Over the last few weeks, the big news in the tech world has been about Beeper Mini and Apple continuing to block the app from letting iMessage work on other platforms. Well, now Congress wants to get involved.
A bipartisan group of US Senators and Representatives have sent a letter to the Department of Justice to investigate whether Apple violated any antitrust laws by attempting to block Beeper Mini from having access to iMessage.
These include Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), along with Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Ken Buck (R-CO). Who has asked an assistant attorney general to look into “potentially anticompetitive conduct” by Apple?
The moves that Apple has made are not an antitrust issue. However, refusing to launch iMessage on Android might be.
A couple of weeks ago, Beeper Mini launched. It was able to reverse-engineer iMessage so that it could connect to Apple’s servers and act as an Apple device for sending iMessage messages. This was a pretty big breakthrough because prior to this, all of the options for iMessage on Android included logging into a Mac Mini in some server farm somewhere that you did not have access to. Obviously a very major security issue.
Apple quickly patched it within a day or two. The company took the security approach here, putting out a statement that said, “We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.”
Beeper did find another way around this, which required signing into your Apple ID on Android to get iMessage to work. The back and forth continues, and now Congress is entering the group chat, obviously on the side of Beeper Mini.
iMessage was already under fire by the European Union, which caused Apple to cave
The EU has been targeting Apple quite a bit lately with its new Digital Markets Act, which forced Apple to add USB-C to the iPhone 15 this year and also forced Apple to adopt RCS next year. The EU was going after iMessage since it was not interoperable, which Apple argued that iMessage wasn’t big enough to be considered a “gate-keeper”. So, to keep everyone happy, Apple decided to announce that they would add RCS support next year – likely as part of iOS 18.
Apple is going to add support for the universal profile of RCS, which is not quite the same profile as what Google is using, but it’s better than nothing at this point.
2023-12-19 15:08:02