This Beeper Mini Situation is Ridiculous

Four points, two companies, one country — divided

Beeper Mini. Image: Beeper.

Some context: In early December, a company called Beeper, founded by chief executive Eric Migicovsky and Brad Murray, announced and launched a new Android application called Beeper Mini, which was framed as being a successor to the company’s older product, Beeper Cloud. Beeper Cloud, first announced in 2021 with a lengthy waitlist of hundreds of thousands, is an application — available for both iOS and Android, as well as macOS, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS, the software that runs on Google Chromebooks — that allows users to bring all of their messaging services into one place for easy access. Beeper Cloud would prompt users to sign into all of their messaging accounts, such as their WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Slack, and Signal accounts (the service supports many more such services), and then would create a list of all of their messages from every application. The premise of Beeper Cloud was to provide a unified application so that users wouldn’t have to keep track of multiple messaging clients across multiple devices. Sounds enticing.

However, one of the messaging services Beeper Cloud supported was Apple’s iMessage service. Unlike the aforementioned messaging services, iMessage had and continues to have no public application programming interface for developers to interact with it. iMessage is only available on Apple-made devices through Apple-made software, like iOS and macOS. To circumvent this limitation, and thus to bring iMessage to Android and Windows, Beeper’s founders engineered a clever solution, which is where Beeper Cloud gets its name from: Beeper uses its own Macs in a server room somewhere and asks Beeper Cloud users to sign into their Apple ID accounts on those Macs through the Beeper Android/Windows application. Beeper then sends iMessages from those machines’ iMessage application built into macOS, then relays those messages into Beeper with custom, proprietary software. While the technique worked, it was expensive, and more importantly, was a severe security vulnerability. Users know to never enter their Apple ID anywhere other than on Apple’s websites, but using iMessage via Beeper Cloud required them to do so.

That brings us to Beeper Mini. Beeper Mini tries to solve the same problem: bringing iMessage to Android (Windows support never arrived, though Beeper said it had plans to combine Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini and by extension, bring Windows support), but it uses a different approach. According to Migicovsky, the previous co-founder of Pebble, the failed smartwatch company of the early 2010s, Beeper’s engineers had been working hard on a way to reverse engineer the iMessage protocol somehow to bring iMessage to Android. Their problem was solved by one 16-year-old high school student from Pennsylvania, who goes by the pseudonym “JJTech” on GitHub, and who brought the idea up to the founders of Beeper via an internet message. The student somehow found a way to reverse-engineer Apple Push Notification Service, the API Apple uses to send push notifications from its servers to Apple devices. JJTech discovered that APNS was bi-directional, meaning that it could be “used to send push notifications as well as receive them,” JJTech writes on their blog.

From there, JJTech simply used Apple’s public developer documentation to find out that Apple devices are assigned a “push notification token” once they connect to APNS, and that to send messages, a device would have to be assigned a token and specify the type of message it was trying to send, called a “topic.” Topics are in the form of bundle identifiers, such as com.apple.madrid in the case of iMessage, JJTech writes. Then, a device uses an authentication token retrieved from your Apple ID to register the device for an Apple key server, which facilitates end-to-end encryption. In summary, all that is needed to send iMessages from any internet-connected device is an identity key pair derived from the key server. These key pairs are “used to perform public-key lookups,” says JJTech. Once you have a public key, you can send iMessages freely, as if you were sending them from an Apple device. These public keys are just that: public, meaning that they don’t need to come from a specific Apple ID. I assume Beeper simply used a sample Apple ID, gathered the public keys, and then sent Beeper Mini users’ iMessages through those keys, establishing a connection with APNS.

JJTech, without any question, is a genius and clearly has a bright future ahead of them. To reverse-engineer such a complex, proprietary protocol is a major accomplishment — and is completely protected by U.S. law, which states that it is legal to reverse-engineer protocols. Migicovsky wanted to use JJTech’s work and build a new service — which would go on to be called Beeper Mini — with it, so the two worked out a deal where Beeper would hire JJTech for $100 per hour to develop Beeper Mini.

