Mike,

I just listened to the podcast interview with Eric from Beeper, and as an Apple user since the 80s and a Techdirt reader since probably the late 90s or early 00s, I have been increasingly displeased with Apple’s policy decisions on a number of fronts, Beeper being only the latest.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if the rational explanations for Apple’s position on this must include the fact that the vast majority of the marketplace for modern technology is functionally technologically illiterate, all efforts to introduce coding into standards curricula notwithstanding.

People in general buy tech devices for what they can do and they don’t care how they do it, nor do they understand the issues at stake. A massively significant corollary to this is that people are largely ignorant of security concerns and happy to simply depend on the suppliers of their devices to handle security on their behalf.

Apple is well aware of this and so it stands to reason that it would be legitimately concerned that allowing Beeper to do what it has done opens the doors to a flood of maliciously designed apps which an unsophisticated user base will be unable to distinguish from Beeper and other genuinely benign products.

I feel like a well rounded discussion of this problem, published for a tech-savvy audience, should not exclude considerations like this, and in fact should aggressively address this problem rather than apparently pretending it does not exist and that the open internet exists in a bubble of benign intention for all to experience, but for the unreservedly evil and self-interested actions of the tech giants.

Thanks for your great work over the decades, and I look forward to an earnest and thoughtful response when you have the opportunity to make one.