I think Apple will almost certainly win on a purely technical game of cat and mouse.
I think you need to adjust your definition of winning. Blocking 5% of messages is a 'win' for Apple. I won't use a messaging service with a 95% success rate. I won't migrate from iMessage to Beeper. I will submit, Apple would have liked a more decisive victory.
My definition of a win for Apple would be to have the problem go away and the attention dissipate. That's how it went for Nothing's attempt for instance, where it was instantly ridiculed and everyone forgot about it.
Right now, they blocked a part of Beeper mini, and nobody expecting a rock solid service would join Beeper Mini so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.
But the news cycle keeps going on, Beeper Mini is still there for those the group of users that wants it alive, and I wouldn't be surprised if next week for instance actual iMessage users came out to complain about getting kicked out of the service as colateral damage from the whole additional filtering.
And of course this whole publicity for Beeper is a door opened to any other company to give it a shot, as Apple is playing the cat and mouse game, and not taking any more drastic option.
Apple isn't losing either, but they're now dragged into guerrila like battle with no upside for them.
> so Apple's won't be losing any of their core customers.
They won't be losing _any_ of their customers. For the most part[^], nobody using Beeper Mini has paid Apple for anything... otherwise they wouldn't need to use Beeper Mini.
[^] Yes I'm sure there's at least a few people with an iPhone and a Windows PC or something that see this as "iMessage on Windows".
Beeper mini is not ready for regular use, so it's not even a question, but I think there's many potential use if it was any good.
For instance if you have a mac and an iPad but use an android phone, iMessages will go to both Apple devices but not where you want it the most, on your phone. That's the kind of pain point that pushes a group to fully move to another service if the android members have enough weight, but would be fine if there was a reliable android client.
based on the history of tech-related cat and mouse games, then Apple will probably lose.
Just like Sony could not prevent people from pirating Playstation DVDs, Apple itself could not prevent iOS jailbreaks, music labels could not prevent CD ripping, etc etc etc
if there are enough people who are strongly motivated to bypass whatever protection, eventually they will probably bypass it.
I think Apple will almost certainly win on a purely technical game of cat and mouse.
I think you need to adjust your definition of winning. Blocking 5% of messages is a 'win' for Apple. I won't use a messaging service with a 95% success rate. I won't migrate from iMessage to Beeper. I will submit, Apple would have liked a more decisive victory.