On December 5, 2023, Beeper Mini was launched on the Google Play Store as a $2-a-month subscription product, with a 14-day free trial. It was an instant hit, with selected press promoting the product as a solution to the ‘iMessage on Android’ conundrum. Beeper Mini was fully end-to-end encrypted, meaning that neither Beeper nor Apple could see users’ messages, and it required no relay server to send messages on Beeper’s end — though the service did require a server Beeper hosted to send Android push notifications. Part of what made the product so popular was that people thought it would be impossible for Apple to remove Beeper’s access to APNS without majorly overhauling the entire encryption stack used for APNS and that it would not have been worth it for Apple just to halt the development of such an insignificant and fringe product.

That assertion was cataclysmically false.

Just days after, Apple completely revoked Beeper Mini’s access to APNS, and by extension, iMessage, and Nadine Haija, a spokesperson for the company, issued the following statement to The Verge:

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. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. 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.

Beeper continued to try to reverse-engineer the protocol, offering possible solutions to customers. The attempts ended with Beeper’s final solution: jailbreaking an old iPhone, keeping it powered on all the time and plugged into power, and signing into an Apple ID, which is by far one of the most hilarious approaches to this issue anyone has ever heard of. Practically, Beeper Mini was dead.

In response to Apple’s allegations that Beeper Mini was unsecure, Migicovsky fired off an overly defensive and angry blog post, where he offered Beeper’s source code for review to somehow prove that the service was not malicious, offered to prepend a beeper emoji (📟) to every message sent with the service, and reiterates his previous statements that essentially say that Beeper makes Apple device users safer since it uses Apple’s own iMessage protocol rather than the antiquated SMS protocol from the 1980s, which is unencrypted. The response was beyond amusing, annoyingly entitled, and portrayed senseless indignation and entitlement. Beeper believed it was in the right and that Apple was in the wrong, which is completely incorrect; both Beeper and Apple were in the right. Here’s where I stand, and what I will elaborate on:

1. Beeper had absolutely every right to reverse-engineer iMessage, and doing so was an ambitious yet admirable solution to the messaging problem in the United States.
2. Apple had absolutely every right to immediately revoke Beeper Mini’s unauthorized access to Apple’s iMessage protocol. iMessage is a service meant for Apple customers subsidized by Apple product sales, and Apple intends for it to remain that way. It should be able to do so.
3. It is in Apple’s best interest to offer an iMessage client for Android users, perhaps requiring a $10 monthly subscription for Android users to access the service. The endeavor would surely be popular and profitable.
4. The entire Beeper Mini/iMessage saga is not the U.S. government’s job to regulate. It is a battle between two private corporations and their users, and the government is entirely unqualified to involve itself in this matter. Doing so would be a blatant example of government overreach.

The U.S. Messaging Problem

In the United States, we have a text messaging problem.

In the late aughts, as more Americans bought smartphones — particularly iPhones — text messaging limits faded away. Americans could choose a cellular carrier that offered unlimited text messaging, and use the default SMS messaging application pre-installed on their new phones to communicate freely with their friends and family within the United States. These modern pre-installed messaging applications also supported the multimedia messaging service protocol, more commonly known as MMS, which allowed people to send images and videos along with their messages. This worked well for a while, but Apple had a different idea, and it called that idea iMessage.

In 2011, Apple announced iMessage with iOS 5. The idea was simple: iMessage was exclusively available to Apple device owners, subsidized by Apple device purchases, and offered better features than MMS, like end-to-end encryption, higher quality image uploads, unlimited-length videos, read receipts, and no character limits. iMessages could also be sent exclusively over Wi-Fi, and to use it, all users would have to do is register their phone numbers or Apple ID email addresses with iMessage. Starting an iMessage chat was simple: Once all parties in a conversation updated their Apple devices to iOS 5, MMS conversations automatically converted to iMessage conversations, and messaging another iPhone would automatically begin a new, secure iMessage conversation.

iMessage was designed to serve as an enhanced version of MMS, evidently, but it required each person in a conversation to have an Apple device, as running iMessage required maintaining costly servers. Americans who had iPhones immediately reaped the benefits of iMessage with no work on their part, and they knew they had access to these benefits because iMessage messaging bubbles were highlighted blue rather than the green color used for SMS/MMS messages. With no extra effort, iPhone owners enjoyed the luxury of high-quality media and read receipts, among other niceties — all encrypted, keeping their conversations away from prying eyes, and even Apple.

