How can Beeper reasonably claim that it’s trying to “pressure Apple to achieve interoperability through RCS,” when Beeper Mini’s debut trick was to employ a Hackintosh-esque spoofing of a fake Apple device?
Apple can transform anything Beeper Mini tries to achieve into a public statement about how they patched yet another security flaw for their users. Because that’s literally what it is, and that strategy’s already been field tested now. You can’t claim anti-competitive behavior when your business model relies on reverse engineering a proprietary messaging protocol and authentication scheme for the purpose of profit (this makes it illegal in both the EU and the US, FYI.) That’s why I’m bringing up the dubiousness of the whole operation in the first place.
I don’t think Beeper even cares about making money
Then not charging anything is what they should’ve done right away. Charging a subscription for an exploit is the kind of thing black hat hackers do, and it immediately gives the wrong message to those who care. Also, the price was exorbitant for what it was – WhatsApp charged far less annually to access their own servers before they were acquired by Meta; Beeper is completely piggybacking off a trillion dollar company’s servers and using exploits and workarounds to trick these servers. This is not the kind of thing you want to charge a subscription fee for on day one.
How can Beeper reasonably claim that it’s trying to “pressure Apple to achieve interoperability through RCS,” when Beeper Mini’s debut trick was to employ a Hackintosh-esque spoofing of a fake Apple device?
Apple can transform anything Beeper Mini tries to achieve into a public statement about how they patched yet another security flaw for their users. Because that’s literally what it is, and that strategy’s already been field tested now. You can’t claim anti-competitive behavior when your business model relies on reverse engineering a proprietary messaging protocol and authentication scheme for the purpose of profit (this makes it illegal in both the EU and the US, FYI.) That’s why I’m bringing up the dubiousness of the whole operation in the first place.
Then not charging anything is what they should’ve done right away. Charging a subscription for an exploit is the kind of thing black hat hackers do, and it immediately gives the wrong message to those who care. Also, the price was exorbitant for what it was – WhatsApp charged far less annually to access their own servers before they were acquired by Meta; Beeper is completely piggybacking off a trillion dollar company’s servers and using exploits and workarounds to trick these servers. This is not the kind of thing you want to charge a subscription fee for on day one.