Your advice was "There are plenty of cross-platform things out there. Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp", but you don't seem happy to take it and move away from iMessage either.
This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.
What? I pay for iMessage. You’re just arguing for the right to use products for free, and in Beeper’s case to create monetized products that use others’ products for free.
I doubt that. iMessage is a free service if you have almost any Apple OS product (iOS, iPadOS, macOS). You aren't making ongoing payments for the iMessage service.
You could say you paid for iMessage in that you bought a device that worked with it. But you do not pay for iMessage.
I'm arguing that the crux of the issue is a lot more than just "why don't they use something else ?" The same way you see value in iMessage, other users also see value in iMessage. You may want them to go away, but to my eyes that's the same weight as other users wanting to be there. I'll be standing in the corner with the popcorn to see how it turns out.
On what is paid and what is free, Beeper mini is free, iMessage is free (as we've learned from the whole saga, you don't even need an icloud account). Using someone else's public facing API without consent is rude, but hey, our whole industry started with kits to plug into the AT&T network with unauthorized material, and as of now no money is changing hands.
Beeper Mini wasn’t free. It became free the first time it was shut off.
Yes I’m sure “can anyone use other services as their product backends for free, directly against the TOS of said service” is going to be a really interesting and complicated legal question…
This tension is at the center of the it all, and why Beeper Mini exists in the first place.