Fast-forward to the mid-2010s and the U.S. messaging problem started to develop. All of a sudden, this once-great feature was at the root of a class issue. Keep in mind that this was a social class issue that was created because of humans’ natural tendency to discriminate against each other, not a technical issue created because of the lack of some kind of technology or service. Americans who had Android phones and wanted to converse with their iPhone-toting friends had inferior messages, which in some cases infuriated iPhone users. Suddenly, Android users were alienated, and in some exceptional scenarios, bullied simply because their text message bubbles were green, and some people, particularly younger Americans, believed that was due to a lower income or inferior choice in technology. By the late 2010s, classism was in full swing, especially in middle- and high schools across America.

This issue didn’t arise because Americans are of “low intelligence” (this is seriously a theory some Europeans have come up with on the internet, which baffles me) but rather because of the technological advancements in the United States. While Americans had the luxury of unlimited monthly texts, Europeans resorted to third-party messaging services — most commonly, WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook, now Meta, in 2013. WhatsApp continues to be the most popular messaging service globally, with over two billion monthly active users, and the entire service is controlled by just one major American social networking corporation: Meta. If the same series of events — that is, unlimited text messaging — happened in Europe, it is almost certain that the same classism issue would arise there. However, because unlimited messaging still is not guaranteed in many parts of Europe, WhatsApp and its end-to-end encryption became the most popular messaging service across the continent.

As stated numerous times, people are difficult to change, so Android-toting Americans have been decrying this very prevalent societal issue for years. The more technically inclined ones use end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Signal and Telegram to communicate with each other, but the simple truth is that it is nearly impossible to convince a stranger or classmate to download a third-party messaging application just to talk to one Android user. In the United States, you are either using iMessage, or MMS, or you are out of luck — it’s a simple statement of fact.

Naturally, this developed the will in the hearts of tinkerers to try to bring iMessage to Android, either by pressuring Apple to create an official client for Android — what was later correctly determined as a helpless exercise — or by reverse-engineering the protocol somehow to enable interoperable high-quality messaging between mobile operating systems. This will, or rather, determination, sparked Beeper Cloud (and a competitor, Sunbird), then Beeper Mini. But more importantly, it gave way to a new theoretical cross-platform messaging protocol: Rich Communication Services, developed by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, a nonprofit trade organization representing mobile network operators globally. The GSMA, in November 2016, published the Universal Profile, the specification used by RCS. Google quickly adopted the protocol on Android, and now, it is the de facto messaging protocol for Android-to-Android communication, replacing MMS. Android phones now prefer using RCS unless a phone is too old to support the standard.

RCS brings iMessage-like niceties to Android, such as read receipts and high-quality media, but omits an important iMessage feature: end-to-end encryption. Google, as the main adopter of RCS, announced in November 2020 that end-to-end encryption would be added for users of the Google Messages application on Android, but the standard published by the GSMA continues to leave off end-to-end encryption; only Google Messages users who use RCS can safely encrypt their messages. Since then, Google started a major public pressure campaign against Apple that the company called “Get the Message,” mustering public support for Apple to adopt the RCS protocol, which Apple had resisted supporting on iOS for years. (iOS still uses SMS/MMS for all Android chats to this day.)

In November 2023, Apple relented, and in a statement to 9to5Mac from an unnamed spokesperson, announced it would be adding support for the protocol published by the GSMA. Notably, this is not Google’s custom-designed protocol — which adds end-to-end encryption — but the standard RCS Universal Profile published years ago. Nevertheless, analysts and Google executives hailed the addition, which is coming later this year, presumably with iOS 18 in the summer.

The addition of RCS on iOS is more than welcome — and is certainly overdue. However, I don’t think it will resolve the class situation we have in the United States currently. An unnamed spokesperson for Apple also confirmed to 9to5Macthat RCS messages will continue to be accented in green, which leads me to believe that there will be no end-user differentiation between RCS and MMS messages. If Apple had adopted RCS before classism took over U.S. high schools, then the story might have been different. But currently, the debate in U.S. society is not about the feature set of MMS and iMessage — it’s about the color of the message bubbles. It sounds dimwitted, but it’s a real social issue. Again, I’ll repeat myself: Apple never created this class system; people did, and there is no way that you can convince them to stop bullying each other. The bullying will never end, and it is simply foolish to assume that Apple adding RCS will solve the American messaging problem. It’s an issue rooted in classism — not technological limitations. Most American teenagers will never care if their phones now support RCS. Any teenager who tells their class, “Hey, your iPhones now support RCS, so we all get read receipts!” will be pointed and laughed at.

