I saw this coming from a mile away.
If you use your iMessage account for illicit activity, by which I mean “using Apple products in a way that causes no harm but offends them personally,” they probably reserve every right under the sun to make your life miserable.
Yep
This also extends to other products. Don’t use your personal Gmail to do ‘TOS violating’ things. Better yet, separate it as much a possible with different devices, VPNs, etc.
Losing your primary email will SUCK
(Also make backups)
Violating the iMessage/iCloud user agreement can, yes, result in getting booted from the platform. It’s in the terms of service. It was a risk everyone took when using beeper. 
“How dare they access their own messages!”
I too like to champion a trillion dollar company over what’s morally right!
ah, yes, pointing out a simple fact = “championing” / taking a moral stance
if i point out that it happens to be raining outside today, am i also “championing” the rain, claiming rain to be morally right?
lol
Stop. Fucking. Raindancing.
My shoes are WET. You did this.
rude ._.
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getting through everyday life must be a challenge for you.
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descriptive ≠ prescriptive
No one gives a flying fuck about Apple’s TOS.
tell that to those who got booted from iMessage
They don’t give a shit either. Hence why they tried to bypass shitty iMessenger.
if it’s so shitty, why are they so obsessed with using the platform?
the only thing they’re trying to bypass is owning an apple device to get onto iMessage.
I’m calling it shitty. What are you even arguing? Forget it, I don’t give a fuck.
if you don’t give a fuck, why are you even here?
Tell that to the humancentipad! You clicked on agree TWICE!
Why are US users so focused on iMessage? I have seen rejected date memes because the message bubble had the wrong color. There are tons of alternatives out there. Is this a status thing?
vast majority of people use the default app their phone choice comes with.
historically eise, the reason EU uses whatsapp was that there was a time period early on where sms costed money, so people used whatsapp to circumvent that. the U.S didnt have that problem as sms was free for the majority of people in that time period.
This seems a bit revisionist. Everyone had an amount of smses per month that were free in their contract.
People switched to whatsapp because it was better than sms.
And a lot of people had to pay per SMS/minute! At least, for the plans that didn’t require a contract or a huge load of money up front. Remember Net10, where the gimmick was prepaying for $.10/minute, and text messages around $.05 apiece?
wasn’t it the long distance thing? charged for sending SMS outside of your network or something. I recall whatsapp was the way to text your parents from one country in to another, even in the EU.
I know for a fact my fam adopted almost a decade ago, so we can text from USA to EU to SA to Canada. Family all over and it’s free.
39 cents/SMS. I remember this time. This does not explain why it has to be that specific protocol, though.
because people were already uaing sms when it was paid beforehand before smartphones were a thing. people just used to whatever the default was, especially since its not like everyone switched to a smart phone immediately after the iphone 3gs’ relase. sms was the default method to talk to people who were still using “dumbphones”
Also, at the time, WhatsApp was pretty much the only option. Nowadays, there are a lot of other options.
A part of it was that they put in the effort to support featurephones. People with smartphones always had other options.
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The average American is not tech savvy.
(Which is surprising, given that the US has arguably the strongest software development industry in the world.)
Most Americans just use the default apps installed on their phones. Facebook Messenger is really the only non-default messaging app with mass market penetration, and that’s because most Americans already have Facebook accounts.
Americans just don’t want to sign up for new accounts or learn new apps. Therefore, iMessage won by default.
the users are holding their wallet the wrong way, probably
Welp, yep, get on the wrong side of a company and they can take everything you enjoyed from their “integrated” ecosystem away from you. That’s why we need to remove these types of walled garden monopolies.
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Another episode of “trying to contact people behind some big company app because they haven’t heard what an Internet is”.
I think the bigger news here is that Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky has once again bitten off more than he can chew.
I personally was already skeptical of Beeper based on Migicovsky’s terrible treatment of the Pebble devs on the way out (they were supposed to be sold with the company, that ended up not being the case and they were left jobless), and personal experiences when on the original Beeper waitlist (was not notified our onboarding session would be recorded until joining the session, follow up questions ignored), but this really seems to reveal that he never had a real solid plan to deal with this potential outcome (that most saw coming from a mile away).
Beeper was originally supposed to be a “universal chat app” in the vein of classic apps like Trillian, Adium or Pidgin, but they paid particular attention to trying to get iMessage into the game from early on. It’s genuinely odd to think that they’ve been persuing iMessage compatability for this long to not have considered this as an outcome, especially after the release of Beeper Cloud, which was an actual reverse engineer of the iMessage protocol.
The classic Beeper app (I forget the name for it now) could have kept flying under the radar and being ignored by Apple, despite the fact that it required an intermediary iOS device to be able to work as it was. They originally were going to send out refurbished iPhone 4s to customers, but as iOS updates quickly made the iPhone 4 too far behind to still be functional in this way, they rolled out their own fleet of macOS servers as an intermediary.
It really seems like an ill-considered plan, and it really makes me glad I never dumped any money into the product, because this has kind of become a complete shitshow. We shouldn’t be celebrating Apple’s decision to do this, but Migicovsky never even had more than a few moves planned before he gave up on Beeper cloud, so it’s not like we can count on him to be the one trying to mount a legal battle to change things and allow others access to iMessage through a legal framework.
Migicovsky bailed on Pebble pretty quickly when it became unprofitable. Will he do the same again? Seems likely to me, imho.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t think this guy actually has a real business plan with any of this and I’m kind of surprised no devs involved had brought it up, considering it’s been being developed for three years now.
While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.
I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.
Sounds like the WeWork of messaging apps TBH.
One point: don’t you mean Beeper Mini was using reverse-engineered iMessage code?
Meanwhile the Beeper app won’t even open on my computer.
Crapple at it again. (Gonna make this a thing.)
