They were selling a service for $2/month. Did everyone forget that? For essentially a tosser app that could quickly be a pretty lucrative amount of money.
There is some white knight narrative that has suddenly arisen that isn't based in reality. That these guys are freedom fighters that just wanted to take on Goliath. In reality they're capitalists who saw a way to make money off of a proof of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they could shame the target into not taking obvious actions to squash them.
They literally released this as a commercial service for $2/month. That they removed fees temporarily while it was completely broken does not make my statement of absolute, verifiable, incontestable fact a "strawman".
Fair enough. I don’t disagree they saw it as a way to make some money.
I took your comment to imply that as a result of charging, their goal in fighting Apple was to “get back to charging $2/mo” which is a pretty surface-level statement. Their goal is to get iMessage on Android phones. I honestly doubt they’d care if they were the ones who eventually did it, as the main thing they eventually plan on making money off of is Beeper, not Beeper Mini.
If this was any where near the truth, they would not have started charging at all. It would have been released as a free app to gain traction, and then start charging money for it. They fact that they started charging on such a slippery app shows it was a cash grab
Based on my reading of their post where they announced it was free…
> We’ve made Beeper free to use. Things have been a bit chaotic, and we’re not comfortable subjecting paying users to this. As soon as things stabilize (we hope they will), we’ll look at turning on subscriptions again.
… and based on my reading of their jobs page …
> *How will Beeper make money?*
>
> We charge our users a $10/monthly paid subscription service. Our pricing model allows Beeper to deliver a great product and service, while eliminating any need to profit by monetizing user data.
… and the affirmation of that on their homepage …
> Our business model is simple - we build a great app and earn money from those who find value in it.
… I’m not sure where the narrative that their goal was anything other than to make money is coming from. They’re a business with a potentially useful product and full-time salaried employees.
> In reality they're capitalists who saw a way to make money off of a proof of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they could shame the target into not taking obvious actions to squash them.
The "target" here is also literally the largest company in the world, whose executives have been discussing since 2013 about how to lock families into an iPhone monopoly that costs thousands of dollars a year by restricting iMessage [1].
There are no white knights here (it's all a money game), but Beeper's stance isn't as one-sided and ridiculous as you're making it out to be.
I said that Beeper saw a business opportunity to make money. This is without question. You're posing a false dichotomy that therefore I'm somehow sainting Apple or something, which simply isn't true: Apple absolutely is out to make money (humorously a couple of days ago I called Apple one of the greediest companies -- in a bad way -- ever, and my comment was flagged which...rofl), and absolutely no one doubts that. No one is claiming that Apple are the white knights in this or any other situation.
It is a simple app, and is yet another of literally thousands of chat apps. The single compelling reason why it would be in a position of charging fees is purely because it backdoored into Apple services (which Apple of course bears the burden of), using Apple device identifiers to access it. The value they were trying to convert to cash was Apple's.
I didn't realize making an app like beeper was so simple, can you recommend your favorite alternative? The other 3rd party apps I've tried to use for FB tend to have lots of problems (eg missing/delayed notifications, rendering issues).
But... It wasn't simple. No other app has been able to create the bridge they created. We all saw their initial trending HW post and the impressive technical breakdown.
If it were simple many others would have done this by now.
>If it were simple many others would have done this by now.
Would they? Not only was it obviously going to get crushed by Apple (this isn't some 20/20 hindsight -- when they first announced this I stated exactly what they were doing and exactly the reasons why it would be easily squashed), it's actually completely illegal!. Like if Apple were so inclined they could actually demand legal action of the criminal kind. Apple has been incredibly soft-handed about this whole thing.
Incredibly early user of beeper here. I actually didn't use it for iMessage at all. The Matrix Bridge system they used (bridge slack, discord, sms, etc) to allow all of my communications into a single app had real complexity. My biggest concern was the front end -- the simpler part of the app -- wasn't very good. The back end had complexity if you ignore the iMessage bridge.
Then why on earth did they do this? If this is really unambiguously and completely illegal they are just going to get eviscerated and bled dry. And they would have known that. They aren't dumb.
I could just as easily claim there is more of a "they are just capitalists trying to sell a white knight narrative" narrative than an actual white knight narrative.
They're a smaller business that wants to make money, but Apple doesn't want to play fair. I agree with this part of their blog:
“Apple is within their rights to run iMessage how they see fit”
This might be true if Apple was a small company. But they aren’t. They control more than 50% of the US smartphone market, and lock customers into using Apple’s official app for texting (which, in the US, sadly, is the default way people communicate). Large companies that dominate their industry must follow a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to innovation. We are not experts in antitrust law, but Apple’s actions have already caught the attention of US Congress and the Department of Justice.
> Large companies that dominate their industry must follow a different set of rules that govern fair competition, harm to consumers and barriers to innovation.
Must? You're really going to need to provide some actual citations there. Tortured interpretations of anti-trust laws do not count.
Look up some alternative SMS clients on the Play Store and you will see there is a market for it. People on forums have been also complaining about there being no way to do this with RCS.
You wouldn't know how much demand there could be till you build it, iterate and innovate. You can't ever do that if regulations stifle it completely.
I don't care. But I'd rather live in a world where tinkerers can tinker away since I imagine they'll be able to make something I would care about later as a consumer.
Look up some alternative SMS clients on the Play Store and you will see there is a market for it. People on forums have been also complaining about there being no way to do this with RCS.
They were selling a service for $2/month. Did everyone forget that? For essentially a tosser app that could quickly be a pretty lucrative amount of money.
There is some white knight narrative that has suddenly arisen that isn't based in reality. That these guys are freedom fighters that just wanted to take on Goliath. In reality they're capitalists who saw a way to make money off of a proof of concept, and (ridiculously) thought they could shame the target into not taking obvious actions to squash them.