Therefore, because this problem is so rooted in U.S. society, Beeper — or more specifically, JJTech — rightfully reverse-engineered iMessage. Reverse engineering is protected under U.S. law, and that is not where Beeper went wrong. This is the only point I will ever concede to Beeper: Beeper’s original product is clever, and legally, it had every right to create it. The “green bubble/blue bubble” debate is a problem, and Beeper saw an opportunity to address it and did so legally. It was an incredibly daring solution, knowing Apple, but it was a solution — just a short-lived one.

Wrongful Indignation

As much as Beeper had the legal right to reverse-engineer iMessage, Apple was fully in the right to immediately revoke Beeper’s unauthorized access to iMessage. What Beeper did was immoral: it hijacked a private service — bypassing multiple layers of security — piggybacked off of Apple’s servers for free, intended to charge users for its blatant, indisputable thievery, and thought it had every right to do all of this while making a profit. It’s hysterical. Beeper’s entire business was akin to breaking into someone’s house, eating their snacks and drinking their soda, inviting its friends over, charging them like it was some kind of club, then knocking on the owners’ bedroom asking for $100,000. That’s exactly what Beeper did, and when the owners finally called the cops, it threw its hands up and said, “They don’t have a right to be in such a comfortable house, it’s unfair!” Beeper didn’t just act unknowingly, it acted maliciously. You can’t just break into someone’s house and use it as some kind of hangout spot. You can’t break into a company’s proprietary messaging service it operates for its customers and profit from it!

iMessage is a service for Apple customers, and Apple is using it as a selling point for its devices. Apple is not a charity; it has no obligation whatsoever to open iMessage up to other companies. Apple did it first — it created a product that people enjoy (iMessage) and then put a price on that product (the price of an iPhone or any other Apple device that supports iMessage). Nobody can or should have access to that product without paying the price. Beeper’s solution to this is to cut Apple a check for the “minuscule” server costs it may incur to support Beeper and its customers. I beg your pardon? Apple does not agree to that, and neither do they have to agree to it. The argument here is something along the lines of, “Apple should cease to exist entirely, or they should operate as a free, open-source software company.” This is not in defense of Apple; it’s in defense of the free market. If anyone — including Beeper — were to create a product, nobody else has the right to that product, let alone to profit from that product, unless the company that makes the product authorizes the access, which again, it is under no obligation to do.

This flawed interpretation of the market that classifies Apple as a “gatekeeper,” using E.U. parlance, truly is nonsense in this context. Of course, Apple has a right to gatekeep the product it created, and if you don’t like that, then stop buying iPhones. There is a reason iPhones fly off the shelves and there is a reason the Android-iPhone classism developed in the first place: people want iPhones. There is very evidently a strong, tangible demand for iPhones and the services that come with them, and no random company — small or large — has any right to that demand unless Apple wants it to have that demand. Customers have a choice; Apple is not forcing anyone to buy an iPhone, let alone to use iMessage. In fact, iMessage is a toggle users explicitly have to enable in the Setup Assistant of iOS, when the device is first turned on. Millions of Americans have explicitly said that (a) they want an iPhone, and (b) they want to use iMessage for the myriad benefits that come with it. Those customers might also want interoperability with Android, but regardless, that isn’t the business of Beeper, an entirely separate company. That debate is between Apple and its customers — not Beeper, not Google, not anyone else.

Beeper paints itself as a company that advocates for user choice, but realistically, it is entirely anti-user choice. Beeper took another company’s service and hid it behind a paywall of its own. It tried to play a game of capitalism while advocating for socialism; it tried to take choice away from users while championing interoperability on the outside; and it tried to capitalize on the success of a completely different corporation and the only excuse it was able to provide for its mischief was that “Apple is a monopoly.” It very clearly is not one, and if Beeper wasn’t operating within the fog of its own ego, it would realize that there is a U.S. market for iOS devices and Apple services and that in places where that market is smaller — like Europe — Apple doesn’t operate a monopoly.

