01/08/2024

The Fight to Unite iPhone and Android Users is Far From Over

Some say interoperability is urgently needed

Is this the way the walled garden ends: not with a bang but a beep? In December, Bay Area upstart Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage, with help from a teen coder, to give Android phones full access to Apple's proprietary messaging service. It started a fight that triggered fresh debate about whether the iPhone-maker is breaking antitrust law.

When the Beeper Mini app first launched it promised to heal the sociotechnical divide between Android and iPhone users. People with Android phones could use the app to securely message their iPhone-toting friends and have those messages appear inside blue chat bubbles—like iMessage—not the green bubbles Apple previously assigned to Android users, a mark of shame in some social circles. Apple responded by tweaking its service and hobbling Beeper Mini, which suffered outages, arguing that it posed a security risk to real iMessage users. A few weeks later, in late December, Beeper threw in the towel on the app and vowed to come up with another solution.

Apple may have repelled Beeper, but in swatting away the startup it drew bigger questions. Letters from U.S. senators and advocacy groups landed on the desks of the Justice Department, which The New York Times reported last week is ramping up a potential antitrust suit against Apple. Beeper, in many ways, has become more of a symbol than a scalable app. Even the name of its single-purpose app, Mini, served as a counterpoint to Big Tech and its sprawling fortified ecosystems. Eric Migicovsky, the startup's cofounder, said a successful cross-platform app is still possible and that walled-off messaging apps will soon feel as outdated as the limitations of early cell networks. His conversation with WIRED has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.