For years, Ben Black’s phone annoyed his family. It’s the only Android device in a family message group with eight iPhones. Because of him, videos and photos will come in low resolution and there will be green text bubbles in the middle of blue bubbles.
But a new app called Beeper Mini has given him the ability to change that.
Mr. used Black, 25, the app to create an account for Apple’s messaging service, iMessage, using her Google Pixel phone number. For the first time, every message a family exchanges has a blue bubble and members can use perks like emojis and animations.
Since its introduction on December 5, the Beeper Mini has quickly become a headache and potential antitrust problem for Apple. It poked holes in Apple’s messaging system, while critics say it showed how Apple is oppressing potential competitors.
Apple surprised when the Beeper Mini gave Android devices access to its modern, iPhone-only service. Less than a week after the launch of Beeper Mini, Apple blocked the app by changing its iMessage system. It said the app created a security and privacy risk.
Apple’s reaction started a game of Whac-a-Mole, with the Beeper Mini finding alternative ways to work and Apple finding new ways to block the app in response.
The dispute has raised questions in Washington about whether Apple has used its market dominance in iMessage to block competition and force consumers to spend more on iPhones than on lower-priced alternatives.
The Justice Department took an 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, a 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 in a blog post on Thursday that it will investigate “dominant” players that “use privacy and security as a justification to disallow interoperability” between services. The post does not name any companies.
The battle also caught the attention of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. 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 is stifling competition.
Apple declined to comment on the letter.
The questions coming from Washington cut into the middle of today’s smartphone competition. Rival smartphone makers credit iMessage with 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.
Messaging has become a key part of Apple’s strategy to sell more iPhones. For years, it’s made exchanging iPhones and Android devices as simple as texts between decades-old flip phones. Texts between iPhone users appear in blue and can be tapped to give a thumbs up, but texts with Android users appear in green and lack simple perks.
Android companies tried to fight back. An Android smartphone maker, None, has teamed up with an app called Sunbird to offer iMessage. Google, which created the Android operating system, has forced Apple to adopt a technology called rich communication services, which will make it possible to send high-resolution video and photos between competing smartphones.
But their efforts did not do much harm. Last month, Apple said it would use the technology in the coming year. The move means Android users can enjoy benefits like sharing videos with higher resolution but are stuck with 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 with the Beeper Mini,” said Cory Doctorow, a special counsel to the digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation who wrote a book about interoperability in different technologies. “We can’t tell how worried they are internally, but their response can have a big impact on how the messaging works.”
Protecting iMessage is a decades-old Apple strategy. In 2013, Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software, was opposed to making iMessage work on competitors’ devices because it would “remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their children the Android phone,” according to emails released during the company’s courtroom battle with Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite.
Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has resisted calls to change that position. He An iPhone owner was told at a conference last year that the solution to green text messages is to buy iPhones for friends and family members.
Beeper brought a different approach to messaging. Mr. Migicovsky created the company in 2020 to build a messaging app that could send texts across multiple services, including WhatsApp and Signal.
Mr. Migicovsky to integrate most messaging services, except iMessage. Unlike its peers, Apple doesn’t offer a web app, which makes connecting to its service difficult. The only way Beeper can integrate with iMessage is to route messages through Mac computers and then to an iPhone. The process delayed messages and made them less secure.
As Beeper struggled with iMessage, a teenager in Bethlehem, Pa. found an alternative solution. James Gill, a 16-year-old computer hobbyist, made it his personal goal to learn how iMessage works. He used software to decrypt his iMessages and determined that Apple used its push notification system — the same one that delivers news alerts — to deliver messages between devices.
“It’s not a genius idea,” said Mr. Gill, a junior at Saucon Valley High School. “I just poked it too long.”
In June, Mr. Gill published his findings on GitHub, a software platform where programmers share code. When Mr. Migicovsky saw the post, he thought it would help Beeper solve its iMessage problem. He offered Mr. Gill a job that makes $100 an hour, a big increase from the $11 an hour the high schooler makes as a cashier at McDonald’s.
The work was much more involved than Mr. Migicovsky or Mr. Gill expected. Since the Beeper Mini was released this month, Apple has changed iMessage about three times, Mr. Migicovsky said.
Every Apple change requires Beeper configuration. Its latest solution involves routing registration information to Beeper Mini users through their personal Mac computers.
“To block it completely, they had to come up with a way to require the iPhone’s serial number,” Mr. Gill said. “Beeper will still have a workaround.”
An Apple spokesperson said it would continue to update iMessage because it could not verify that Beeper kept its messages encrypted. “These techniques pose significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks,” he said in a statement.
Mr. does not agree. Migicovsky. Instead of allowing Android customers to send encrypted messages to iPhone customers, he said, Apple is trying to force them to exchange unencrypted text messages. He posted Beeper’s software code on the web and urged Apple and cybersecurity experts to review it.
Matthew Green, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, said Apple has some legitimate security concerns and warned that an extended battle between the two companies could potentially introduce vulnerabilities that can be exploited by criminals.
“A world where Apple works with third-party clients in a supported way is a good world,” Mr. Green said. “A world where Beeper and Apple try to fight each other in a tit-for-tat arms race is a bad one.”
In an attempt to end the standoff, Mr. Migicovsky said, he emailed Mr. Cook, but the Apple chief did not respond.
“This was not our intention,” Mr. Migicovsky said. “We’re trying to make it work, within our control, for the good of the chat world.”