I’ll put it another way: There is a doughnut shop on Broadway selling pink doughnuts because it has the right to pink doughnuts because it made them first. Out on the street, there is a line of 100 people waiting to buy these pink doughnuts, which cost more than the doughnuts on the other side of the street. The other owner — whose shop only had four people in line and only sells chocolate doughnuts — walks up to the pink doughnut shop’s owner and lambasts him because his pink doughnuts are selling better even though the chocolate doughnuts are cheaper, demanding that pink doughnuts be made available to all doughnut shops. The chocolate doughnut shop owner doesn’t get the deal he wants, so he steals a rack of pink doughnuts and starts undercutting the original owner in prices. That’s not competition, choice, or socialism — it’s thievery. Like all analogies, this one is not perfect — stealing is illegal whereas reverse-engineering isn’t — but it gets the point across. Apple made something first, and as long as its customers are happy, it doesn’t have to open the service up or play nice with anyone else. If you want access to Apple’s products, hand over the cash — that is how business works.

I have not heard a single good argument from Migicovsky as to why Beeper should be allowed to hijack iMessage and sell access to it for $2 a month. Each of his arguments boils down to the fact that iMessage is popular and that, in his opinion, it should not be able to be. I truly am unable to understand why Migicovsky and Friends™ have taken it upon themselves to be the champions of free messaging. I would even go as far as to argue that Beeper isn’t even a champion of “free” messaging because it is a business that wants to sell a product. Beeper wanted to profit from another company’s inordinate success and limit consumer choice while parading themselves as the champions of socialism and interoperability. That is not how the world works, Beeper.

The only scenario where Apple would be correctly classified as a “gatekeeper” would be if it intentionally suppressed third-party messaging applications on iOS. For the record, Apple does not gatekeep messaging on iOS — it simply makes iMessage an appealing reason to own an iPhone. I have heard three arguments — all flawed — supporting the thesis that Apple makes it impossible for other companies to compete with iMessage on iOS:

1. iMessage “hijacks” your phone number, and piggybacking on an open standard is an obvious example of ecosystem lock-in. (Via Joshua Topolsky, a renowned technology journalist.)

I don’t even know where to begin here. For starters, no, iMessage does not “hijack” your phone number in any way, and if one wants to deregister their phone number from iMessage and prevent people from sending iMessages to them, they can do so in Settings (Settings → Messages → Send & Receive → deselect the phone number, then disable iMessage from the previous menu). Additionally, hijacking something would mean that it intercepted messages sent to your phone automatically, without a user’s consent, and that is false in the case of iMessage. Setup Assistant asks for permission to enable iMessage when first setting up an iPhone, and users can continue to use the Messages application on iOS without using iMessage if they would prefer. Also, as a counterargument, what do WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Google Voice all ask for upon first download? A phone number, so is that considered “hijacking” according to Topolsky? Apple never prohibits moving, removing, or sharing your phone number just because you are an iMessage user, and if for some reason you’re still uncomfortable with being one, the system gives you a choice — nothing is forced.

2. Apple pre-installs iMessage and asks for notification permissions when you install a third-party application, like WhatsApp, which is anti-competitive. (Via Adam Mosseri, chief executive of Instagram.)

Of course, this one comes from the “head of Instagram.” Either Mosseri (a) wants Apple to pre-install WhatsApp on all iPhones, or (b) omit one of the most, if not the most important parts of a phone — the text messaging application — from the operating system. Both suggestions are beyond ludicrous. A new iPhone needs to be able to perform basic functionality out of the box, and if it is unable to, that is a poor reflection on Apple. Barely anyone in the United States wants to download WhatsApp, clearly, because if they wanted to, they could do so easily via the App Store. The App Store does not prohibit anyone from installing WhatsApp; you can do so freely, with no restrictions.

When WhatsApp is first downloaded to an iOS or macOS device, the system does ask for permission to enable push notifications — and Mosseri rightfully calls this “fair” — but that’s a protection extended to all third-party apps. Meta evidently has a problem with system prompts, like App Tracking Transparency, the technology introduced by Apple in early 2021 that allows users to choose if they want to share private advertising identifiers with developers which can be used to track them. If it doesn’t like system prompts, it is more than welcome to create its own operating system and hardware to run that operating system on. Customers like system prompts because of developers like Meta that frequently try to invade people’s privacy without their knowledge or consent. The Messages application does allow users to switch off notifications if they would like (in Settings → Notifications → Messages).

3. Apple must take responsibility for classism in U.S. society because it fundamentally is in the business of communications, and its job is to make communication between people easier. If it does not do this on its own, the government must become involved because that is anticompetitive behavior. (Via the entire internet.)

