The US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Apple filed on Thursday relates to the iPhone maker’s battle against Beeper, the app that aimed to bring iMessage to Android users. Beeper abandoned its mission after Apple blocked the app’s efforts late last year. The Justice Department cited the dispute in its lawsuit as an example of Apple controlling “the conduct and innovation of third parties in order to insulate itself from competition.”
Beeper, a startup from Pebble smartwatch founder Eric Migicovsky, has managed to reverse engineer the iMessage protocol to bring support for end-to-end encrypted iMessage blue bubble chats to Android users. Beeper worked as a real iMessage client, supporting threads, replies, read receipts, direct messages and group chats, emoji reactions with tapback, editing and more.
Once the Beeper was released, the companies got into a cat-and-mouse game, which Apple eventually won. Every time Beeper issued workarounds and fixes to keep the service alive, Apple shot them down one by one. The controversy led a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to ask the Justice Department to investigate Apple’s anti-competitive treatment of the app.
“Apple recently blocked a third-party developer from fixing the broken cross-platform messaging experience in Apple Messages and providing end-to-end encryption for messages between Apple Messages and Android users,” the DOJ complaint states. “By rejecting solutions that would allow cross-platform encryption, Apple continues to make iPhone users less secure than they might otherwise be.”
At the time of the dispute, Apple argued that Beeper “posed significant risks to users’ security and privacy, including the potential to expose metadata and enable spam, spam, and phishing attacks.”
The battle between the two companies also caught the eye of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who in February asked the agency to investigate Apple’s actions under the FCC’s Part 14 rules on accessibility, usability and compatibility.
The DOJ cited the battle between the two companies as part of a broader argument accusing Apple of protecting its smartphone monopoly to undermine cross-platform messaging apps and competing smartphones. The department alleges that Apple “knowingly and intentionally degrades quality, privacy and security for its users.”
The lawsuit also accuses Apple of suppressing cross-platform smartwatch compatibility, something Migicovsky previously faced at Pebble, a smartwatch company that shut down in 2016. The DOJ notes that in 2013, Apple began offering users the ability to connect their iPhones to third-party smartwatches and gave third-party smartwatch developers access to various APIs related to the Apple Notification Center Service, Calendar, Contacts, and geolocation. When Apple introduced the Apple Watch the following year, it began restricting third-party access to new and improved APIs for the smartwatch’s functionality.
The DOJ notes that Apple prevents iPhone users from responding to notifications using a third-party smartwatch. The department says Apple instead gives third-party smartwatches access to more limited APIs that don’t allow users to do things available on its own Apple Watch, such as reply to a message or accept a calendar invitation.
The lawsuit goes so far as to accuse Apple of “copying the idea of a smartwatch from third-party developers.”
For more on Apple’s antitrust lawsuit, check here:
