Apple is not necessarily against programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do so. Beeper was using it to replace the iMessage interface when it already exists, which is why I think Apple was against it. We're doing something fundamentally different - allowing agents to interact with humans on iMessage, which is something that the current iMessage interface cannot do.
iMessage for Business is very restrictive and has a really long approval process. On top of this, it also sends gray bubbles and doesn't allow any outbound, which prevents consented outbound use cases such as form fill text back.
"iMessage for Business" doesn't exist as an Apple product, since they don't support business messaging in iMessage. They have a service called "Apple Messages for Business." They didn't use the iMessage name, presumably because it's a totally different service.
Looking at their approval process, it is involved because Apple is focused on their customers, who are the end-users. They want it to be "great." Just letting any random company connect to their API and blast Apple users isn't going to fly. Users would hate it, and it would destroy their trust in the channel. Spammers and scammers ruined SMS. Nobody wants that to happen to the other channels too, especially not Apple.
It looks like in iMessage for business, the phone’s user’s outbound messages show as dark grey (as opposed to normal iMessage and SMS/RCS which show outbound messages as blue and green respectively). I assume this is supposed to communicate that you’re talking to a different sort of entity, not a normal person on a phone.
Personally I don’t see why you’d care. My business isn’t trying to pretend to be a normal person using a phone, so why would it matter?
Then there’s a misunderstanding here. I have an iPhone. When I open my Messages app and view a conversation with someone with an iPhone, my outbound messages are blue and their messages to me are gray. When I open a conversation with a non-iPhone user, my outbound messages are green and their messages to me are still gray. Are you sure you’ve never received a incoming gray message? Because that doesn’t seem possible, unless you’re talking about something other than what I and the person you responded to are talking about.
As far as I can tell, the OP’s insistence that their service won’t send gray messages seems entirely disconnected from reality.
yes, what I originally meant was that Apple iMessage for Business has gray bubbles for the messages that you're sending (or the ones that would normally be blue)
Our goal behind this is to make it easier for people to conversationally interact with agents when they want to. Use cases like customer service or form-fill text backs would fit this. People are already getting SMS/RCS conversations in their iMessage inbox. We're simply making those conversations feel more human, conversational, and natural.
We're clear on what we want to do and the future we are building towards, which is an agentic future where agents can better assist and interact with humans on a more emotional and personal level.
We're not trying to be deceptive. In fact, whenever we deploy agents over iMessage, we make it very clear that they're speaking with an AI agent and that they can request human handoff if they want. The goal is to make conversations with AI agents feel more conversational and less automated.
We are solving a real user pain point and not promoting spam. Users want a more conversational interface when they're reaching out for customer support during off hours and businesses want a better medium to talk to their customers. There is value created on both sides. There is no reason for Apple to ban us.
I believe enough people have made it clear in this thread that Apple does already have reason to ban you. Whether or not you promote spam is not the issue, the issue is that Apple already has a feature built for this exact purpose; you can disagree with their approach—and maybe you’re right, I don’t know. But the idea that you won’t blocked by Apple for this is naïve.
While I do actually believe you’re trying to solve a genuine frustration people have. I disagree with your opinion that Apple has no reason to ban you.
Apple have always had a negative view on 3rd party APIs replicating their core OS functionality. And that’s exactly what you’re building here. You’re bypassing Apples approved process and selling those services. Even if you guarantee your customers wouldn’t abuse your service, it still defies Apples walled garden.
So Apple will find an excuse to shut you down. It might be a “security” update that changes their API and thus breaks your compatibility. It might be the ToS point others have raised regarding commercial use. It might even just be something as vague as “we detected unusual activity from your account” bullshit. But Apple will close you down just like they did with every other service that bypassed their walled gardens.
The only way you’d survive this is through lobbying. Like what Epic and others had to do. But there’s no way your startup would have the runway for an extended legal battle with Apple.
iMessage for business has a very long and restrictive registration process, gray bubbles instead of blue bubbles, and is inbound only. We're democratizing iMessage for businesses that have good intentions on helping their customers more but can't afford to go through the long approval process.
Right gray bubbles and validated businesses for commercial and blue for people. Apple business chat is not inbound only. 100% of your features including the ability to redirect voice calls to iMessage are already offered by Apple via an api and its integrated into every major crm
Apple Messages for Business does have requirements for their partner program, and they strictly enforce it, but would you really expect otherwise? I've talked to a few of their "MSP" partners, and it is true the process isn't as simple as integrating with an API. They do want you to fully support the entire feature set, and you have to prove it. How long it takes depends on your resources and commitment. It also isn't "inbound only," and does have a lot of features that iMessage doesn't. It's branded, without users having to download a contact card. No rate limits. Lots of advantages it seems.
Saying you are "democratizing" iMessage is like saying you are "democratizing" bike lanes by selling car owners access to drive the bike lanes. That's not what it's for, you don't have the authority to do that, and it's going to get someone in trouble at some point.
We're helping to support conversational customer support agents that can help users better during off-hours and scheduling assistants that can interact with and understand user requests better than current models over SMS/RCS. This is definitely not just spam but instead the future of conversational 2-way messaging.
I don't think anyone would be expressing the same level of concern if the conversations were only started/triggered by an inbound [to you] message.
Commingling things like cart abandonment and (actual, user-initiated) conversational messaging dramatically increases the risk that Apple takes action, from my point of view.
Yes, I agree, which is why we try to make the opt-in clear. Use cases like form-fill text back or cart abandonment after the user has opted in and noted down their number are what we primarily focus on
Thanks for the suggestion! Yes, the setup process is extremely long and requires a lot of documents from the side of the business haha. It's definitely one of our goals to create the Vercel for iMessage for Business. Also, for the iMessage app payloads, that's an awesome suggestion! We can work on building that.
We are not "disseminating unwanted messages". A lot of what we're doing (e.g. customer support or missed call text back) would be things that users would already be doing conversationally over iMessage.
You can't guarantee one of your customers isn't going to do that dissemination though, right? No spammer is going to sign up saying "I'm a spammer that just got banned from <other service>! Can you guys help?"
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