Apple is not “in the business of communications,” and neither does it bear the responsibility of what people do with its products and what people say to each other. As stated earlier, the iMessage classism in the United States is not the result of any technical limitations, and adding RCS to iOS most certainly will not address it. People will naturally discriminate against each other. Apple is in the business of providing the best experience to its customers, and it is in its best interests to conduct that business properly. If not, it will not have customers to serve anymore. Apple is not a charity, and refusing to cater to other companies’ customers is not anticompetitive behavior.

Federighi Was Wrong

On April 7, 2013, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, wrote the following in an email to a group of Apple executives:

We really need to bring iMessage to Android. I have had a couple of people investigating this but we should go full speed and make this an official project.

The email was in response to an AppleInsider article reporting on a rumor that Google was buying WhatsApp — a rumor that was incorrect, as Facebook, now Meta, bought WhatsApp instead. Phill Schiller, then-Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, responded to Cue’s email:

And since we make no money on iMessage what will be the point?

That is exactly how you make money on iMessage. Cue responds correctly:

Do we want to lose one of the most important apps in a mobile environment to Google? We have the best messaging app and we should make it the industry standard. I don’t know what ways we can monetize it but it doesn’t cost us a lot to run.

Cue tells Schiller that iMessage “doesn’t cost [them] a lot to run.” That is a crucial point: Apple is a company of many assets. Monetizing the project would be easy, and the cost-benefit analysis should have proven that charging Android users for iMessage would return a profit. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software, chimes in:

Do you have any thoughts on how we would make switching to iMessage (from WhatsApp) compelling to masses of Android users who don’t have a bunch of iOS friends?

That is not Apple’s priority. Apple’s priority is capturing the subset of the Android market that wants to communicate with iOS users. Federighi continues:

…I am concerned the [sic] iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove and [sic] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.

Federighi is running on the pretense that iMessage is the sole reason a parent would buy an iPhone. The truth, even in 2013, could not be more false. In a fascinating display of irony: Apple’s software chief is so unconfident in iOS that he thinks it is the only reason someone would buy an iPhone. On iOS, applications are more private, well-designed, and secure; social media applications behave better due to the small amount of iPhone models (one in early 2013) Apple makes each year; and the intense social pressure in high schools makes iPhones nearly must-haves. Each of these factors is a strong reason for parents to buy their children iPhones. I would even argue that the reasons for buying an iPhone in 2013 were much stronger than they are now because of how much better iOS was then compared to Android. Societal pressures were more abundant then, too — if you didn’t have an iPhone, people thought you were poor, and if you had an iPhone, they thought you were rich. Of course, these reasons sound arbitrary when laid out like this, but they are all real considerations.

If Apple’s chief of software engineering was so pessimistic about the state of iOS in comparison to the state of Android, Apple’s first job should have been to improve the state of iOS, bringing it up to speed with Android. Because, if iMessage is the only thing keeping people on iOS, that is an indisputable, major problem for Apple and its bottom line. I guarantee you that if these executives had this same conversation today, the analysis would be a lot more different, and in the rare scenario where it was not different, Apple has some work to do. iOS has plenty of features that make it a superior choice over Android, even for young people, and Apple should use that to its advantage instead of keeping this one feature close to its heart.

iMessage should be available on Android because it is in Apple’s best interest to create the best messaging experience for its customers. Currently, iOS users have to put up with low-quality attachments, character limits, and unencrypted messages whenever they message one of the many millions of Android users. Moreover, there is an incredible amount of money to be had from this market, as discussed earlier. From a pure business standpoint, tons of Android users have gotten desperate enough that they would pay Apple $5 or $10 a month for access to iMessage purely for blue text message bubbles alone. I’m dead serious: There is a market for this product, and it is almost inevitable at least one person at Apple has realized it. iOS users are complaining day in and day out about Android users’ green text message bubbles, and Android users are complaining that their message bubbles are green. To strengthen this point, Cue himself says that iMessage doesn’t cost much to run. Again, business-wise, it is in Apple’s every interest to up-charge Android users for iMessage access.

Apple’s strategy should not be to compete with WhatsApp or Telegram in any way — contrary to what Federighi says — but rather to capture the market that wants to text their iOS friends without having to worry about message bubble colors. Anyone who has been in the real world knows that the market for a product like that is substantial — that’s why Beeper even attempted to tap into and profit from it in the first place. This is not support for Android users — if Apple wanted to be certain of that, they could mandate that one of the parties in a chat must be on an Apple device — but rather, support for iOS users, who are tired of what they say are “ruined” group chats. Apple could (a) make money from Android users who want iMessage, (b) make disgruntled iOS users happy, and © ease regulators’ concerns about iMessage being a closed-off product. It’s a win-win-win situation.

