There’s a bit of good news following the whole Beeper Mini drama of the last few weeks. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are apparently launching investigations into Apple’s alleged anti-competitive practices. This follows the recent call from a group of bipartisan Congress members asking the DOJ to open an investigation.
However, the Department of Justice is already embroiled in a four-year-long investigation into Apple’s alleged anti-competitive conduct. The New York Times is also suggesting that the FTC is involved in this investigation, pointing to a blog post from the commission that was published yesterday. It warns that it will evaluate “privacy and security” justifications for refusing to interoperate with other companies’ technology.
Beeper Mini launched earlier this month, bringing iMessage to Android
For years, companies have been making strides in bringing iMessage to Android. Most of the time, it lacked security and also required you to log in with your Apple ID on a Mac Mini that you didn’t have access to. That’s pretty scary. However, Beeper Mini was different. It was able to reverse engineer iMessage and allow your Android phone to register on iMessage’s servers without needing your Apple ID at all. It was quite impressive, to say the least.
However, it took Apple all of 24 hours to find that exploit and patch it. Keeping Beeper Mini from working. Then the cat-and-mouse game began for Apple and Beeper Mini. Until eventually, Beeper Mini called it quits yesterday. Beeper Mini released one last update to the app, which should hopefully keep it running, but it requires having a jailbroken iPhone or an older Mac that has to stay on all the time for iMessage registration.
And this is all because Apple wants to keep everyone locked into iMessage and on the iPhone. Apple is adding RCS support next year to appease the European Union. However, that won’t solve the issues of texting and receiving texts from Android users on the iPhone. For one, Android users will still be green bubbles, it also is going to be the most basic version of RCS. Meaning it won’t have all the features that Android users currently have with RCS.