They didn’t, someone made an App to interface with it. Trying to shut that down is anti-competitive.
Comment on Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
SayJess@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
I don’t get it. iMessage is Apple’s service. Why are they obliged to open it up for everyone to use? Would it be nice? Yes, of course. Should Apple be legally required to open up access to their service?
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 9 months ago
btmoo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s also a huge security hole
LinuxSBC@lemm.ee 9 months ago
How? It’s not a MitM or anything like that, it’s connecting exactly how an Apple device would connect. Everything is still E2EE, just one of the ends can now be an Android device.
btmoo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
A non-trusted 3rd party that has the capability to decrypt messages? It’s a big problem.
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
So is having unencrypted messages with all non-iOS devices with no real solution in sight. Security is obviously not their concern here, it’s vendor lock in.
GrayBoltWolf@lemmy.world 9 months ago
SMS doesn’t support encryption, nor is Apple preventing you from downloading any number of encrypted chat apps that work cross platform.
If google didn’t release a new chat app every 6 months we might have a more widespread standard in the US already - and yes RCS is coming to the iPhone next year.
btmoo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It’s not a public API. Hacking someone’s private API is already against law - charging $$ for it moreso.
DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
Reverse engineering an API is not illegal
Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Reverse engineering it is not, sure. And Beeper could do that and run their own messaging service with their own infrastructure running their reverse engineered version.
Lutra@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)
Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either… make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.
“BUT they copied!” - it doesn’t have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don’t even have to use the ‘special shape’ just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to ‘ensure a monopoly’. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.
Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me list the 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadr-ripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.
In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them – well… that’s not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.
It’s like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.
tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can’t charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they’d probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.
candyman337@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
They didn’t hack it, they spoofed a device, they just tricked the systems around the api
jon@lemmy.tf 9 months ago
That counts as unauthorized access in the eyes of the law. It’s a private system and they did not have any agreements permitting them to use it as they wanted.
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Genuinely curious, what’s the law against reverse engineering an API? I can maybe see the argument for charging for the service, but beeper mini is planning to integrate other services as well so I don’t know if that’ll really hold water.
Evilcoleslaw@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They can reverse engineer it and run it as their own service with their own infrastructure. But that doesn’t mean they can then start accessing Apple’s implementation and using Apple’s resources without permission.
ripcord@kbin.social 9 months ago
Hacking someone’s private API is already against law
"Hacking" is the wrong word here. But in general, no, this is not true.
kpw@kbin.social 9 months ago
Yes, they should be legally required to open up access to their service. No more walled gardens that hold a large number of users hostage.
GentlemanLoser@ttrpg.network 9 months ago
So by this thinking all cars should have compatible parts.
The world just ain’t that way bruh
Maggoty@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Fun fact, a lot of parts are compatible between cars.
kpw@kbin.social 9 months ago
That would be awesome, wouldn't it be?
Do you think we live in the best possible of worlds where nothing can be improved anymore?
KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
Bad analogy. It’s more like, Apple has its own roads that are exclusively for their cars.
Eggyhead@kbin.social 9 months ago
Like someone’s private property that they can kind of do what they want with? Makes sense.
rdri@lemmy.world 9 months ago
And when some developer comes at you and shows how they did some work to make a part compatible to your car, you go and “fuck it, redo all existing cars to make all 3rd party incompatible!” instead of “ok do that at your own risk”.
holdthecheese@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You can argue that they’re unfairly using monopoly power. Same reason why MS was forced to allow windows to switch browsers.
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Monopoly on what?
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
How would you argue that? There’s plenty of other options and iMessage falls back to MMS, which all phones are capable of.
akilou@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I think the problem is that it’s unnecessarily hardware locked. They shouldn’t have to “open it up” insofar as anyone can access it from whatever app like beeper is doing. But it’s only fair that they support other operating systems. They can still control it or even charge a fee to access it from other OSes.
Uglyhead@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I wish this kind of thing was more spotlighted when Palm and Windows Phone developers were trying to use Google API’s to make apps for their OS’s and got shut down at every turn, eventually killing off the Palm and WP because of device lock-in.
I still miss what Palm could have been before Google bent them over a barrel with their massively anti-competitive bs.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Palm terrified them.
Palm apps were tiny, took trivial resources, and could provide a lot of what was done with new apps on Android. Dictionaries, calculators, games (I played monopoly on a Treo, it looked great). I watched Mp4 movies on a Treo.
Imagine Android with a Palm Subsystem so all those old Palm apps could run. It would’ve majorly slowed Android app adoption, perhaps even giving enough support to allow PalmOS architecture to develop into a competitor to Android.
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 9 months ago
When I message was announced they planned to bring it to other platforms. That died when they realized how much of a lock in it was
JoeCoT@kbin.social 9 months ago
Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they're "green texters" in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage's connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is "Get your grandma an iPhone". Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they'll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.
Dippy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How is creating a proprietary service anti competitive? There are many other methods of messaging and Apple is not stoping anyone from using them.
Kids being bullied in school has nothing to do with being anti competitive.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
Apple is not stoping anyone from using them.
You can’t change your default messenger on iOS, so they’re not making it easy to stop using iMessage completely.
Dippy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You can turn off iMessage in settings and disable the phone number from messages. Then use whatever messaging service you want with the phone number.
Still not sure how it’s anti competitive to not allow others to use your own proprietary software when there are alternatives available, and they are not being restricted.
GrayBoltWolf@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There’s a toggle to turn off iMessage, and the phone asks you when you set it up if you want to use iMessage or not.
DirigibleProtein@aussie.zone 9 months ago
School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones
That’s a people problem, not a market-share problem. From experience, kids will always find something to bully others about — if it’s not the colour of the bubbles, it’s something else: the brand of shoes they wear, the suburb they live in, the sport they play (or don’t play). Bullies will do what they do.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Kids don’t use imessage, they’re on fucking discord
Maggoty@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If they’re going to default message service to it then yes.
Zak@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:
It further explains that “market power” means:
Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They aren’t excluding competitors. Anyone is free to write a cross platform messaging app that has blue bubbles in it. The preloading thing could be an issue if you can’t uninstall imessage. Otherwise it would follow the IE/edge ruling.
But we’ll see what the courts say.
Zak@lemmy.world 9 months ago
We’re far from court cases. What we have right now is politicians asking the Department of Justice to investigate. I suspect that’s more likely to go nowhere as it is to go to court.
If it did go to court, either side of the smartphone/messenger equation could be argued as anticompetitive use of market power, or both; they could claim that Apple used its market power in smartphones to popularize its messenger service, which it then used to increase its market share in smartphones.
holdthecheese@lemmy.world 9 months ago
They’d have to allow any app to replace iMessages as their sms client