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
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