Replay: The Not-So-Hostile Takeover of iMessage Technology

[00:00:00.230]
Ned: Tomorrow is the holiday breakfast, and one of the requests is for Ned bread. Every year, I have to make two loaves of bread for them, two different kinds, because they want the Everything Bagel Sourdough and also my Cranberry Walnut Sourdough. That's what I just pulled out of the oven.

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Chris: But not for you to actually be there.

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Ned: No, I'm not there for this.

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Chris: It feels like a win-win for them.

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Ned: Well, you're not wrong. You get the bread and not the Ned. Oh, God. Everybody wins.

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Chris: You know what else you can do? You can go to a bakery.

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Ned: You're an asshole.

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Chris: And say, I want that one. And you know what? Then your responsibility capabilities are over.

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Ned: You're not wrong. Hello, Alleged Human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I enjoy the The aroma of delicious breads baking in the oven, the feeling of flour between my fingers, and also consuming human flesh. I mean, eating bread with my friends. With me is Chris, who is also here. Hi, Chris. You look delicious today. I mean, very handsome today.

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Chris: First of all, I appreciate you lying to me. And second off, that joke would have been way funnier if you had said, With me is Chris, who is also bread.

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Ned: You're welcome. If we had editors, this would be so much easier. No, no. We can only do it once, and then it's over. How are you, sir?

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Chris: It's cold out, and I don't like it.

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Ned: That's right. You are not a fan of running in the cold, if I recall correctly.

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Chris: What is there not to like? Who doesn't get just the warming of the cockles of your heart when you get icicles on your eyelashes?

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Ned: It's not that cold yet. Yeah.

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Chris: And what's the important word in that sentence, Ned?

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Ned: Yet. Yet. Well, I mean, thank goodness that global warming is going to take care of that for you.

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Chris: Moving on.

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Ned: Yeah. Let's talk about some tech garbage, shall we? Do it. Today, we're going to talk about the dreaded green bubble. Dun, Dun, Dun.

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Chris: Aka, the Mark of the Loser.

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Ned: You know, I'm not going to lie. I had to go and look up whether it was the green bubble or the blue bubble in iMessage, because I don't use iMessage, and I never have. That will become relevant very shortly. A few weeks ago, Chris, you brought it to everyone's attention that the Nothing phone was bringing iMessage to an Android phone through their chat app, which is creatively named Chat.

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Chris: It's been five weeks and I'm still furious.

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Ned: I can tell the fumes are just coming off your head. Well, hot on the heels of that announcement was a new app in the Google Play Store called Beeper Mini, which purported to support iMessage on any Android phone. Then Apple blocked them out of concern for user security. Then Beeper said they patched their app and now it works again. And by the time you hear this, it's probably been blocked yet again. It's the dumbest game of cat and mouse I can possibly imagine with all the thrill of a tax audit.

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Chris: Yep, you've got it completely nailed down so far.

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Ned: All right. So allegedly, Apple is also considering supporting the RCS protocol at some distant point in the future that is vague enough to be meaningless. Are you not familiar with RCS? Well, you are in for a treat because I thought I would take a moment to recount the world of mobile messaging from SMS to BBM to our present dichotomy of RCS and iMessage. Let's start with the Humble SMS or Short Message Service. You're pumped?

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Chris: I thought it was Save My Ship.

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Ned: I don't think that's right.

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Chris: Sail Sail Marsh Sideways.

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Ned: I like that better. We'll go with that. Perfect. The idea for Sail Marsh Sideways was initially proposed in the early 1980s and formalized in 1984 by Friedhelm Hildebrand and Bernard Guilbaer?

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Chris: I'm guessing that's Gilbert?

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Ned: Gilbert. That's better. I like that. Of the Franco-German Company, GSM. The idea was to transmit messages from a server to one or more receivers using the control channel on phone networks.

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Chris: Aka, gaming the system. More or less. To send real, real small packets of data, which we eventually called text messages.

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Ned: Oh, you're breathing ahead.

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Chris: People are going to get confused.

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Ned: Okay, well, I'm getting there.

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Chris: You're getting to the part where you confused them?

