The part that's wild to me is that Beeper is collecting revenue from their users for this.
Apple doesn't charge for iMessage, and instead that service is funded by device purchases. Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices to help them parasitize the infrastructure of the service, and instead of contributing to Apple's operational expenses, they're pocketing the money.
There's no scenario where this stands, even if iMessage came to non-Apple devices Apple is probably going to charge users if they're not buying Apple devices (I can't imagine it being an ad-driven service).
The marginal cost of an extra user on the APNS server is extremely small. Hell I bet the overall barrage of spam push notifications across the iOS landscape causes orders of magnitude more load than Beeper users, and Apple doesn't complain (despite push spam being against the App Store rules).
Of course, Apple is welcome to start charging a reasonable fee for the service.
Asking a million people to pay $0.01 per month is a small marginal cost. Asking one company to pay $0.01 for each of a million users per month is not a small marginal cost.
That was the point I wanted to make. I don’t see Apple letting Beeper make money off of a service they don’t run. If the app was open sourced and free then Apple wouldn't really be able to stop it. Apple can definitely sue them as a business, though.
> Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices
Do you have numbers for that? Sure, some of the users haven't purchased devices, but many of them have an apple device or two and just want access to the network across all the devices they use.
Apple doesn't charge for iMessage, and instead that service is funded by device purchases. Beeper is charging people who haven't purchased devices to help them parasitize the infrastructure of the service, and instead of contributing to Apple's operational expenses, they're pocketing the money.
There's no scenario where this stands, even if iMessage came to non-Apple devices Apple is probably going to charge users if they're not buying Apple devices (I can't imagine it being an ad-driven service).