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)
Buy your own domain and point it to an email provider. You’ll essentiolly never lose your address
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.
well the mobile phone market is almost fully a duoapoli
kai os is pretty much the olny other choice
I’m not convinced. Sounds more like people having issues with iMessage are now correlating them with their recent Beeper use. There seems to be no evidence other than a handful of people on Reddit describing different problems they’re having with iMessage after having used Beeper at some point. If this was actually a coordinated banning effort from Apple, I’d expect to see thousands of reports describing the same problem instead.
Update: it was Beeper specific
Meanwhile the Beeper app won’t even open on my computer.
the users are holding their wallet the wrong way, probably
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.
Sounds like the WeWork of messaging apps TBH.
One point: don’t you mean Beeper Mini was using reverse-engineered iMessage code?
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.
And SCOTUS did so by introducing a rule it never explained and which has no support in prior law (they’re only supposed to rule on ambiguity in law, not to create new rules, that’s up to congress instead)
Thanks for the article, it was a fun read. I’ll have to go back and re-read the majority opinion because I do remember some interesting analysis on it even if I disagree with the outcome.
It’s fine, apple users are not really people !
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?
deleted by creator
we don’t have per-message charges in the US, so most people continue on using SMS for daily conversations.
We don’t here in the UK either, but we still use data messaging for the most part. I use WhatsApp for my Android friends, iMessage for my iPhone friends, and it’s never a problem.
deleted by creator
Apple also intentionally made the green bubble contrast worse so that iPhone users would have eyestrain when conversing with non-iPhone users.
Oh yay another thing I can add to my list of “ways in which Apple’s marketing is extremely predatory”
I’m just surprised people aren’t fed up with how shit SMS (well, MMS, but I never want to hear about that again) is for anything other than text. It was always a fucking pain and just plain shit even if it weren’t.
deleted by creator
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.
Also, at the time, WhatsApp was pretty much the only option. Nowadays, there are a lot of other options.
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”
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.
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.
Yes it’s a status thing and I’m aware of people who have been rejected on dates for having an Android.
I’ll bet that most of them never happened. But they do make great memes!
Sounds like they are better off that way. Anyone who thinks that is important is probably not worth it.
Another episode of “trying to contact people behind some big company app because they haven’t heard what an Internet is”.
Violating the 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. 
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!
“How dare they access their own messages!”
Crapple at it again. (Gonna make this a thing.)
