Boo-hoo, let me play you the world's smallest violin for Apple's "suffering". Apple is the richest company in the world, it has more money than God, they can fend for themselves just fine, why should anyone shed a tear that someone is stealing from them?
People are defending others stealing from Apple because Apple has a history of stealing from other companies and developers as well, so it's just karma.
Though you'll have to enlighten me what exactly it is they are stealing from Apple since Apple doesn't charge money for iMessage for there to be any theft or loss of revenue for them. Unless your definition of theft is "YOU WOULDN'T DOWNLOAD A CAR?!"
Apple doesn't charge money for iMessage in much the same way Microsoft doesn't charge money for MS Paint. iMessage is included as part of an Apple hardware purchase. Running a messaging system that likely handles billions of messages—with photo and video attachments—every day is not free. Apple's device sales subsidize the cost Apple pays to run this system.
Beeper using this system by exploiting a technical loophole is theft in a much more direct way than pirating a copy of an audio track is, I think.
And Beeper bought and paid for the Apple devices which they use to route iMessage. What's the problem? Looks fair and square to me.
Apple is legally allowed to try to block me for breaking their ToS, but legally, I bought the device, I can do whatever I want with it since it's my property now, including trying to route iMessage on my device and my account if hat's what I want.
It's still not stealing because I paid Apple for the HW, and stealing means breaking the law, not breaking Apple's ToS which are silly and worthless anyway.
I'm assuming you're confused here and not intentionally misleading. Beeper Cloud (formerly just Beeper) uses Apple devices to route iMessages. This is legit and as far as I know hasn't been blocked or stopped in any way.
Beeper Mini (the Android app in discussion) doesn't use this system and is instead exploiting a loophole left to allow older Apple devices to use the platform.
Stealing is also not only a legal term, but can be used in a purely ethical context too. I don't think anybody's arguing that Beeper or their users are breaking the law.
Be honest, if Apple was the party taking someone else’s property without permission, and then selling it for their own gain, would you still be defending this? I wager you wouldn’t.
If you are doing something that definitely requires E2EE that you are certain works and forces the user on the other end to comply, then maybe I could see your point. You would be in the vast minority of users and it's debatable that your use case is worth gutting the functionality for the majority of users who would benefit from being able to iMessage their Android friends, but you would still have a valid use case. I would tell you in that case to use an open source E2EE solution instead of Apple's closed source one though, given that privacy is such a concern.
The problem is: the client application itself is a big unknown. Beeper says it's secure, and it very well could be. But we have no idea. But if it receives, decrypts, then sends sensitive information, as diagnostics, back to a a central server unencrypted, for example, that's obviously a huge problem.
Really? I haven't seen anything approaching it in the US, except maybe Facebook Messenger? But iMessage is definitely ubiquitous enough across the US (I've lived on both coasts and in between) that it's surprising (and annoying) when someone doesn't have it.
By allowing Android <--> Apple communication, Apple has potential "loses" as they loose their lock in ability of forcing people buying a new iPhone for Christmas.
iPhone $800, Android $200. If an Android can do what iPhone can do on the messaging front there's no purpose in buying an iPhone.
Comparable devices cost pretty much the same whether iPhone or Android.
While most people may not care it’s also worth noting that the alternative OS (Android) is operated by one of the largest ad-tech companies in the world and allows for deep oem integrations of 3rd party applications (that 99.9% of its users aren’t even aware of as being installed.)
And that's a problem...why?