Lawmakers Express Concern Over Apple's 'Anticompetitive Treatment' of iMessage for Android App

[toobravetosave]

So you think Google cares about your privacy? 😂 Their entire business model consists of collecting your data.

Do you think apple cares about googles privacy practices given their intimate relationship and funneling of iOS users to google products?

 

[HylianKnight]

I find their concern ludicrous at best, and deceptive at worst. Let’s not forget how much the Government and many lawmakers dislike end-to-end encryption.

 

[DFZD]

Do you think apple cares about googles privacy practices given their intimate relationship and funneling of iOS users to google products?

Brutal Takedown. Anyway my point was not about privacy but interoperability. Apple likes to pretend that Apple users don't have non Apple user contacts. They don't realise some of us use other systems on a daily basis, and no one comes close to Apple's death kneel on open communication.

 

[DFZD]

I find their concern ludicrous at best, and deceptive at worst. Let’s not forget how much the Government and many lawmakers dislike end-to-end encryption.

iMessage is not end to end encrypted though. It's the most common target of high profile hackers.

 

[Biro]

Facebooks Messenger is on the IOS devices.... Heck my wife uses that more than Apples products for txting the kids.
I send and receive SMS messages on my IOS devices

If your wife is happy with Meta reading all of her Messenger communications and selling the information to third parties, fine. But I’ll bet she doesn’t realize that’s happening.

 

[duffman9000]

Beeper isn't breaking the law. The Protocols were reverse engineered, which isn't illegal. Nothing they did violated the CFAA.

Apple isn’t obligated to keep their iMessage APIs stable.

 

[duffman9000]

People celebrated Beeper shutdown too early. I hope Lawmakers investigate macOS too maybe opening it up to other SoC and platforms.

Utterly ridiculous. Apple is under no obligation to support their OS on non Apple hardware.

 

[jimbobb24]

So a bunch of boomers who don’t know the difference between software and hardware had some lobbyists tell them Apple was being naughty and they are concerned. lol these politicians all sound so dumb.

 

[Sorinut]

Apple isn’t obligated to keep their iMessage APIs stable.

That's correct, but has nothing to do with what I said.

 

[jimbobb24]

I can give you three very recent examples.
1. Apple’s fight against USB C, which is far superior than lightning.
2. Apple’s fight against side loading.. which gives users and publishers a choice.
3. Apple’s fight against open communication standards like RCS.

Fight?
No one cares about USBC vs lightening except some weird zealots.

Side loading is a disaster that many users do not want. Not ever and it will be forced on everyone once that happens. No console allows side loading. If you want the computer phone experience Android caters to that crowd. That is the choice. If you want to load random games on a pS5 you cannot.

RCS is a mess made by Google who couldn’t get their crap together in messaging but know everyone thinks they are behind. They are free to make an RCS app for Apple. Everyone uses WhatsApp’s anyway…is that open?

 

[tranceme]

I mean, yeah, it works perfectly as long as you wilfully ignore or don't care about the parts that are bad or broken.

Do me a favour and try leave a group chat where one of the participants is on Android — you can't.
Or send/receive images with an Android device — they'll be compressed to hell and back.
And the video thing, I get that you don't care, but that doesn't make the experience good.

The problems still exist even if you don't want to acknowledge them.

Easy. I stop chatting in the group. And, you can even delete the entire group chat from phone. Or, even suppress notifications from it. Not that hard. Yes, would I like to be able to remove and add Android users, user. But, not that big of a deal. Day to day, I manage to communicate with Android and iOS users just fine. I guess you get use to little things not being perfect. Which maybe is settling. I just don't think it lawmakers should waste my tax dollars on it. Plenty of other thing lawmakers are failing at.

 

[rhemy123]

Apple's well-publicized decision to shut down iMessage for Android app Beeper Mini has attracted attention from U.S. lawmakers concerned that the Cupertino company is suppressing competition.

Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee along with Representatives Jerry Nadler and Ken Buck on Sunday penned a letter to Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter calling for an investigation into the Beeper Mini dispute. The letter suggests that Beeper Mini reduced Apple's iMessage "leverage" over iPhone users, leading Apple to shut it down.
Though Beeper Mini's developers have tried to push the privacy angle by pointing out the encryption its app offered for Android to iPhone communications, Beeper Mini launched using a reverse engineered version of iMessage that surreptitiously registered Android phone numbers as Apple device owners. It took advantage of Apple's own iMessage servers with fake credentials, so it is not surprising that Apple viewed Beeper Mini as a security risk.

