I wouldn't take that as a lack of hacker spirit ; and honestly saying this was to be anticipated is not being an applogist. You could tell this would happen, no

I wouldn't take that as a lack of hacker spirit ; and honestly saying this was to be anticipated is not being an applogist. You could tell this would happen, notably because they were selling a product on top of a retro-engineered API, and it made quite the noise. Even if they hadn't closed it at a technical level, they'd probably have done it at a legal level. And to point out the obvious, Beeper was also closed source. I don't trust apple much, but I trust a random startup much less to believe that they're not either doing something dicey, or screwing up the encryption protocol and creating tons of security holes (esp. if it was retro engineered). Honestly, as you're pointing out the closed source character of all of that, I'd much rather use something like Signal.