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 US 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cofounder, says a successful cross-platform app is still possible and that walled-off messaging apps will soon feel as outdated as the limitations of early cell networks.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.
Lauren Goode: When we spoke in mid-November, before Beeper Mini launched, I asked what you thought Apple would think of this. You had to have known that Apple was going to have some kind of reaction.
Eric Migicovsky: Well, the case we were trying to make with Beeper Mini is that it made the experience better for both iPhone customers and Android users. The previous experience was that you, on an iPhone, would have texted me, on an Android, over an unencrypted, low-quality SMS protocol. There are not too many other ways to slice it. It’s kind of crazy that we’re now in 2024 and there still isn’t an easy, encrypted, high-quality way for something as simple as a text between an iPhone and an Android. What we built is a way to do that.
I think Apple reacted in a really awkward, weird way—arguing that Beeper Mini threatened the security and privacy of iMessage users, when in reality, the truth is the exact opposite. That’s a long answer to your question, but no, I did not expect them to say that Beeper harmed security.
I fully grok the value proposition of Beeper. But I’m guessing Apple’s argument would be that I actually can use end-to-end encrypted messaging right now between my iPhone and my Android friends, and it’s called Signal or WhatsApp, which I can get easily on my iPhone.
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