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I think the bigger news here is that Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky has once again bitten off more than he can chew.
I personally was already skeptical of Beeper based on Migicovsky’s terrible treatment of the Pebble devs on the way out (they were supposed to be sold with the company, that ended up not being the case and they were left jobless), and personal experiences when on the original Beeper waitlist (was not notified our onboarding session would be recorded until joining the session, follow up questions ignored), but this really seems to reveal that he never had a real solid plan to deal with this potential outcome (that most saw coming from a mile away).
Beeper was originally supposed to be a “universal chat app” in the vein of classic apps like Trillian, Adium or Pidgin, but they paid particular attention to trying to get iMessage into the game from early on. It’s genuinely odd to think that they’ve been persuing iMessage compatability for this long to not have considered this as an outcome, especially after the release of Beeper Cloud, which was an actual reverse engineer of the iMessage protocol.
The classic Beeper app (I forget the name for it now) could have kept flying under the radar and being ignored by Apple, despite the fact that it required an intermediary iOS device to be able to work as it was. They originally were going to send out refurbished iPhone 4s to customers, but as iOS updates quickly made the iPhone 4 too far behind to still be functional in this way, they rolled out their own fleet of macOS servers as an intermediary.
It really seems like an ill-considered plan, and it really makes me glad I never dumped any money into the product, because this has kind of become a complete shitshow. We shouldn’t be celebrating Apple’s decision to do this, but Migicovsky never even had more than a few moves planned before he gave up on Beeper cloud, so it’s not like we can count on him to be the one trying to mount a legal battle to change things and allow others access to iMessage through a legal framework.
Migicovsky bailed on Pebble pretty quickly when it became unprofitable. Will he do the same again? Seems likely to me, imho.
Anyway, TL;DR: I don’t think this guy actually has a real business plan with any of this and I’m kind of surprised no devs involved had brought it up, considering it’s been being developed for three years now.
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the users are holding their wallet the wrong way, probably
Violating the iMessage/iCloud user agreement can, yes, result in getting booted from the platform. It’s in the terms of service. It was a risk everyone took when using beeper. 
No one gives a flying fuck about Apple’s TOS.
tell that to those who got booted from iMessage
They don’t give a shit either. Hence why they tried to bypass shitty iMessenger.
if it’s so shitty, why are they so obsessed with using the platform?
the only thing they’re trying to bypass is owning an apple device to get onto iMessage.
I’m calling it shitty. What are you even arguing? Forget it, I don’t give a fuck.
Why are US users so focused on iMessage? I have seen rejected date memes because the message bubble had the wrong color. There are tons of alternatives out there. Is this a status thing?
This is a long story. But the short version is that we don’t have per-message charges in the US, so most people continue on using SMS for daily conversations.
Unless you’re an Apple user, because then you were only allowed to use 1 SMS app, and if you used with another Apple user, you were automatically upgraded to iMessage, which gave you a better messaging experience. And Apple users are an arrogant bunch so instead of switching to using literally any other chat app to chat with other users, they will just not message you if you don’t have iMessage (green bubble).
I suppose Google is equally to blame because they had several very similar apps that they abandoned over and over again.
vast majority of people use the default app their phone choice comes with.
historically eise, the reason EU uses whatsapp was that there was a time period early on where sms costed money, so people used whatsapp to circumvent that. the U.S didnt have that problem as sms was free for the majority of people in that time period.
This seems a bit revisionist. Everyone had an amount of smses per month that were free in their contract.
People switched to whatsapp because it was better than sms.
wasn’t it the long distance thing? charged for sending SMS outside of your network or something. I recall whatsapp was the way to text your parents from one country in to another, even in the EU.
I know for a fact my fam adopted almost a decade ago, so we can text from USA to EU to SA to Canada. Family all over and it’s free.
It’s fine, apple users are not really people !
