Congrats on the new position and future of Beeper. I think Automattic will be a great home and I've been impressed with what they've done with other projects as well.
Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper?
Now I just wish there was convenient way to screen my Beeper notifications without having to take my phone out of my pocket every time it buzzes...
Congratulations on your successful exit, but is it actually an exciting day for Beeper? Your product has been assimilated into something of a behemoth, whose goals (in spite of the text of your announcement) aren't necessarily those of a free and open internet through open communication protocols. Do you foresee a five-year timeline in which anti-monopoly legislation forces an opening up of the WhatsApp/iMessage/Messenger walled gardens? And if that were to happen, do you foresee Beeper still existing as a standalone product? Do you foresee there actually being a need for Beeper versus, say, a rejuvenated (and very open) Pidgin?
Yeah, neither do I...although I do prefer to be optimistic.
If you've followed Beeper, you know that roughly 50% of our product is already open source (https://github.com/beeper). You can run your own Matrix server and use our bridges, or self-host the bridges and use Beeper clients (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager). For all intents and purposes, Beeper _is_ the rejuvenated and very open Pidgin.
Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.
FWIW, Pidgin is still very much alive, we even had a release in February... Also not sure what "very open Pidgin" means as we're 100% GPLv2 but whatever.
I haven’t used pidgin in years but does that Teams plugin really work? I’ve seen projects try to integrate it into matrix and drop off because it was too hard.
Yep it's a great place to be especially when the CEO from a company punches down on a volunteer project on the day that CEO sold their company for 125 Million USD... /s
Also worth noting that some past Automattic acquisitions have also been open sourced, e.g. Pocket Casts back in 2022. There's a LOT of stuff in the >900 Automattic repos on Github: https://github.com/orgs/Automattic/repositories
Since now you have more resources, do you plan on open sourcing your whole solution, or will Beeper still be "half" open source? As far as I'm aware you still cannot use the Beeper client with your own self-hosted Matrix instance, and there's quite a lot of Beeper-only features that never became Matrix spec proposals. Is there a plan to make these features available to the whole Matrix ecosystem? Should I be worried that open source development of the mautrix bridges will cease, to focus on a commercial product?
The only thing the beeper client itself brings over your garden variety matrix client is a coat of paint. It’ll make group chats between you, your friend and the bot that’s forwarding everything look like a private chat. Or the chat between a phone # and you will look like the contact name and you and are talking (and if that contact changes so will the chat).
Basically beeper’s open source contribution right now feels like it’s hit a point of no return. I say this as someone who contributes to one of the bridges on my free time. I now know enough about it to feel confident that spending time contributing is time well spent _if_ you’re ok dispensing with the creature comforts the beeper app provides. What I mean by that is that you can always run bridges against your own matrix instance using any of the other open source clients.
It’ll be ugly as hell, but it will work. What we really need to worry about now are the platforms messing with our ability to take our data off of their systems and into our own. There are a million ways to otherwise hack the existing open source matrix clients to make them look however we want.
I think it's a bit naïve to suggest that Apple weren't coming after the Hackintosh exploits for their own unrelated reasons to be honest, and they absolutely knew what they were.
Those exploits have existed for 10-15 years, they are as old as the hackintosh community.
There is a difference between commercial exploitation and hobbyist usage - just like with legacy emulation vs pirating. And no, apple really hasn’t come down despite knowing it exists, and probably wouldn’t have without beeper.
It's really not fair to say that the scene was "just fine" up until Beeper went commercial. In those 10-15 years, there were a lot of changes intended to segregate Hackintoshes from Macintoshes.
> There is a difference between commercial exploitation and hobbyist usage
What damages would Apple claim? That people didn't buy iPhones to use their insular and potentially-illegal messaging service? That they abused the same resources that millions of unknowing users exploit for free daily?
It's Apple's call to pull the cord whenever they want, but it's also entirely their decision to keep iMessage a walled garden. It's impossible for you to redirect the vitriol towards Beeper when the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem.
They don't need to claim any damages, this is not a legal question, they can just close the loopholes.
> the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem.
No, the issue is not that they are "solving an Apple-designed problem" (whatever that problem may be), it's that they did it by leeching off of Apple's infrastructure.
