Beeper’s esoteric fix for iMessage access suggests why it’s pushing politically

Enlarge / If you have one of these, or another Mac handy, you should soon be able to access Beeper on Android and desktop platforms. You'll just need to grab its "registration data" every so often. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Beeper's Android app, which initially promised iMessage support with just a phone number, lost that connection once Apple started openly pushing back on it less than a week after it launched. Beeper has kept revising its approach, and its newest method—involving regular access to a physical Mac—suggests why the company has added a political component to its efforts.

Beeper started pushing back after its initial blockage, both through continued development and through media and political messaging. After a second, if smaller, Apple crackdown, co-founder Eric Migicovsky welcomed CBS Mornings into his garage, where he advanced his argument that Beeper was turning grossly insecure SMS messages between iPhone and Android users into secure, end-to-end encrypted chats. (CBS also interviewed James Gill, the 16-year-old whose work connecting to iMessage, using reverse-engineering methods, is the foundation of Beeper's iMessage tech).

CBS Mornings' interview with Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky and James Gill, a teenage coder.

That interview lined up with another development: a bi-partisan foursome of US lawmakers, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), sending a letter to the Department of Justice regarding "Apple's potential anti-competitive treatment of the Beeper Mini messaging application." Apple's actions toward Beeper, the letter suggests, could "eliminate choices for consumers," "discourage future innovation and investment" in messaging, and make Apple a "digital gatekeeper," suggesting a need for review by the DOJ's Antitrust Division. The move follows, and seems to echo, similar efforts by European Union regulators to open up iMessage, which have been stalled so far.

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