The U.S. Justice Department is expanding its antitrust probe into Apple Inc. over the recent shutdown of an Android messaging app, the New York Times reported today.

The app in question, Beeper Mini, launched earlier this month. It enabled Android users to send messages to iPhones without creating an Apple ID account. On the recipient’s iPhone, messages sent from Beeper Mini appeared in the built-in iMessage chat app.

Three days after the app launched, Apple blocked it by making technical changes to iMessage. The company behind Beeper Mini temporarily restored service but soon thereafter decided to shut it down, saying that “we can’t win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth.” It’s this development that reportedly caught the Justice Department’s attention.

The department opened an antitrust investigation into Apple four years ago. In February, sources told the Wall Street Journal that the investigation seeks to determine whether the iPhone maker may be giving its iOS apps an unfair edge over rivals. The Justice Department is also said to be evaluating other aspects of Apple’s interactions with third-party developers.

Eric Migicovsky, the founder of the company behind the Beeper Mini app, reportedly met with Justice Department antitrust lawyers on Dec. 12. A few days later, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked the department to investigate whether Apple breached competition law by blocking the app. In the statement calling for the probe, the lawmakers stated that “interoperability and interconnections have long been key drivers of competition and consumer choice in communications services.”

Apple, for its part, claims that it shut down Beeper Mini because the app posed a cybersecurity risk. The iPhone maker says that Beeper Mini enabled Android users to send messages to iMessage, a feature the latter app doesn’t support by default, using “techniques that exploit fake credentials.” The company claimed the app increased the risk of user metadata leaks, spam and phishing attacks. 

There are indications that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission may also be looking into the matter. The agency appeared to address the Apple-Beeper Mini controversy in a blog post published on Thursday. 

“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,” the blog post reads. “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.”

The fact that iMessage doesn’t interoperate with third-party chat services has also emerged as a focus for policymakers in the European Union. Last year, EU lawmakers passed a piece of antitrust legislation called the Digital Service Act. The law includes a provision that specifies “dominant messaging platforms” must allow users to send messages to rival services, such as Beeper Mini, if those services’ developers request interoperability.

Apple is arguing that the interoperability requirement shouldn’t apply to iMessage. At the same time, the company is taking steps to assuage regulators’ concerns.

Last November, Apple announced plans to make iPhones compatible with the RCS messaging protocol next year. The feature will enable iPhone and Android users to exchange messages with one another. However, it’s currently unclear whether the RCS feature will be added to iMessage or implemented in a different manner. 

Photo: Pixabay