Beeper users say Apple is now blocking their Macs from using iMessage entirely::The Apple-versus-Beeper saga is not over yet it seems, even though the iMessage-on-Android Beeper Mini was removed from the Play Store last week. Now,
You know what to do, the EU Government.
TL;DR: imessage and other big message services must be able to send messages to each other (when
iMessage isn’t included in that act, since it’s not big enough in Europe.
Oh
What exactly are you implying they should do?
Apple has already agreed to adopt RCS. Although the exact implementation they didn’t specify and will likely be “bare minimum”.
Are there any FOSS RCS apps for Android?
The only RCS apps, to my knowledge are Google Messages and Samsung Messages.
Not sure why.
Well as I can’t use either of those on my degoogled Android device, Apple using RCS is irrelevant, and they should use a more open standard, like Matrix.
Matrix is a terrible standard but otherwise I agree.
What do you suggest, I was just giving an example.
Signal protocol is probably the best open standard?
Hard to say, they all come with their compromises but Matrix would never work, it’s just too slow.
Unfortunately RCS is on the carrier side. The most basic chat system built in by the phone carrier will likely have RCS.
Antitrust laws prohibits killing off your competition. Just because they will have RCS, doesn’t mean they didn’t actively killed beeper.
LOL that’s some impressive mental gymnastics. Beeper is not “competition”. If Beeper started their own messaging service, they would be competition. But that’s not what they did. They were literally hacking Apple’s servers and impersonating Apple devices so that they could use Apple’s service, then tried to charge consumers money for the privilege.
Why would you use an OS from a company that openly messes with everything it gives you?
ICQ died for a small fraction of what they are doing, going from the default IM (in some countries, including mine) to something with only red flowers seen in the buddylist when you launch it once a month to get that sleepy graveyard nostalgic feeling, and that happened in a few months.
Now trojans are seen as normal by people who understand that they are talking about a trojan.
We often treat “normies” as people for whom fashion\easiness is more important than the reality of what they are choosing.
But apparently it’s come to the situation where they just can’t escape Apple, MS, Google, others, due to knowledge lacking and being hostage to some functionality and network effects, if such mechanisms are socially relevant now.
Interesting to see this dynamic of choosing protest over using something else.
Almost like all that late XIX and early XX century spirit with Marx and worker movements, only from consumers, really weird.
ICQ… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I used to use the crap out of that service, but I can’t for the life of me recall what killed it anymore than I can recall migrating from AIM.
Microsoft pushed msn messenger as a default in windows… Autostarted the app on login, made a million popups asking people to use it… People stared using it. Usual story.
Maybe somewhere, but where I lived everybody moved to Skype. It was technologically full of wizardry to make it work on bad channels, had fast file transfers, convenient GUI, groups (which ICQ didn’t have, but everybody would just use web forums or web chats or, ah, IRC).
Some time ago I recovered my Skype history, googled how to retrieve it and read it from those files. I cringed so hard.
I kinda liked Windows Messenger/MSN/Windows Live Messenger with all its quirks.
There were even a few MSN apps for Android back then, like Epinephrine. It was nice. I could even use MSN from my Sony Ericsson W595 through eBuddy and Bluetooth PAN networking.
Sadly, Facebook killed it and for some reason, they thought it would be nice to kill it off in favor of Skype, which never worked as intended and was a really heavy boy to run.
They started breaking alternative clients intentionally with small protocol changes. Instead of just eating it everybody changed IMs, fast.
like the other person said, modern windows is infinitely worse in just about every aspect of its design (you have to fight it if you just want to use your computer without microsoft 3rd wheeling it) and linux app support ranges from “ok” to “straight up doesn’t exist and cannot be ran through any shenanigans”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now, Apple customers who used Beeper’s apps are reporting that they’ve been banned from using iMessage on their Macs — a move Apple may have taken to disable Beeper’s apps from working properly, but ultimately penalizes its own customers for daring to try a non-Apple solution for accessing iMessage.
But the latter only found short-lived success, as Apple quickly figured out how to disable Beeper Mini from being able to reliably deliver messages.
The tech giant’s actions soon caught the attention of lawmakers, leading a bipartisan group of legislators to implore the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Apple’s “potential anticompetitive treatment” of the Beeper Mini application.
Admitting up front that third-party software was to blame would sometimes result in the support rep being able to lift the ban, some noted.
As for Apple, it originally said Beeper techniques had “posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.”
Beeper put an end to its efforts to continue to develop an iMessage solution last month after releasing its latest software.
The original article contains 584 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
FUCK APPLE, but they have so many people that let them ass fuck them they continue to do shits like this
Devils advocate here: it’s their webservice right? They determine who can access it.
If there were legislation that would force them to make it interoperable that would be one thing. But you can’t just demand access to their infrastructure.
No one is saying what they do is illegal, people just say they are cunts.
You’re right - but, as Cory Doctorow points out, Apple owe their success to reverse engineering, the very thing they’re busy blocking now.
They’re not blocking reverse engineering. They’re blocking unauthorized access to their servers.
You’re being unnecessarily pedantic. Apple was blocking interoperability and reverse engineering found a solution—and Apple is blocking that solution.
I’m constantly amazed at people who whine about Apple, if you don’t like their products or their business model, vote with your wallet and buy Android. Don’t try and hack the system, then bitch when they close the exploits. Apple aren’t the first to lockout compromised hardware and they won’t be the last.
I think the issue here is more that interacting with certain companies or services is unavoidable. As an Android user I often will have to interact with iPhone users and the impact of their vendor lock-in techniques is that the experience of those interactions is worse on both sides.
I can’t convince every person to stop using an iPhone, or even just just a different messaging app, most people can’t even agree what to have for dinner…
So users that take it upon themselves to try and improve the experience by trying things like beeper or beeper mini are actually trying to help others maintain their choices and preferences without the degraded experience.
So sometimes a person voting with their dollars isn’t enough, since it’s others choices that still have an impact