James Gill is a 16 year old living in the down Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who has brought several problems for Apple in the last couple of months. Gill’s interest in figuring out how Apple’s iMessage service works had led to a new app trying to breach the tech giant’s monopoly on its Blue Bubbles while a potential lawsuit by the US government may be yet to follow.
The app, Beeper Mini, gained popularity before Apple blocked its access, leading to questions about anti-competitive behavior and a potential antitrust case.
The 16 year old was in school and worked casual shifts at McDonald’s when he decided to make it a personal goal to figure out how Apple’s iMessage works.
“I sort of just wanted to poke at how certain features worked… As a teenager I have a large amount of time to throw at things.” Gill told ABC Net.
“I wanted to know how it worked, and I knew it was possible … I just kept working at it… It was more just curiosity, wanting to figure out how the thing worked and also like it’d be cool to mess around with it, you know?” the teenager added.
During his mid-year summer break, Gill started observing how a non-Apple how a non-Apple and Apple device were registered with the Cupertino based tech giant’s servers. In a bid to figure out how iMessage worked, Gill reverse engineered the iMessage protocol using a programme called “Pypush”.
Gill went on to publish his findings on Github where some users understood its importance and some even pointed out the commercial interest in such a venture.
The teenager also later messaged the CEO of US based software company Beeper, Eric Migicovsky and told him about Pypush. The Canadian enterpreneur woud later admit that Gill’s discovery was the ‘breakthrough’ that helped his company build an app for bypass the iMessage protocol.
Migicovsky responded to the text saying, “Holy crap! Does it work? No-one has ever done this before.” He also offered Gill a job at Beeper that paid 10 times the wages offered to him at McDonald’s.
Using Gill’s discovery, Beeper went on to launch a standalone app last month called Beeper Mini which was touted to help users get “blue bubbles on Android.”. The app was an instant hit and was downloaded over 100,000 times within just two days of its launch.
Explaining how Beeper Mini worked in an interaction with TechCrunch, Migicovsky said, “We’re not actually a middleman anymore. The research that we’ve done is actually reverse-engineering the iMessage protocol, down to the lowest layer of the protocol. So Beeper Mini doesn’t use a Mac server as a relay like all the other apps — they have a Mac Mini in a data center somewhere. And when you send a message, you’re actually sending a message to the Mac Mini, which then forwards it to iMessage,”
However, just three days after the launch, Apple started blocking access the technology’s access to iMessage noting that it was protecting the security and privacy of iPhone users. Beeper tried to find alternative ways of operating and Apple found news to block the app. However, on December 22, Beeper finally decided to discontinue its attempt of bringing Blue bubbles on Android.
However, the matter had not come to a rest, with US Senator Elizabeth Warren raising questions on why Apple would restrict access to Beeper Mini giving the app was working on bringing parity between Android and iOS users.
Later on, a bipartisan group of four US politicians wrote a letter to the Department of Justice asking the body to investigate Apple for “anti-competitive conduct”. The ABC Net report citing US Media noted that the Justice Department was preparing an antitrust case against Apple with a focus on how the tech giant has used its hardware and software to make it difficult for custmomers to ditch its offerings.
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Published: 31 Jan 2024, 11:07 AM IST