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Ned: Yes, I'm going to do my best. When we switched to, or shifted, I should say, to switched telephony in the 1970s, no more of the operators literally sitting in rooms swapping cables to connect calls. We needed a way to carry signaling information to properly connect to those calls inside and across networks. Rather than carrying that information in the data channel, the standards bodies for the telecommunications industry, they created a signaling channel, something that we would call a control plane in our modern parlance. The thing about the control plane is that it was used to connect a call, but after that, it pretty much quiesced. There was not much going on there.

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Chris: It basically just sat and waited for the next control message.

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Ned: Right, which there weren't a lot of them. So what the folks at GSM proposed was that we could use that signaling channel to transmit messages. However, because of the way it was designed, bandwidth was extremely limited. And so that's how we ended up with a maximum of 167 bit characters for SMS messages, which, when you think about it, directly impacted how Twitter functions, since originally that was SMS-based. So that's right. A national platform for Discourse in the 2010s, had a character limit imposed on it from a decision on signaling channels established in the 1970s. The world's very strange, Chris.

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Chris: I wonder... I mean, that's probably... We're already off to fun fact like number three, but... I know, right? How many people do you think even know or remember the fact that Twitter was primarily SMS-based as it was conceived and generally released in the 2010s?

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Ned: Yeah, well, so I've been on Twitter. Well, not really on it so much anymore, but I'm past the 10-year mark at this point. Shameful, Bragg. When I started using it, the failwill was still a thing that happened on a regular basis, and they had launched the web interface. Interface, but they didn't have a mobile app yet. So it was just like the web interface, or you could text messages to Twitter and it would post it for you. I don't know if they actually have removed that capability. I got to imagine they have. Probably the only way to do it now is through the app or the web interface.

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Chris: It's a great question. Next question. I'm ashamed nobody did any research at all before we started the conversation.

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Ned: I didn't think we would talk about Twitter that much, honestly. So the signaling channel in question went through a few standards, but they eventually landed on Signaling System 7 in the 1980s. Ss7, which if you think it sounds like a pop punk band from the early '80s, you're not wrong, but you're probably also thinking about SR-71. What's fun about SS7 is that it was never intended to be super secure or unspoofable, which is why SMS is not considered as secure for for things like MFA. Once again, decisions made about protocols decades ago come back to haunt us.

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Chris: Now, would somebody please tell my bank that?

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Ned: Mine, too. The first successful SMS message was sent in 1992 on the Vodafone cellular network from a computer to a digital handset. Auspiciously for us, the message was, Merry Christmas.

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Chris: So it is a topical episode.

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Ned: Indeed. Look at that. It's important to note that the early vision for SMS was to send messages to a receiver from a server and not to send messages from that receiver back to the server or to other receivers. If you're wondering why I keep using the word receiver, it's because SMS was also not meant to be limited to mobile phones and mobile networks. The protocol was designed to work with any device that implemented it on the phone network, whether that's a mobile phone, a digital handset, or a computer terminal. Just so happens we already had email. So as the standard matured, the use case for receiver server messaging and receiver-to-receiver messaging was formalized. Of course, that meant that we needed mobile handsets that could actually support SMS. And the earliest of these devices was produced by Nokia, of course. That was finish. They're fun. Messages could be created using Multitap on a standard phone keypad. This is before the T9 standard and later additions of a physical or, God forbid, virtual keyboard that really accelerated the ability to text prolifically.

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Chris: Teenage girls back then were so frustrated. 3, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 9, 9, 9, 9. Damn it, it's not 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 Saving out the message. Fun. I mean, on the one hand, there is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But on the other hand, there's the T-Mobile store.

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Ned: I know, right? Well, he does have an iPhone now, and we're all thankful for that. So in a bit of foreshadowing for iMessage, the earliest versions of SMS were restricted to in-network messaging only. I might be able to text other people on Verizon, but not on AT&T. There was also no well-defined way of tracking usage and billing for messages sent, so that had to be addressed before cellular providers were willing to push this technology because telecoms are nothing, if not greedy little bastard.

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Chris: Fair.

