The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are stepping up their investigations into Apple’s recent blocking of the iMessage for Android app Beeper Mini, the New York Times reports.
The DoJ is apparently responding to calls from a bipartisan group of senators for an investigation into the matter. Beeper founder Eric Migicovsky is said to have met\ with DOJ antitrust lawyers on December 12. The DOJ is currently conducting a four-year-long investigation into Apple’s alleged anticompetitive conduct.
The Times report suggest that the FTC is also investigating the issue, referencing a blog post published yesterday by the commission warning that it will evaluate “claims of privacy and data security that implicate competition”:
In the face of concerns about anticompetitive conduct, companies may claim privacy and security reasons as justifications for refusing to have their products and services interoperate with other companies’ products and services. As an agency that enforces both competition and consumer protection laws, the Commission is uniquely situated to evaluate claims of privacy and data security that implicate competition.
Beeper Mini identifies text message conversations from iMessage, converting them to the blue bubbles associated with Apple’s messaging service. The allows Android users access to several iMessage features, such as reactions, threads, high-quality media sharing, and group chats, without the iPhone users on the other end being none the wiser.
The reverse-engineered Beeper Mini app originally launched earlier this month and promised to provide Android users with a full iMessage experience. The app registered Android users’ phone numbers with Apple’s iMessage servers.
The app did bring the much-desired “blue bubbles” to text conversations between iPhone and Android users, allowing iMessage features to work as they should. However, Apple quickly put a stop to it, as three days after the Beeper Mini launch, the app stopped working. Apple confirmed that it had slammed the brakes on the app.
The app soon came back from the dead, as developers made changes so that Beeper Mini now only works with an Apple ID email address. Android users have required access to a Mac with Beeper Cloud installed to generate their iMessage registration data and get Beeper back up and working on Android, but the service has seen reports of poor reliability, leading to the developers’ current solution, which requires a jailbroken iPhone.