Beeper's solution didn't overhelp themselves to Apple's infrastructure, though. They used iMessage like a legitimate user would, and then charged customers for the automation. If that's leeching, then thousands of iOS and Mac users around the world are also leeching off Apple's service too.
I won't contest that it's Apple's decision how to present iMessage. The idea that Beeper killed iMessage spoofing is a hysterical assertion though, when people will readily admit that it was Apple's double-standard keeping it alive in the first place.
Clearly he means that it's shitty for people who relied on the exploit, but without monetizing it. When Beeper started monetizing it, obviously Apple had to close it, and hobbyists suffered.
As someone that knows people that use Matrix bridges, I feel confident that 99% of those people would blame Apple and not Beeper. Either the exploit is bad and Apple would have shut it down regardless, or it's benign and Apple is trying to secure their manifest destiny. The monetization aspect of it feels completely tangential when there is no sanctioned "free" route anyways.
I really like Beeper, and congrats to them for getting acquired, but my first reaction is "aw damn how long until the parts I love about Beeper get incredible journey'd away".
The new android app is really good, the desktop app has always been a step up from other Element apps I've used (it is a distant fork, these days), I don't have iMessage, but it works great with Matrix and Signal and WhatsApp a ton of other "rarely used" apps I have.
Automattic very rarely shuts down any products they acquire, so I'd certainly be less concerned with them as the buyer compared to another company. (Their failure mode for acquisitions tends to be underresourcing them and letting them stagnate, not actually shutting them down.)
That link is probably more apropos than you intend, since Automattic also now owns Tumblr and has been a decent steward of it thus far, not shutting it down even though it undoubtedly loses lots of money. Instead, they made a good-faith effort to make it profitable, before putting it in minimal-cost maintenance mode when that didn't work out.
If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.
FWIW, Automatic has bought a few projects I use (PocketCasts, Simplenote) and seem to have been pretty good stewards. For Simplenote they actually reduced the monetization (although a decade after the acquisition they've started remonetizing in a lowkey way which is hopefully sustainable)
Seems that way. From the announcement:
"This is a big bet. Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans!"
They will likely dismantle Texts and focus on Beeper as it received more investment while taking the good of Texts. They will probably introduce Texts monetization model to Beeper though.
One app for Apple and another for Android kinda defeats the purpose of "all in one platform", wouldn't it?
Not my experience. I’ve tried (and am still trying) texts and not once I was able to have it just work. Constantly messages not showing up, accounts not loading, or something else missing. I’ve been submitting heaps of feedback to the Texts team.
It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription
I'm a pretty avid Texts user, and I both agree and don't… as much as I ~regularly run into hiccups of some kind, I feel they're pretty inevitable with this sort of thing, and the parts of Texts that _could_ be stable definitely are. The overall product feels polished and snappy IMO.
I've not had a day without issues. I don't know if this is something wrong with my account (instagram), but it's so unreliable that I can't trust that what I see in Texts is actually how the conversation looks like. Funnily enough, I ran Beeper in parallel as backup.
Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc.
(The iOS app is on a completely different level with it not even refreshing my messages most of the time until I disable and enable certain accounts again. But it's in TestFlight so I'll treat it as a beta and not expect too much polish yet)
I've religiously submitted feedback constantly to them, together with console logs and error dumps, but now my trial expired and I just can't justify paying for it in the current state :/
Yes, it mentioned Texts and Beeper teams will be merging under the Beeper brand. So essentially the end of Texts. Presumably will bring some parts of Texts app to Beeper that doesn't exist, but overall glad I abandoned Texts little while back, since while loved the idea, was very buggy with notifications delayed, or sometimes unable to send certain types of messages through certain services etc. And no pathway at the time for support on iOS. With all the EU stuff, there is a chance maybe people will be forced to open up more as would love to have a single app to manage all messaging but certainly far from hopeful that will come to be, at least without downsides.
Both of our apps are cross-platform. Both Texts and Beeper are available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Texts for iOS is in public beta, you can join the TestFlight: https://texts.com/install/ios
Came to ask the same, is that really true? They have a graphic on their homepage that certainly implies you can use it as a replacement for iMessage on iOS. I can't imagine anyone doing that if you can no longer actually reach anyone on iMessage.
> Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging.
If they had to get acquired, Automattic is most likely the best I could've hoped for. The backing of a large company might help Beeper get more formalized APIs since they depend on hidden APIs and hacks to do what they do.
I've been pretty impressed with their Pocket Casts acquisition from NPR to date, they open sourced the apps which was a great bit of community service.
Is Automattic big enough to achieve that? You'd think they would be making a pretty penny from Wordpress.com and Tumblr, but these days you wouldn't pick either one over the competition (Wix, Squarespace Threads, IG etc).
I still choose WP over Wix or SquareSpace when given the option. Self hosting a bunch of WP sites on a DigitalOcean instance and mirroring them all through CloudFlare is probably the cheapest way to run high traffic read-only sites. Toss in ServerPilot and you can spin up sites about as quickly as you could doing the Wix onboarding.
My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
In the past I would have argued against you, but the WP block editor has taken away most of the advantage that Wix/SquareSpace had. I've done the same as you now. You can buy a $3/mo Hetzner ARM box and run 100 WP sites on it.
Because you need either to write your own html or to use a static site generator, none of which are accessible solutions to normal people. WordPress (.com) is accessible to my grandmother.
It seems automattic is realizing that there is value in being "the established service that does what the giants are doing but isn't the giants". Personally and I think the HN crowd would agree with me, I see the value proposition in using Tumblr, beeper, WordPress over their competitors, simply because automattic has amassed a lot of consumer trust in not running things into the ground and making interesting things out of software that seems like it shouldn't be there.
That doesn't sound much considering they employ like 2k people, that's $100k per worker and considering they're tech workers that would just cover their pay
IMO hidden APIs are not quite safe to use. As a user, you are susceptible to be banned by the service when they find out that you have another active session in another country or city.
Some users on Reddit reported that they get suspended by Instagram because of Beeper.
Does anyone know how much Beeper raised, or how the economics of this exit work out? Just curious how this stacks up for everyone.
UPDATE: To date, Beeper had raised $16 million in outside funding, including an $8 million Series A from Initialized. Other investors include YC, Samsung Next, Liquid2Ventures, and angels Garry Tan, Kevin Mahaffey, Niv Dror, and the group SV Angel. [1]
Automattic basically consolidated the messaging aggregator market for $175M - I don't have any data but given they had 40 FTE between the two companies, I would guess not more than $10M in revenue across the two. Anyone understand the business rationale for wanting to own this market?
No matter what, as long as we continue to communicate with each other, messaging will never die. Individual messaging platforms will come and go but the idea of instant messaging has existed for about as long as the internet. $175M might be a steal if Beeper gets more mass market appeal.
Yes. Messaging will never die. Given that, why has it been so difficult for so many to get a toe-hold - and be sustainable - for so long?
I agree with the sentiment of your comment. However, I'm not sure it answers: what's the justification of this purchase? What does the buyer know that others have not?
Yeah, my first response was going to be that the paid messaging app business model hasn't worked that entire time. But what we've learned from Whatsapp is that there may be other ways to monetize (Whatsapp Business). Still not an obvious bet IMO but you're right that owning the messaging layer is valuable.
These apps are a gateway drug onto the Matrix protocol thereby eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies like WhatsApp (Meta).
What is the market size of people who care about "eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies"? And how will you monetize them?
Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.
This is cool. I always knew that Matrix could theoretically support anything chat related, but I had no idea that Beeper existed and a company was formed around the idea. This is actually exciting to me. It sounds stupid, but I can't wait to ditch the Apple ecosystem.
> Since then, Beeper has rolled out some security upgrades that change the way the app handles security and prevent Beeper itself from seeing unencrypted messages from Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted apps.
Screenshots of Beeper’s desktop and mobile apps.
Beeper has been talking about running on-device bridges rather than server-side bridges. So presumably that would allow encryption to the user's device, then re-encrypted on-device to Matrix then sent to Beeper.
I'm sorry, but that's not an answer. WhatsApp encrypts the message E2E, and then Beeper is bridging it into Matrix. The only way this would make any sense is if they've bridged E2E all the way through to ... the clients? Like, it doesn't make any sense.
