I think the bigger news here is that Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky has once again bitten off more than he can chew.
I personally was already skeptical of Beeper based on Migicovsky’s terrible treatment of the Pebble devs on the way out (they were supposed to be sold with the company, that ended up not being the case and they were left jobless), and personal experiences when on the original Beeper waitlist (was not notified our onboarding session would be recorded until joining the session, follow up questions ignored), but this really seems to reveal that he never had a real solid plan to deal with this potential outcome (that most saw coming from a mile away).
Beeper was originally supposed to be a “universal chat app” in the vein of classic apps like Trillian, Adium or Pidgin, but they paid particular attention to trying to get iMessage into the game from early on. It’s genuinely odd to think that they’ve been persuing iMessage compatability for this long to not have considered this as an outcome, especially after the release of Beeper Cloud, which was an actual reverse engineer of the iMessage protocol.
The classic Beeper app (I forget the name for it now) could have kept flying under the radar and being ignored by Apple, despite the fact that it required an intermediary iOS device to be able to work as it was. They originally were going to send out refurbished iPhone 4s to customers, but as iOS updates quickly made the iPhone 4 too far behind to still be functional in this way, they rolled out their own fleet of macOS servers as an intermediary.
It really seems like an ill-considered plan, and it really makes me glad I never dumped any money into the product, because this has kind of become a complete shitshow. We shouldn’t be celebrating Apple’s decision to do this, but Migicovsky never even had more than a few moves planned before he gave up on Beeper cloud, so it’s not like we can count on him to be the one trying to mount a legal battle to change things and allow others access to iMessage through a legal framework.
Migicovsky bailed on Pebble pretty quickly when it became unprofitable. Will he do the same again? Seems likely to me, imho.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t think this guy actually has a real business plan with any of this and I’m kind of surprised no devs involved had brought it up, considering it’s been being developed for three years now.
While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.
I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.
And SCOTUS did so by introducing a rule it never explained and which has no support in prior law (they’re only supposed to rule on ambiguity in law, not to create new rules, that’s up to congress instead)
Thanks for the article, it was a fun read. I’ll have to go back and re-read the majority opinion because I do remember some interesting analysis on it even if I disagree with the outcome.
I think the bigger news here is that Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky has once again bitten off more than he can chew.
I personally was already skeptical of Beeper based on Migicovsky’s terrible treatment of the Pebble devs on the way out (they were supposed to be sold with the company, that ended up not being the case and they were left jobless), and personal experiences when on the original Beeper waitlist (was not notified our onboarding session would be recorded until joining the session, follow up questions ignored), but this really seems to reveal that he never had a real solid plan to deal with this potential outcome (that most saw coming from a mile away).
Beeper was originally supposed to be a “universal chat app” in the vein of classic apps like Trillian, Adium or Pidgin, but they paid particular attention to trying to get iMessage into the game from early on. It’s genuinely odd to think that they’ve been persuing iMessage compatability for this long to not have considered this as an outcome, especially after the release of Beeper Cloud, which was an actual reverse engineer of the iMessage protocol.
The classic Beeper app (I forget the name for it now) could have kept flying under the radar and being ignored by Apple, despite the fact that it required an intermediary iOS device to be able to work as it was. They originally were going to send out refurbished iPhone 4s to customers, but as iOS updates quickly made the iPhone 4 too far behind to still be functional in this way, they rolled out their own fleet of macOS servers as an intermediary.
It really seems like an ill-considered plan, and it really makes me glad I never dumped any money into the product, because this has kind of become a complete shitshow. We shouldn’t be celebrating Apple’s decision to do this, but Migicovsky never even had more than a few moves planned before he gave up on Beeper cloud, so it’s not like we can count on him to be the one trying to mount a legal battle to change things and allow others access to iMessage through a legal framework.
Migicovsky bailed on Pebble pretty quickly when it became unprofitable. Will he do the same again? Seems likely to me, imho.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t think this guy actually has a real business plan with any of this and I’m kind of surprised no devs involved had brought it up, considering it’s been being developed for three years now.
While not related from a legal standpoint, the use of iPhones and intermediate devices reminds me of a supreme Court case that I wrote a brief about. The crux of it was a steaming service that operated large arrays of micro antenna to pick up over the air content and offer it as streaming services to customers. They uniquely associated individual customers with streams from individual antenna so they could argue that they were not copying the material but merely transmitting it.
I forget the details, but ultimately I believe they lost. It was an interesting case.
And SCOTUS did so by introducing a rule it never explained and which has no support in prior law (they’re only supposed to rule on ambiguity in law, not to create new rules, that’s up to congress instead)
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18073200/aereo
Thanks for the article, it was a fun read. I’ll have to go back and re-read the majority opinion because I do remember some interesting analysis on it even if I disagree with the outcome.
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