James Gill is a 16-year-old from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who has caused Apple a few problems in recent months. Gill’s interest in figuring out how Apple‘s iMessage service works led to a new app that attempted to break the tech giant’s monopoly on its blue bubbles, while a potential lawsuit from the US government may be on the way.
The 16-year-old was at school and working casual shifts at McDonald’s when he decided to make it a personal goal to figure out how Apple’s iMessage worked.
“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”.
Start of Android’s iMessage alternative:
Gill then posted his findings on Github, where some users understood the importance of the project and some even pointed out the commercial interest in such a venture.
The teenager also later sent a message to the CEO of US software company Beeper, Eric Migicovsky, telling him about Pypush. The Canadian entrepreneur would later admit that Gill’s discovery was the “breakthrough” that helped his company develop an application to circumvent 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 of Beeper Mini, Apple began blocking the technology’s access to iMessage, claiming that it was protecting the security and privacy of iPhone users. Beeper tried to find alternative ways to work, and Apple found new ways to block the app. However, on December 22, Beeper finally decided to abandon its attempt to bring Blue Bubbles to Android, noting that it can’t win a game of cat and mouse with the largest company on Earth.
Legal troubles brewing for Apple:
The matter did not end there, with US Senator Elizabeth Warren questioning why Apple would restrict access to Beeper Mini when the app was working to bring parity between Android and iOS users.
Later, a bipartisan group of four US politicians wrote a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to investigate Apple for “anti-competitive behaviour”. The ABC Net report, citing US media, noted that the Justice Department is preparing an antitrust case against Apple, focusing on how the tech giant has used its hardware and software to make it difficult for customers to leave its offerings.
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Published: 31 Jan 2024, 11:07 AM IST