now that you have to install special kernel drivers, and that kernel has to be on bare metal (no hypervisors allowed). This only happened because a specific genre of fast-twitch first person shooter has a lot of closet cheating going on. But it also gets blindly applied to things like rhythm games that absolutely do not need kernel-level anticheat[1]. So every game gets more invasive because of one hyper-competitive game genre triggering an anticheat arms race.

[0] Or at least, for as long as Web Environment Integrity stays dead

[1] Altering the client isn't even the most common way of cheating rhythm game records. For example, a good chunk of the rules for, say, Pump It Up's online leaderboards is "don't have other players play on your A.M.Pass" and "don't hook up a hand controller onto an online cab". Neither of which would be stopped by an anticheat system (and yes, PIU being an arcade rhythm game, there's shitton of encryption on it).

They can; Apple (and others) have implemented Private Access Tokens (PATs) for this.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...

And no, web registrations as a must have is an extremely antiquated concept.

From Beeper's perspective, they now have to figure out why only those logins were blocked and if they need to patch something or not. Apple could be wasting their time and blocked random users out of spite.

Time will tell.

It's not simply a MeanGirls experience of not being cool enough. Most Americans don't use or have 3rd party apps like WhatsApp, so most people will fall-back to SMS, which is objectively a much worse experience. I feel like the adult equivalent is getting group dinner with a friend with severe allergies or dietary restrictions. You care about your friend, and you want to invite them, but the effort to include them is high and sometimes you want to try a restaurant you know they can't eat at, so you skip the invite. I'm a vegetarian, and I know my friends skip me outright in the steakhouse dinners.

50% of Americans have an iPhone, and that is even higher for teenagers (almost 90%). That means >50% of people have this superior group functionality built-in (can't beat defaults). That means for teenagers, most of your friends will have iMessages, and most will be able to do effortless group chats, and its a statistical dice-roll to see if someone doesn't have an iPhone. You become "that guy" that causing disruption, and you'll 100% be ignored sporadically.

Again, the issue isn't "I don't wanna see green bubbles", the issue is "I don't want to bother with a third party app for this conversation". Since most people don't regularly use 3rd party messaging apps, there's a coordination issue to be solved picking the app and confirming everyone has it, OR falling back to SMS which is pretty messy. The alternative is to skip one friend and just fill them in later. Sometimes it's easier, it's not an elitist attempt to ostracize.

Apple also relies on the path of least resistance as well, if someone is having a poor experience in a group chat with their iPhone friends...it just becomes "easy" for them to choose an iPhone the next time they change phones.

Look at other companies, Microsoft porting Office etc to MacOS, Google services like maps gmail etc available on the iPhone. It's only Apple that walls their tech in so that it's only on iPhone - they don't care about profit lost to not expanding their reach because they reinforce their own platform.

Your current lived experiences may not be in sync with people in their teens or twenties. This is a well-known phenomenon called "green bubble bullying" that Apple has masterfully orchestrated to make people force other people to buy their phones.

oh wait. i drifted off back to the 90s software cracking days.

But Beeper Mini isn't asking users to bring-their-own valid hardware registered Apple hardware ID tied to their Apple ID, they're doing something different/unknown behind the scenes

After you de-register it the buyer can register it with Apple under their Apple ID.

As far as I know (I could be wrong), in order to log in + auth to Apple's various protocols that are involved to make iMessage work, you need a valid Apple ID and some sort of valid hardware ID.

If you don't have either of those, how would you be talking to Apple's services?

If their POST /login requires email + password + valid registered serial # of device sold that isn't flagged stolen and not shared across 100 accounts... how does Beeper Mini expect to work?

This feels super against terms of services. Taking a paying Apple user's hardware ID and using it for a non-paying user?

Also, I thought you had to tie/pair hardware ID to Apple ID.

I wonder if it might also have anything to do with govt action. I believe a US elected rep recently tweeted in favour of Beeper. Apple cares much more about PR than they'll admit, and server costs for them are negligible.

Apple has made it clear that they won't bring iMessage to Android. People who choose to invest in Android phones know they won't get access to iMessage.

It seems a bit entitled behaviour for someone to feel like Apple should be forced to bring iMessage to Android for any reason besides Apple's own choice, and that they know better than Apple on how to run Apple's business.

What's entitled behavior is big tech thinking it can dictate how and where we use technology and services. Why should we be roped into serving Apple's interests and ignoring own own? Beeper can pursue their own interests while benefiting users, that's hardly a negative.

I'm sure if Ford dictated how and where you drove your car you'd be outraged, but we should kowtow to the likes of Apple?

I just wouldn't buy a Ford.

Then you really wouldn't buy a Ford. Problem solved?

There are of course a lot of companies with lock-in out there, but none with such big network effect deeply intertwined with peoples' communication and personal lives (in the US).

And RCS will solve it all. If group chats and high quality media work, people will only complain about the one thing they hate most:

The bubbles will still be green.

But I am from Europe, we don't care around here and I don't like iMessage that much. Compared to Telegram/Whatsapp, it's slow at loading old messages, has sync issues and only gut swipe to reply this year.

2. I hope you are right that RCS will solve everything once Apple implements it, but I don't have confidence it will. The biggest problem is how they handle group chats: If iMessage group chats cannot seamlessly convert into RCS group messages (without duplication or splitting) then it will solve it well enough. This is unlikely to happen unfortunately