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Ned: Mm-hmm. Naturally, pretty soon, the billing issue was sorted and SMS gateway services were created to allow internetwork messaging. As the use of cellular phones exploded, so did the rise of text messaging. The average user in 1995 sent 0.4 text messages per month, which expanded to 35 text per month in the year 2000. That's when the internetwork messaging issue was resolved. To now, in 2023, sending an average of 52 text per day. That's an average for people 35 to 44, which is a demographic that I'm just outside of. And personally, I don't send anything near that number, but that's because I have a life.

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Chris: Be honest.

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Ned: Okay, I'm too busy chatting on the 16 million other chat apps on my phone. There it is. Okay. Also playing solitaire.

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Chris: Yeah, and just since we're playing fun facts, way back in the day when this happened, it was a huge deal. And you also had a limit on the amount of text messages you could send. Oh, you sure did. And if you went over that limit, you paid 10 cents per message?

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Ned: You're reading ahead again, but yes.

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Chris: Darn it, really?

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Ned: 10 to 15 cents per message. In fact, I'll just skip ahead to this point. There was a congressional investigation when all of the carriers worked in collusion to bump it from 10 cents to 15 cents per message. Per message, Chris.

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Chris: Which ended up being something like, what was it, 200,000% markup on how much it cost for them to handle SMS?

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Ned: Yes. Because honestly, the messages themselves were going over unused bandwidth that they had allocated for this control signaling. So that was basically free. The only thing they had to do was set up and maintain these messaging gateways, which I mean has some cost associated with it, but not nearly what they were charging customers. They were basically printing money. Stealing.

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Chris: Stealing money.

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Ned: Yes. There's a reason why there's unlimited talk and text now, and it's like $10 a month. And it's still too much. Anyway, let's talk about Blackberry Messaging for a moment, or Blackberry Messenger. Bbm, great acronym, no notes. The first Blackberry devices were produced in 1998, and they were two-way pagers. That meant if you got a page, you could write back. Neat. You know what a pager is, right?

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Chris: Back in my day is clearly the topic title for this week.

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Ned: I'm sorry. I'm going to go on an aside because I can. I had a pager in high school. It was green?

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Chris: Yeah, we all know that. We can tell just by looking at you.

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Ned: Now, now. I remember the fact that you would get phone number would come up on the screen of the person who paged you, and if they did star in some numbers, that would also show up. But that was it. That was all you could communicate, and I couldn't communicate back. It was a one-way communication. I had to now go find a pay phone if I wanted to respond to them. So that's where we were in 1995. So '98, two-way pagers, big deal. But then they added email capabilities around the year 2000. There are a whole lot of big advancements that came out of Blackberry, one of which was the addition of a full Qwerty keyboard on the device. That was pretty important if you wanted to compose a full email, but it also made text messaging a hell of a lot easier. Now, the thing is, as we well know, SMS is horribly insecure, and cellular companies like to charge you out the nose for it, which, like I said, is funny, considering that the transmission medium was literally unused bandwidth. Fun. Enter a new private chat service called BlackBerry Messenger, which is in many ways the precursor to iMessage.

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Ned: They launched it in 2005, and BBM used the public Internet instead of the phone networks and BlackBerry's own servers to handle the transmission of messages. So unlike SMS, BBM supported group chats, multimedia files, and eventually video and voice calling. It did all that, and it was a far more reliable platform. And that's in large part because Blackberry controlled the entire stack, software, hardware, and protocols. That type of vertical integration is nice, isn't it, Tim Apple?

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Chris: It was also encrypted, which is huge. The reason that BlackBerry blew up in the first place was it was also centrally controlled.

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Ned: Yes, that was also good and bad. One of the issues that I remember encountering was If you had people who were using the Blackberry service in India, the Indian government forced Blackberry to decrypt those messages for them because reasons. The fact that it was centrally controlled in that way meant that they could just go to Blackberry and be like, All right, you have to decrypt all these messages for these Blackberry pins.

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Chris: Well, shit. Wait, how much money? Here you go.