Apple should not be forced by any regulatory body to do this, but the public — particularly iOS customers — should pressure the company to develop iMessage for Android. Apple most certainly has the internal resources for a project like this — see Apple Music for Android, which in many cases is better than the iOS app — and it should put those resources to work to make as much money as possible from this sector of the market while making people happy. To me, this seems like an idea that truly has no downsides. Eddy Cue was on the right track.

Government Overreach

Shortly after Apple revoked Beeper’s unauthorized access to the iMessage service, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted the following to the social media website X, quoting The Verge’s article reporting on the changes Apple made:

Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage? Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors.

Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure.

A week later, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mike Lee of Utah; and Representatives Jerry Nadler of New York and Ken Buck of Colorado wrote a bipartisan letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter calling for the Justice Department to “investigate whether this potentially anticompetitive conduct by Apple violated antitrust laws.” “This” conduct refers to Apple’s immediate shutdown of Beeper Mini. The members of Congress collectively write:

We write regarding Apple’s potential anticompetitive treatment of the Beeper Mini messaging application. We have long-championed increased competition, innovation, and consumer choice in the digital marketplace. To protect free and open markets, it is critical for the Antitrust Division to be vigilant in enforcing our antitrust laws.

Earlier this month, Beeper introduced Beeper Mini, an interoperable messaging service that allows users of the Android mobile operating system to communicate with users of Apple’s iMessage service. Previously, Android users were unable to securely communicate with iMessage users and were relegated to using decades-old, unencrypted SMS technology. Within days of its launch, Beeper Mini users began to experience service disruptions. Apple admitted it took action to disable Beeper Mini, citing security and privacy concerns for iMessage users.

Earlier this year the Department of Commerce released a report titled Competition in the Mobile Application Ecosystem, describing Apple as a “gatekeeper” with a “monopoly position” in its mobile app ecosystem.

We are therefore concerned that Apple’s recent actions to disable Beeper Mini harm competition, eliminate choices for consumers, and will discourage future innovation and investment in interoperable messaging services.

In other words, the letter tells the Justice Department to investigate Apple for locking its doors to thieves. There are two main points to untangle here: that the members of Congress show apparent illiteracy in both antitrust law and technology, and that opening up messaging ecosystems is not a job of the government. It is quite obvious that these members of Congress have no clue what Beeper did to gain access to the iMessage service — nor have any interest in finding out — and that Beeper’s Migicovsky brainwashed the members into taking congressional action against Apple as retaliation for destroying Beeper’s flawed-from-the-start business model. Speaking of Migicovsky, he promoted the letter with his own commentary on X shortly after it was published. It does not require any knowledge of government lobbying to conclude that Migicovsky — and perhaps some of his cohorts — lobbied the members of Congress to get the letter published for publicity.

To begin, the members begin by calling Beeper Mini an “interoperable messaging service,” an entirely incorrect assertion. Beeper is not a service of its own; it reverse-engineered another American company’s service, took control of its servers, and sent messages through it. Beeper was never a service — it was using another company’s service and sold access to it for $2 a month. Meanwhile, Warren’s post brazenly states that “Big Tech” companies “squash competitors,” which again, is a categorical misunderstanding of the Beeper Mini fiasco. Beeper Mini was never a competitor to iMessage; it was a wrapper for iMessage that used iMessage and sold access to iMessage. Beeper Mini took advantage of a security loophole in the iMessage protocol — a loophole Apple has since patched, thus disabling Beeper’s access to iMessage — and created a nice-looking graphical user interface for it. Beeper Mini was not a competitor to iMessage in any way, and Apple never “squashed” competition.

“Squashing” competition, using Warren’s words, would mean that Apple removed WhatsApp or Telegram from its App Store, or sued those apps for taking users away from iMessage. These events never occurred. “Squashing” is a serious word, and Warren loosely uses it without even the most minimal amount of regard for antitrust law. Each of the members of Congress who participated in the attacks against Apple’s business demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how technology works, how interoperable messaging works, and how U.S. antitrust law works. It’s not just Warren; the letter to Kanter states that “Beeper Mini users began to experience service disruptions,” which, again, overlooks a key aspect of the situation: Beeper Mini had no users; it infiltrated a separate company’s network and used its servers. Beeper Mini was not offering a service of its own — it was using another company (Apple)’s service and planned to profit from it until Apple rightfully and lawfully shut it down. Beeper Mini users were unauthorized iMessage users.