Apple said that it shut Beeper Mini down because the app "posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks."

Apple put a stop to Beeper Mini's full functionality just days after it launched, but the Beeper Mini team was able to come up with a workaround shortly after. The updated version of the app requires an Apple ID unlike the first version, and it only works with email addresses, not phone numbers.

In a CBS News interview, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky said that he is simply trying to provide a secure service for Android users, and he decried Apple's iMessage monopoly.

As of now, Beeper Mini continues to experience outages as Apple tweaks the iMessage service. Beeper Mini engineers are aiming to keep the app up and running, and for now, it is free to use.

Apple may be facing scrutiny over Beeper Mini, but the pressure may ease after the company adopts Rich Communication Services, or RCS in 2024. RCS will be used for chats between ‌iPhone‌ and Android users, and it includes support for high quality video and images, emoji reactions, typing indicators, read receipts, and more, providing Android users with many of the same features available to iMessage users.

Encryption for iPhone to Android chats will be missing until Apple is able to work with the GSM Association that developed the RCS protocol to add end-to-end encryption. Google's version of RCS, Google Messages, supports end-to-end encryption on Android devices, but Apple is adopting the RCS Universal Profile and not the version of RCS that was modified by Google.

It is worth noting that there are many cross-platform apps that iPhone and Android users can download to communicate privately, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and more.

Article Link: Lawmakers Express Concern Over Apple's 'Anticompetitive Treatment' of iMessage for Android App

Apple isn't a monopoly. It is an Apple product. If you don't like it use an alternative.

It’s insane that this is the stuff they focus on. They probably can’t even use an iPhone. And are terribly upset that someone in their family has green bubbles.

 

[Boeingfan]

This is a load of garbage, and seems to be geared around making money for law makers rather than entrenching competition.

Competition is when companies have competing products and aim to tussle over market share. What these silly lawyers are doing is making manufacturers or allow the piggy backing of other manufacturers to provide the same product as everyone else.

Perhaps there should be another White House and government in the US because surely it is a monopoly to only have one. Perhaps the EU could govern the eastern half of North America, really open it up to political competition. Careful what you wish for because with these silly lawyers and the EU council pushing for same same we will end up with just that.

Don’t like a product? Don’t buy it. Like features of another brand better? Buy it. This wah wah about ‘I want it all’ and silly law makers waving their finger is a condition called self-entitlement and it’s rampant. Someone should make a cream for it.

 

[Boeingfan]

It can be confusing so let me explain my point.
Apple created iMessage and locked it up for everyone else.
Google helped created RCS and opened it up for others.
Now iPhone users can communicate well with each other but for iPhone and Android users to communicate with each other they need to use a third option like Messenger or Whatsapp. Neither of them is known for user privacy or encryption.

There’s always faxes.

 

[Boeingfan]

Apple's Messages doesn't have half the features these services rely on. It would take a massive development leap for Messages to be able to handle them. I think it's just time for people to admit that Messages is a thing of the past. If Apple wants to die on the hill of proprietary apps, just let them.

iMessage has what it has, and if you buy an iPhone then you buy it for a reason.

Would you buy a Skoda and complain it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a BMW? If you answer yes then you have a problem.

If you buy an iPhone and expect it to behave like an android, then you have a problem.

If you buy an iPhone and expect it to behave like an iPhone then you do not have a problem.

 

[ZZ9pluralZalpha]

Yep, this is the same Amy Klobuchar who in 2012 introduced a (poorly-written) bill to add cloud computing protections to the CFAA act—in other words, to codify and stiffen penalties against companies like Beeper who unauthorizedly access and use the computing platforms of others like Apple. Somebody should ask Sen. Klobuchar to explain her sudden and enthusiastic reversal of position.

 

[dampfnudel]

Not very long ago, Apple used to be a company that innovated and contributed to new technology standards.. now it just fights them in court and market to ensure the users are still using decade old proprietary technologies.

