Apple’s Tight Grip on iMessage Spurs Fresh Calls for an Antitrust Probe

“Apple is attempting to squash efforts to streamline messaging between Apple and Android devices,” the letter reads. It cites accusations that by making messages from people without iPhones appear in green bubbles, Apple exploits peer pressure, especially on teenagers, to advance its own interests. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Pile On

The Apple-Beeper episode has triggered new pressure on Apple to loosen its tight control of its services. On December 17, four US senators wrote to the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s antitrust division, Jonathan Kanter, calling for the department to investigate whether Apple potentially violated antitrust laws when it cut off some of Beeper’s functionality between Android messages and iMessage.

Beeper, a three-year-old Silicon Valley startup, launched its Beeper Mini app on December 5 to bridge the gap between SMS messaging on Android phones and Apple’s iMessage protocol on iPhones. The app runs on Android phones and initially cost $2 per month but is now offered for free.

Apple’s Messages app is offered only on Apple devices and displays incoming SMS messages from Android phones inside green bubbles instead of iPhone’s blue bubbles. Android users also generally have a less secure, less media-rich messaging experience when communicating with people using iPhones. Beeper was supposed to fix those incompatibilities and put Android users on a level playing field with iPhone owners.

After Beeper Mini launched, Android phone users who signed up could experience iPhone features like tapbacks, and iPhone users on the receiving end of Beeper messages saw those messages as blue bubbles. Not only that, but Beeper claims it made messaging between Android users and iPhone users fully end-to-end encrypted and thus more secure than a standard Android SMS-to-iPhone message exchange.

Beeper Mini began to experience outages shortly after it launched, which Beeper suspects was the result of Apple blocking some of the app’s functionality. (Beeper had open sourced its app code to be transparent about its technology.) Apple later confirmed to the Verge that it “took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” saying that the techniques Beeper used posed “significant risks to user security and privacy.”

Beeper tweaked its technical infrastructure to try to keep the app running and now requires users to provide their Apple ID email and password in order to work with iMessage, something it did not require before. It also removed the app’s subscription fee. The app continues to suffer intermittent outages.