“Apple is attempting to crush efforts to streamline messaging between Apple and Android devices,” the letter states. He cites accusations that, by showing messages from people without iPhones in green bubbles, Apple is exploiting peer pressure, particularly on teenagers, to advance its own interests. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Stack up
The Apple-Beeper episode has triggered new pressure on Apple to relax strict control of its services. On December 17, four U.S. senators wrote to Deputy Attorney General of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Jonathan Kanter, asking the department to investigate whether Apple potentially violated antitrust laws by removing certain features of Beeper between Android and iMessage messages. .
Beeper, a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup, launched its Beeper Mini app on Dec. 5 to bridge the gap between SMS messaging on Android phones and Apple’s iMessage protocol on iPhones. The app works on Android phones and initially costs $2 per month, but is now offered for free.
Apple’s Messages app is offered only on Apple devices and displays incoming SMS messages from Android phones in green bubbles instead of the iPhone’s blue bubbles. Android users also generally experience a less secure and less media-rich messaging experience when communicating with people using iPhones. Beeper was supposed to fix these incompatibilities and put Android users on equal footing with iPhone owners.
After the launch of Beeper Mini, Android phone users who signed up were able to take advantage of iPhone features such as tapbacks, and iPhone users receiving Beeper messages saw those messages as blue bubbles. Not only that, but Beeper claims to have made messaging between Android users and iPhone users fully end-to-end encrypted and therefore more secure than a standard Android SMS to iPhone message exchange.
Beeper Mini began experiencing crashes shortly after launch, which Beeper claimed was due to Apple blocking certain features of the app. (Beeper had open sourced its app code to be transparent about its technology.) Apple later confirmed to Verge that it “has taken steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit false credentials in order to access iMessage”, claiming that the techniques used by Beeper presented “significant risks to user security and privacy”.
Beeper has tweaked its technical infrastructure to try to keep the app running and now requires users to provide their Apple ID, email address and password in order to work with iMessage, something they didn’t need previously. The app subscription fees have also been removed. The application continues to experience intermittent outages.