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Ned: Exactly. But anyway, so SMS is based on a best effort for message delivery, at least in the original standards, it was. It's like UDP. The messages are just flung across the Ether at their intended recipient, and there's no confirmation returned. Blackberry Messenger, on the other hand, confirmed that the message was delivered and was generally more reliable in terms of outages. The downside was, Blackberry Messenger only supported BlackBerry devices until 2013, which meant you had to have a BlackBerry if you wanted to use BBM. In 2013, they opened it up to iOS and Android users via an app, which was basically an admission that BlackBerry's time as the premier enterprise user device was very much in decline. That lasted for about six years until they shut down the public BBM service in 2019. There is an enterprise version still available, but I don't believe it's actually run by a research in motion anymore. Some other company bought it.

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Chris: I think they made a movie about Blackberry.

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Ned: They sure did. And while I was stuck on an airplane, I watched 75% of it. That's pretty good. I enjoyed it. The actors were decent. Takes some serious liberties with the actual history of it. It's a dramatization more than it is a documentary, but certainly fun. And if you're like me and had a Black Berry for a decent amount of time for your work device, there's some nostalgia involved as well. So BBM died, but we had another one which was MMS. That's a thing. Since SMS was limited to text only and 160 characters, phones started showing up with these pesky camera things and better displays. And so people wanted to send, I I don't know, like their stupid photos of children and small dogs to their friends. So MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Services, were introduced. This standard was proposed by the telecom industry Supergroup 3GP in 2002 and subsequently adopted by all the major carriers. Yes, there is a telecom standards supergroup. No, they don't have a Christmas album. I wish you'd stop asking.

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Chris: One of these years, it's going to happen.

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Ned: But not this Christmas. Mms added a ton of new features, predictably around nontext media. You could send up to 40 seconds of video, you could send pictures, slideshows, other graphics. It used a MIME type of encoding to send the messages. It was a much more complicated standard since not all the receiving devices would have the same capabilities, and using the SS7 control plane was really not an option. So cellular providers had to create MMS service centers, like a gateway that would accept an MMS message from one device and then store and forward the message to the recipient on the other end or to another MMS service center that's for a different cellular network. And then the service center would send the message to the receiver, but it would first have to figure out if the target device was even MMS capable. So it would start a conversation saying, Hey, can you do MMS? And if the device said yes, then we go, Okay, what are your capabilities? And then it might decide to rerender the media being sent so that it would actually be compatible with the device. Not all Service centers would do that.

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Ned: Some others would just send a message back to the sender with a failure message saying, I could not send to this device. Since MMS was implemented at the carrier level, you can bet on three things. Number one, they were snooping on everything you sent, which is true of SMS also. Number two, they were charging you out the ass for every bit that you sent. Number three, the service was subpar at best.

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Chris: Hey, that's not fair. Sometimes it worked.

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Ned: Sure. Sometimes. With the rise of so many other chat apps and solutions, MMS usage has largely dropped, and it's actually been shut down by several carriers. They just don't even support it anymore. So what to replace it with? Now we come to RCS. You got there.

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Chris: They're the people that make radios.

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Ned: Not anymore. So RCS stands for Rich Communication Services. It was first drafted by the GSM Association. Those were the folks behind SMS back in the day, and it was meant as a replacement for SMS and MMS. This was in 2007. It took them nine years to get to version 1.0 of the standard, published in 2016. That's nine years for one standard.

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Chris: Maybe they just were still using T9.

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Ned: They're typing very slowly. It just took that long to write it. The goal of RCS was to support a a rich messaging platform, meaning all kinds of media, to completely replace SMS as a standard. So just get that shit out of here. Use IP communications instead of anything to do with SS7, and also support service discovery. The standard included what they call a universal profile that carriers can implement, which guarantees interoperability between carriers that have implemented the universal profile. Now, RCS languished in obscurity until Google and Microsoft, to a smaller extent, got in on the action. They were looking for a new standard to support their chat app in Android, which has had at least four different names. I think it's currently called Messages. And RCS looked like just the thing for them to implement. Carriers started supporting RCS and Universal Profile in 2016, and then Google said they would support it in 2017. And not only that, they said that they would use RCS on Android messages, whether or not the carrier had adopted it. So they would just make a run around the carrier and support RCS themselves. And they made good on that promise in 2019, with all Android messages now being sent via RCS, with the addition of end-to-end encryption in 2021 for one-to-one messaging.

