Apple’s latest headache: an app that turns messaging control on its head

For years, Ben Black’s phone annoyed his family. It was the only Android device in a family messaging group that included eight iPhones. Thanks to him, videos and photos would arrive in low resolution and green text bubbles would appear between blue bubbles.

But a new app called Beeper Mini gave him the opportunity to change that.

The 25-year-old Mr. Black used the app to create an account for Apple’s messaging service, iMessage, with his Google Pixel phone number. For the first time, every message the family exchanged had a blue bubble and members could use perks like emojis and animations.

Since its introduction on December 5, Beeper Mini has quickly become a headache and potential antitrust problem for Apple. It has blown a hole in Apple’s messaging system, while critics say it has exposed how Apple bullies potential competitors.

Apple was surprised when Beeper Mini gave Android devices access to the Modern iPhone service. Less than a week after the launch of Beeper Mini, Apple blocked the app by changing the iMessage system. It was said that the app created a security and privacy risk.

Apple’s response set off a game of Whac-a-Mole, with Beeper Mini finding alternative ways to work and Apple finding new ways to block the app in response.

The match has raised questions in Washington about whether Apple has used its market dominance over iMessage to block competition and force consumers to spend more on iPhones than cheaper alternatives.

The Ministry of Justice has expressed interest in the case. Beeper Mini met with the department’s antitrust lawyers on Dec. 12, two people familiar with the meeting said. Eric Migicovsky, co-founder of the app’s parent company Beeper, declined to comment on the meeting, but the department is in the middle of a four-year-old investigation into Apple’s anticompetitive behavior.

The Federal Trade Commission said so a blog post Thursday that it would scrutinize “dominant” players who “use privacy and security as a justification for not allowing interoperability” between services. No companies were mentioned in the message.

The fight also caught the attention of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee. The committee’s leadership — Senators Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah — wrote a letter to the Justice Department expressing concern that Apple was eliminating competition.

Apple declined to comment on the letter.

The questions from Washington go to the heart of today’s smartphone competition. Rival smartphone makers are praising iMessage for helping Apple expand its smartphone market share in the United States to more than 50 percent of smartphones sold, up from 41 percent in 2018. according to Counterpoint Researcha technology company.

Messages have been a key part of Apple’s strategy to sell more iPhones. For years, it has made the exchange between iPhones and Android devices as fundamental as the texts between decades-old flip phones. Texts between iPhone users appear in blue and can be tapped to give a thumbs up, but texts from Android users appear in green and have no simple benefits.

Android companies have tried to fight back. An Android smartphone maker, Nothing, has collaborated with an app called Sunbird Offer iMessage. Google, who created the Android operating system, has put pressure on Apple to take this over a technology called rich communications services that would allow high-resolution video and images to be sent between competing smartphones.

But their efforts have not yielded much. Last month, Apple said it would adopt the technology in the coming year. The move means Android users will enjoy benefits like sharing higher-resolution videos, but will be stuck with the green bubbles for text messages, which have become stigmatized and associated with less wealth.

“Everyone is watching to see what kind of response Apple will have to Beeper Mini,” said Cory Doctorow, special advisor to the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, who wrote an article. book on interoperability about different technologies. “We can’t say how concerned they are internally, but their response could have a huge impact on the way messaging works.”

Protecting iMessage is a decade-old strategy at Apple. In 2013, Apple software chief Craig Federighi opposed making iMessage workable on competitor devices because it would “remove a barrier for iPhone families to give their kids Android phones,” according to emails released during the company’s court battle with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has resisted calls to change that position. He one iPhone owner told a conference last year that the solution to green text messaging was to buy iPhones for friends and relatives.

Beeper brought a different approach to messaging. Mr. Migicovsky founded the company in 2020 to build a single messaging app that could send text messages across multiple services, including WhatsApp and Signal.

Mr. Migicovsky managed to integrate most messaging services except iMessage. Unlike its peers, Apple didn’t offer a web app, making it difficult to connect to its service. The only way Beeper could integrate iMessage was to route messages through Mac computers and then to an iPhone. The process slowed down messages and made them less secure.

While Beeper struggled with iMessage, a teenager in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, found an alternative solution. James McGill, a 16-year-old computer hobbyist, made it his personal goal to figure out how iMessage worked. He used software to decrypt his iMessages and determined that Apple was using its push notification system – the same system that provides news alerts – to send messages between devices.

“It wasn’t a stroke of genius,” said Mr. McGill, a junior at Saucon Valley High School. “It just bothered me for a long time.”

In June, Mr. McGill published his findings on GitHub, a software platform where programmers share code. When Mr. Migicovsky saw the message, he thought it might help Beeper solve his iMessage problem. He offered Mr. McGill a job paying $100 an hour, a significant increase from the high school student’s $11 an hour as a cashier at McDonald’s.

The job was more complicated than Mr. Migicovsky or Mr. McGill expected. Since the release of Beeper Mini this month, Apple has changed iMessage about three times, Migicovsky said.

Every change from Apple required an adjustment from Beeper. The latest solution involves routing registration information to Beeper Mini users via their personal Mac computers.

“To block it completely, they’re going to have to figure out a way to require an iPhone serial number,” Mr. McGill said. “Beeper will still come up with a solution.”

An Apple spokeswoman said it would continue updating iMessage because it could not verify that Beeper was keeping its messages encrypted. “These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling spam, spam and phishing attacks,” she said in a statement.

Mr Migicovsky disagrees. Instead of allowing Android customers to send encrypted messages to iPhone customers, he says, Apple is trying to force them to exchange unencrypted text messages. He posted Beeper’s software code on the Internet and encouraged Apple and cybersecurity experts to review it.

Matthew Green, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said Apple had some legitimate security concerns and warned that a prolonged battle between the two companies could potentially introduce vulnerabilities that criminals could exploit.

“A world where Apple works with third-party customers in a supported way is a good world,” Mr. Green said. “A world where Beeper and Apple try to fight each other in an arms race is a bad world.”

In an effort to end the impasse, Mr. Migicovsky said, he emailed Mr. Cook, but the Apple chief did not respond.

“This was not our intention,” Mr. Migicovsky said. “We try to make it work, within our control, for the benefit of the chat world.”