3 ms·

Yeah Apple won't like this or ever officially approve of it, but you make it sound like you'd call the police if you saw someone using an unofficial AIM client.

by jchw 3y ago

Yeah Apple won't like this or ever officially approve of it, but you make it sound like you'd call the police if you saw someone using an unofficial AIM client. I think the dramatics can be chilled. The ToS is dumb and not worth the virtual paper its written on. If Beeper can keep up with the cat-and-mouse game, this is no different than Trillian or GAIM/Pidgin/Bitlbee/libpurple or aMSN or Miranda IM or Gtkcord4 and on and on and on... Apple doesn't need an internet defense force for their stupid ToS.

JoblessWonder 3y ago
I feel like there are two questions Beeper needs to ask itself... 1) Are they going all-in on being an antagonist to Apple? 2) Will the users be willing to stick around during any outages/downtime/failures due to the cat-and-mouse game? (That I agree will follow and continue.)
- jchw 3y ago
  I can't answer for Beeper, but why would they be unnecessarily antagonistic to Apple? It's not related to their product or mission. Beeper offers interoperability. Antagonism is an undesired byproduct of any of this work, and it's immature to be antagonistic for no reason. Will it be a cat-and-mouse game? Maybe. Will users stay? Probably. In many cases, Beeper users already WERE iMessage users. Beeper users ARE Discord users. They are users of the upstream service and explicitly want a unified and interoperable chat system, for one reason or another. Maybe it's more practicality than ideals, but it's all the same in the end. That said, it's not like Beeper is new, and it doesn't seem like antagonism is a primary driver of operational issues yet, so it's not clear it's about to start any time soon, either. Perhaps one of the most annoying tech company strategies is to try to establish a horrid status quo before regulators and law enforcement have time to catch up with you, making it much harder to actually do anything about. I see Beeper as one of a small number of companies that are basically on the opposite end; if they gain a large enough mass of users, it's going to be harder and harder to antagonize Beeper without antagonizing their own userbase, especially when you consider that the value of IM networks is largely in the connections between users. So, the clock is ticking.
xinayder 3y ago
When there's money involved, the results are way more dramatic. If Beeper was free, sure, they wouldn't bother that much. But Beeper relies on this business model. Apple and co wont let this slip.

by jchw 3y ago

JoblessWonder 3y ago

I feel like there are two questions Beeper needs to ask itself... 1) Are they going all-in on being an antagonist to Apple? 2) Will the users be willing to stick around during any outages/downtime/failures due to the cat-and-mouse game? (That I agree will follow and continue.)

jchw 3y ago
I can't answer for Beeper, but why would they be unnecessarily antagonistic to Apple? It's not related to their product or mission. Beeper offers interoperability. Antagonism is an undesired byproduct of any of this work, and it's immature to be antagonistic for no reason. Will it be a cat-and-mouse game? Maybe. Will users stay? Probably. In many cases, Beeper users already WERE iMessage users. Beeper users ARE Discord users. They are users of the upstream service and explicitly want a unified and interoperable chat system, for one reason or another. Maybe it's more practicality than ideals, but it's all the same in the end. That said, it's not like Beeper is new, and it doesn't seem like antagonism is a primary driver of operational issues yet, so it's not clear it's about to start any time soon, either. Perhaps one of the most annoying tech company strategies is to try to establish a horrid status quo before regulators and law enforcement have time to catch up with you, making it much harder to actually do anything about. I see Beeper as one of a small number of companies that are basically on the opposite end; if they gain a large enough mass of users, it's going to be harder and harder to antagonize Beeper without antagonizing their own userbase, especially when you consider that the value of IM networks is largely in the connections between users. So, the clock is ticking.

xinayder 3y ago

When there's money involved, the results are way more dramatic. If Beeper was free, sure, they wouldn't bother that much. But Beeper relies on this business model. Apple and co wont let this slip.