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Ned: Look at that. They did a good thing.

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Chris: We got there,.

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Ned: We took 12 years. Good Lord. As it stands now, there are more than 90 operators who have adopted adopted RCS and Universal Profile, and all modern Android handsets supported as well. The odd one out? Apple, of course, who publicly said in 2022 that they would not be adopting RCS on their devices or iMessage. Only to change track after the EU passed the Digital Markets Act, which literally forces all mobile devices to support RCS.

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Chris: Bold of them to finally do that.

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Ned: Yeah, I know. So I'm going to be honest here, As we get into the iMessage portion of things, I had one iPhone. It was the 3G. It was back in 2008. I never used iMessage, and I honestly didn't know what the big deal was. That's because iMessage launched in 2011, and I had switched to Android at that point as my mobile OS of choice because I like to tinker, Chris. I was the weirdo installing the customized Android open-source images on my phone, breaking it and then reflashing it in like a day or two.

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Chris: Does your phone work today? Shut up.

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Ned: It might. Given all the shortcomings of SMS and MMS and the glacial adoption of RCS, it's really not surprising that Apple would create their own app for messaging. By all reports, they nailed it.

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Chris: Accurate.

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Ned: For those like me who don't know anything about iMessage, it runs on Apple devices only. So that's macOS, iOS, padOS, watch I don't think they have too many OSs. It supports all kinds of media, including pictures, video, documents, and text. It's got end-to-end encryption on by default, and I don't think you can turn it off. It has delivery and read status as well as feedback on the other person typing. At least that's what I understand. Chris, feel free to add more color about how much you love iMessage.

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Chris: I mean, you're mostly right. I think the only thing you did is undersell how much of a wave of excitement and relief there was when people started using it because all of the other standards were hacked together and worked. And you could legitimately, pre iMessage, you could legitimately say to somebody, I sent you a text message. Did you not get it? And everyone would be like, Oh, yeah, I guess it must not have come through. Imessage, the number one thing that it had was all of the problems with other services just disappeared. You could, if you would like to, or if you were talking to somebody particularly not tech savvy, say, I sent you that message. Did you get it? The The service is reliable enough and built in such a strong way that that lie is very easy to call bullshit on. Because if someone sends the message, it will get there.

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Ned: So what you're saying is the reason I stayed on Android all these years is because I enjoy lying to you.

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Chris: Plausible deniability, yeah. Yeah.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: Yeah. All the other stuff is awesome. You can watch the dot, dot, dot as people are typing, and then watch as the dot, dot, dot disappear and a message never shows up, and you're like, I guess I'm single again. Allegedly, et cetera. Right. But now you can also do cool things with the very most recent versions, like unsend a message.

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Ned: Oh, that seems useful.

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Chris: Can't do that with SMS.

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Ned: No. Or even email for that matter, even though Microsoft and Google have both tried it.

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Chris: No, what you end up getting is an email that says...

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Ned: It's a person wants to be retracted.

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Chris: Net1313 would like to recall this message. Okay, bro.

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Ned: That's never a good look, huh? So in iMessage, all all the communication bubbles are in blue because blue is pretty and calming. Except if someone in the chat is using a non-Apple device, their messages appear in green, and some amount of functionality is lost on them. Being entirely unaware of this until a couple of years ago, I guess I'm retroactively sorry? No, I'm not. I don't care. But some people really don't want to be a green bubble, and also really don't want to buy an Apple device. So various solutions have been created to allow those users to participate in iMessage as a first party. One such solution involves racks of iMacks that basically act as proxies for you, which is no doubt, one, very expensive, and two, probably untrustworthy. And that's how we come to the Beeper drama.

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Chris: See? Right. And just as a reminder, one of the caveats of using iMessage is you have to have an Apple device, but you also have to have an Apple ID. Right. Whereas SMS is a message that goes to a phone number. Yes. Crucial difference.