This is unfortunately going to be Tim Cook’s Legacy.

On the flip-side, Tim Cook will also be known as the man who helped turn Apple into a trillion dollar company which might be enough to scrub away a good amount of the negatives from his legacy.

 

[duffman9000]

It can be confusing so let me explain my point.
Apple created iMessage and locked it up for everyone else.
Google helped created RCS and opened it up for others.
Now iPhone users can communicate well with each other but for iPhone and Android users to communicate with each other they need to use a third option like Messenger or Whatsapp. Neither of them is known for user privacy or encryption.

I'd love to see the source that says Google helped create RCS.

 

[sidewinder3000]

Lawmakers like Amy Klobuchar should be focused on real problems in the tech industry, like the forbidding future where AI absorbs all human knowledge and art into an algorithm without paying rights fees for it. Instead she and others like her latch onto trumped up David vs. Goliath narratives that are based on false logic and don’t solve any real world problems. Why? Because real problems are hard to solve and require real work, while the made-up, nonsense problems require little but bluster to propagate, and are great at making it look like Congress is “doing something”.

 

[sidewinder3000]

Not very long ago, Apple used to be a company that innovated and contributed to new technology standards.. now it just fights them in court and market to ensure the users are still using decade old proprietary technologies.

This is unfortunately going to be Tim Cook’s Legacy.

None of what you said is true. Apple still contributes to standards. Do your research.

 

[MobiusStrip]

More clueless blowhards jumping on a bandwagon they don't understand.

The only aggrieved party against Apple is developers, whereas the aggrieved party against Google, Amazon, and Meta is the entire Internet-using public.

 

[TimFL1]

Oh, stop already. This fixation on that "Apple isn't innovating because each iteration looks physically similar" is just bogus. Technology is getting more and more advanced, while Apple works tirelessly to keep that technology easy to use for end-users. Where they are innovating is deep in the technology stack, not some fancy new exterior phone design.

Since OS X was released, Apple has embraced open standards at its core. Being built on a UNIX core, this makes sense. Its Mail service uses standard IMAP protocols, not the proprietary versions that Microsoft (MAPI) and Google push for their services. Its Contact syncing uses standard vCard format, not the proprietary half-baked support that Microsoft and Google employed in their contact setups. Those are just 2 examples of where macOS has excelled for the past 24 years.

Anyone can fire up Terminal and install an endless range of open-source software. See MacPorts and Homebrew for two popular package managers used on Macs.

The Mac is more open-source than Windows, and iOS is built on the same core system, just not as "open" as a Mac is.

USB-C, which has been a hot topic, was directly inspired by Lightning's reversible connector. Until Type-C, every version of USB used a non-reversible connector because the larger industry was so fixed on their old ways of thinking. Apple showed them a better way.

Is Apple doing everything perfectly? Absolutely not. Nobody does, but you can't dismiss the tremendous contributions that they make across industries. They are the envy of computer and phone manufacturers across the globe because of these contributions. Just think back 30 years ago about how convoluted and archaic the computer industry was, and yet now we live in an age where Windows itself is trying to emulate the simplicity of macOS, which Apple mastered back in 1984.

Back on topic — Why would Beeper Mini be making headlines trying to break into the iMessage world? Because — iMessage is an excellent standard of messaging — developed by Apple. Go figure.

Don‘t forget Apple being a driving force behind Matter, heavily influencing the standard by also contributing HomeKit based code to it.

 

[ksec]

Apple isn't a monopoly. It is an Apple product. If you don't like it use an alternative.

US isn't the only country in the world. If you dont like its law, pull out of US. ( To use the same analogy as people who used to say pull out of EU LOL )

 

[dannyyankou]

I can give you three very recent examples.
1. Apple’s fight against USB C, which is far superior than lightning.
2. Apple’s fight against side loading.. which gives users and publishers a choice.
3. Apple’s fight against open communication standards like RCS.

Ok, but how is lightning any different than Apple using the proprietary 30 pin connector for almost a decade?

 

[DFZD]

Ok, but how is lightning any different than Apple using the proprietary 30 pin connector for almost a decade?

Its not. But Micro USB at that time wasn’t leaps ahead of the 30 pin connector like how USB-C is.