Apple shut down iMessages on Android: A warning to Apple and its iPhone users to be careful with what you do, and what you shouldn’t do
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It appears that Apple will try to keep Beeper from sending iMessages again, since the company has continued to find ways to shut it down.
Beeper provided an explanation about how the service works, and Apple has been able to shut it down. From a message posted to Reddit:
Beeper claims that the connection is very reliable because of the 1:1 mapping of registration data to individual user. This same Mac registration data will also work with Beeper Mini (the Android app that started this whole saga). Beeper will have to occasionally regenerate the registration data, which means that you will have to use your Mac to refresh it.
The Beeper Mini app has been the subject of a letter sent to the Department of Justice after it suffered unexplained issues, was mentioned in a Senator Elizabeth Warren’s post on her account, and is now the subject of a further investigation. It’s a dramatic turn for an app that was supposed to be a simple bridge between green-bubble and blue-bubble texts—and has firmly positioned the app as a David to Apple’s Goliath.
“There are real antitrust implications here, and most people aren’t really getting the full picture,” says Eric Migicovsky, Beeper cofounder and a well-known open source software advocate. “They think, ‘Apple made iMessage, therefore they get exclusive rights to control access to it.’ But when you make a phone that’s used by more than 50 percent of the population in the States, and you make your app the default, you’re held to a higher degree of rules and regulation.” (By some estimates, iPhone market share in the US is less than 50 percent; Apple also doesn’t prevent iPhone users from using any chat app they choose but does default to Messages for incoming texts that are tied to a cellular number.)
Apple’s Messages app—which is sometimes referred to as iMessage and sometimes Messages, depending on whether one is referring to the protocol or the actual app—is fully controlled by Apple and offers end-to-end encryption. The app can only be found on Apple devices, and because of the lock-in strategy used by the company, making it available onAndroid would hurt their ability to get users. If there is a group chat with a bunch of users of the same phone, the chat will use text instead of Apple Messages.
