Apple

But you've failed to draw the parallel here between Apple and their intellectual property being reverse engineered by a third party who's motivations remain unknown, and Beeper who bought the reverse engineering code/process from that third party for the purpose of interoperability. Which I believe I said before but perhaps wasn't clear about. Proving in court that the original engineer of this exploit did so for the purposes of interoperability, or if the intent was to make money will seemingly be between Apple, the courts, and that entity.

Apple device users are subject to the EULA. Beeper and their customers may or may not be depending on if they are Apple device users. There is some gray area here as far as the messaging because my understanding based on the articles I have read is that Beeper is calling their App "Beeper Mini", and are simply marketing it as what it is. A way for Android users to interface with Apple iMessage users. They aren't calling it iMessage for Android. They are calling it Beeper Mini. That being said, the tagline is "iMessage on Android" and yes it does bill itself as enabling Android users to send and receive imessages. The important thing to note here is they go on to say that it's a stand alone app built to send and receive "blue bubble messages" on Android. They don't claim it's an apple product, just that it works with apple products (I'm reading directly from their website here).

The reflection in news sources isn't the greatest point to be made specifically because news outlets have a history of creating taglines, nicknames and nomenclature for things that the original entity behind the story has no real say in. Serial killers are a good example. News networks are notorious for naming serial killers despite law enforcement avoiding giving them monikers like "golden state killer" etc.

I agree with you that Beeper is implementing a paid system and that this was always the intention. I believe I said that as well in my original statement. However I'm still trying to connect the dots as to how Apple has grounds against Beeper specifically. Surely they may potentially have grounds against the original exploiter. But against Beeper? Have they actually stolen Apple's intellectual property?

I wouldn't know a lot of things about Apple if I didn't occasionally peruse communities like this one. There is only so much context you can get from Android users (even people who use both, or neither) about Apple products. I wouldn't for instance understand why the original Beeper was such a big deal to some Apple users, until someone explained in a different thread that they like being able to answer messages from their work phone or work station (not an apple product), throughout their work day. I've worked in places where cell phones were absolutely not allowed, so I could see how this could be a big deal.