The only time when the federal government should intervene in the matters between two private companies and their customers is when one of the companies is engaging in anticompetitive behavior, which could not be further from the truth in this scenario. Anticompetitive behavior would entail Apple shutting down competition on the App Store because other applications were hurting its bottom line. Apple never shut down competition, it simply revoked unauthorized access to its product. Beeper never had any right to use iMessage — Apple never granted it or anyone else that access — and so Apple was entirely justified in promptly removing Beeper’s access to protect its users, save money, and ensure that its intellectual property remained within its control. At least in the United States, if you create something and patent and/or copyright it, thus restricting access to it, you have the right to keep people from stealing access to it. That is exactly what Apple did with Beeper Mini — it is protecting the intellectual property that it created while prioritizing service to its own customers.

The correct, officially sanctioned method of gaining access to iMessage is to buy an Apple device, and Beeper did not do that in the case of Beeper Mini. Apple never acquired WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, increasing its market share and owning a monopoly on the messaging market. Apple doesn’t even have a monopoly on the messaging market at all — Meta does — but Meta receives no scrutiny for its unchallenged ownership of the way people communicate worldwide. iMessage only controls a fraction of the market share compared to WhatsApp, but because more Americans enjoy it over other products — and only for that reason alone — Apple receives nonsense regulatory scrutiny from members of Congress that instead need to focus their time on funding the government before January 19. The entire premise of this ordeal does not make sense, and it’s very clearly biased against Apple. I have no interest in defending a $3 trillion corporation, and if said corporation bought and/or restricted access to competition to increase its monopoly over the messaging market, and then developed anti-user tactics to prevent people from switching to different platforms, such measures would certainly be illegal and should be subject to legal action from the Justice Department. But Apple never did any of that. Instead, it just committed the apparent sin of protecting its creation, a practice that is fully protected by U.S. law.

The post from Warren and the letter to the Justice Department both set the precedent that if your product is popular, your company is subject to legal interrogation. The lack of that precedent for years in American politics is a major reason why “Big Tech” companies favor the United States and despise doing business in the European Union — the European Union enforces draconian rules that stifle competition and frequently probes large corporations purely because they are large — and the United States, in this example, is doing what it historically has never done. If the government intervenes in every popular business’ actions, there will be no technological innovation in this country anymore. If the government makes it its responsibility to open protocols and prevent alleged “anticompetitive” behavior, corporations will be heavily disincentivized to accrue users by building innovative, fantastic products. If every large service is susceptible to regulatory scrutiny, customers will be left with a lack of choice, not an abundance, because fewer companies will be motivated to innovate, and thus the market will be left with fewer, mediocre-quality choices. The U.S. government for decades has taken this stance towards the free market, which is why the United States continues to be the world’s innovator, but if the government embraces such anti-corporate policies and attacks, the United States will rapidly lose its dominance as the world’s largest economy.

As soon as the government becomes involved in anything, discussions about politics and economic systems take over. Truth be told, the Beeper Mini situation is not a political situation even in the slightest, but Beeper lobbied Congress hard enough that it became one. That sets a dangerous, alarming precedent for the future of innovation in the United States, and Americans will pay the cost of such a precedent. Instead of attacking companies that buy competition and cry wolf (Meta), the government has chosen to chase a corporation that is intent on creating the best experience for its users, not Android users, and certainly not Beeper-like piggybackers.

Four points:

1. Beeper was legally correct in reverse-engineering iMessage, especially because of the potent messaging problem in the United States.
2. Apple was absolutely within its authority to immediately revoke Beeper Mini’s unauthorized access to the iMessage service, and doing so is not anticompetitive behavior.
3. It is in Apple’s best interest to create an iMessage client for Android, as doing so would be a profitable endeavor that would please iOS users who simply want to communicate freely with Android users while not having to download another application.
4. Regardless of what happens in this space, it is no job of the government to meddle in the business practices of a private corporation. The government demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the situation, and antitrust law protects Apple’s actions plenty.

I truly don’t understand how any of this can be disagreed with.

A correction was made on January 5, 2024, at 1:37 a.m.: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Beeper’s competitor was called “Subbird” when it is actually called “Sunbird.” I regret the error.