Apple seems to have a way to block the new app from being used

The Beeper Cloud Crisis: Apple Shutdown, Not Behaving as a Fake iMessage Service – And What Will We Do About It?

This statement suggests a few things. Beeper used a custom built service to connect to iMessage through the Apple push notification service, but Apple shut down Beeper Mini because it was using that protocol. To do so, Beeper had to convince Apple’s servers that it was pinging the notification protocols from a genuine Apple device, when it obviously wasn’t. (These are the “fake credentials” Apple is talking about. Quinn Nelson at Snazzy Labs made a good video about how it all works.)

When I ask Migicovsky if he’s prepared to do battle with Apple’s security team for the foreseeable future, he says that the fact that Beeper Cloud is still working is a signal that Apple can’t or won’t keep it out forever. (He also says Beeper’s team has some ideas left for Beeper Mini.) He hopes the court of public opinion will eventually convince Apple to play nice. “What we’ve built is good for the world,” he says. It should be something that we all agree should exist.

Apple and the iMessage War: How it Will Work for Android and Where to Look for Privacy and Security, Not Just for User Authentication

Obviously there’s also a much bigger picture here, though. Apple has repeatedly made clear that it doesn’t want to bring iMessage to Android: “buy your mom an iPhone,” CEO Tim Cook told a questioner at the Code Conference who wanted a better way to message their Android-toting mother, and the company’s executives have debated Android versions in the past but decided it would cannibalize iPhone sales. Apple said it will use the cross- platform protocol to communicate, but we don’t yet know what that will look like, and you can bet that Apple will try to make life better for native iMessage users.

The stance of the company is predictable: it’s simply trying to do right by users and protect privacy and security of their iMessages. “We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” Apple senior PR manager Nadine Haija said in a statement.