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Ned: Carry on. Very. So Beeper. See, we got there and it only took me... Oh, shit. 30 minutes? Well, this is Chaos Lever. You knew what you were getting into, dear listener. So Beeper Mini is an app in the Android store that allows you to directly interact with iMessage. It does not use a Mac mini or iMac or anything like that as a proxy. In the blog post explaining how it works, Beeper cites all the open-source projects that form the basis for Beeper Mini. Essentially, a security researcher who goes by the name of JJ Tech, observed the interactions between iMessage devices and Apple servers and reverse engineered how the whole thing works. When you install the Beeper mini app on your phone, it sends and receives messages with end-to-end encryption to those Apple servers, just like a regular Apple device would. What Beeper is adding to the mix is an API server for account subscription to their service, and Beeper push notifications that watch for new messages on Apple's push notification server and alerts your device. The actual message retrieval and sending happens directly between your device and the Apple servers. How do you think Apple felt about that, Chris?

[00:28:51.810]
Chris: They loved it. Wait.

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Ned: Loved it? No notes.

[00:28:54.750]
Chris: No, it was the other one. It was the other one.

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Ned: Yeah, it was. They were not fans. After the initial launch of Beeper Mini, Apple patched their service to block Beeper, claiming that the techniques used by Beeper, quote, posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users, end quote. See? Apple is doing it for your own good.

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Chris: And we all believe that.

[00:29:26.140]
Ned: Absolutely, 100%. So Beeper then made changes to circumvent what Apple did, with the result that 95% of users were able to resume sending messages, and the other 5% could fix the issue by simply reinstalling the app, which I presume does something to change how it's talking to the Apple server side. The big change in the fix is that now requires users to sign in with an Apple ID, which was previously optional. I don't have any strong feelings about that. It sounds like from what you were describing, Chris, that's an improvement. Because the Apple ID is a way of proving that you're an actual real human being and not a spammy bot.

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Chris: Right. Yeah, I didn't look into the exact details, but my assumption was something along the lines of the Beeper API creates a phony Apple ID, and Apple was like, Well, that violates all of our terms of service.

[00:30:18.770]
Ned: Right. So now that it is in theory using legitimate Apple IDs, they might have less of a leg to stand on. Right.

[00:30:25.430]
Chris: I mean, we're still putting legitimate Apple IDs in gigantic air quotes, but yes.

[00:30:30.570]
Ned: Indeed. So this cat and mouse game has caught the attention of the US government, which could be bad for Apple. Although, let's be honest, they have enough money to basically keep any sitting senator quiet forever or just have them.

[00:30:43.570]
Chris: Yeah, I mean, you could, too. It really only costs like 10 grand to buy a senator. It's pretty sad.

[00:30:47.980]
Ned: Wow, that's like a fire sale. Beper, for their part, have also said that they're currently working on a more significant fix, and they have publicly challenged Apple to do a third-party audit and help prove that they do not pose a security risk. So with all that context in mind, so what? Imessage has been wildly successful because Apple controls the entire stack, just like Blackberry with BBM. But RCS is becoming a legitimate threat to that stranglehold. Sure, standards, bodies, and multi-vendor solutions take longer to adopt a universal platform. Twelve years, maybe. But in the long run, not everyone is going to have an Apple device, despite what Tim Apple told your grandmother. I suspect in 2024, we'll see some significant changes to iMessage, and Apple will position RCS compatibility as a benevolent favor to the great un washed masses. Me, I think I'll choose to remain blissfully unaware of my green bubble status. I like green better anyway.

[00:31:53.820]
Chris: And being blissfully unaware.

[00:31:55.760]
Ned: I thought that went without saying. Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch, fire up Beeper Mini, and send messages to all of your favorite friends with that beautiful blue bubble. You have earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page, just search Chaos Lever, or go to our website, chaoslever. Co, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, and general Tom Foulery. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now. I got there eventually.

[00:32:39.470]
Chris: Yeah, I mean, that's just the caveat that I have that I put at the end of every conversation. I'm sorry.

[00:32:44.450]
Ned: I thought it was, I got there eventually.