They actually reverse engineered Apple's iMessage and released a POC. At the time it worked and demonstrated on device bridges being a possibility. The runs locally and then encrypts it client side before it reaches beeper services. This can be enabled for Signal under experimental settings already.
Well, now I regret that this comment sounds a bit dismissive, if another reply is true and they run the bridge locally. That's... impressive, and still surprising to think about.
I'd honestly be fine with accepting the compromise of hosted bridges, especially since they seem to offer the ability to self-host the bridges, while using Beepers' Matrix infra. Gives them some extra cred in my book.
They break the terms of service of said services, they started this with iMessages last year and Apple shut them down after it was an obvious break of ToS, and they keep doing the same with other IM services.
Haha I was thinking about that, but the joke is actually the reverse of this. When someone sends you a WUPHF, you receive it on every medium. Phone, email, fax, text. Beeper does the opposite, anytime you receive something on one of these platforms, it consolidates it to the Beeper app
I wonder how texts.com and the matrix apps will work together.
I’ve dug deep into both products —- texts.com basically is browser in browser app that pulls in messages from your logged in session, while matrix you have to deploy bridges that pulls messages and sync to a db in the cloud, and app then syncs to that.
Matrix was a bit pain in the ass to work with, and texts.com was more straight forward
Kind of surprising, 1- because Automatic is known for wordpress, what's the play with messaging? 2- They apparently acquired texts.com as well so clearly an area they are interested in.
I also would prefer not to see consolidation but also I imagine it's hard to make money on this kind of product so maybe that drove the decision to merge?
1. WordPress.com - Hosted SaaS for building websites. Very cheap to run, includes ads on free sites, and they sell users upgrades like custom domains or removing ads from their sites.
2. Jetpack - Services for self-hosted WordPress sites, like backups, social media integration, image CDN, antispam - mostly paid services, again very cheap to run.
3. WooCommerce - Open source ecommerce service. They sell add-ons like payment gateways, and have their own with a percentage fee of each transaction.
4. WPVIP - Enterprise and high-scale hosting service. Expensive ($25k/yr+) but worth it for large companies who run their business off it, like newsrooms and marketing sites.
To my knowledge, they're each independently profitable. Automattic also has a lot of additional smaller services which support these, and various Other Bets.
(I don't work at Automattic, but have many friends there.)
I am on an old Premium plan for the Day One journaling app. It was recently acquired by Automattic. Happy to keep paying, but concerned that Apple recently Sherlocked it.
The Apple Journal app is really really limited, and probably good enough for anyone who isn’t a serious journaler.
The only “innovative” feature the Apple Journal app has is access to private data that other apps don’t, to be able to come up with ML-based journalling recommendations. However, this feature is also exposed via an API, for other journalling apps to implement too.
So… if you’re not actually a journaler, the Apple Journal app is probably good enough for you.
If you actually journal, you’ll probably use Day One, because the set of compromises it makes best aligns with the majority of active journalers.
It upset me when they turned off iCloud sync in favour of their proprietary server sync, because they’re effectively asking me to trust them with my data. They finally implemented E2EE though, and it looks like it’s been implemented properly, so it’s less bothersome again.
It’s just a shame that Diarium refuses to implement high resolution images, or they’d actually be a viable competitor with the ability to self-host your E2EE DB sync.
A big chunk of news media online use wordpress instead of a custom CMS. So it's kind of the square space / wix / ghost for news media. I imagine Wordpress offers managed website instances for these companies.
Plus your messages will no longer be fully E2E encrypted. As per their FAQ (emphasis mine):
"For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the bridge, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol."
Directly underneath that they also say:
"Using native end-to-end encrypted chat apps independently may be more secure than connecting to them to Beeper"
In context your use of "no longer" is very confusing. This thread is talking about what might change in Beeper as a service, if you want to interject with information about how the service currently works there are other phrases that would have made that clearer.
You are correct. I was adding what I considered extra privacy-relevant information in response to GPs statement about WordPress sharing data with other companies, but the fact that I'd not heard of Beeper before unintentionally influenced my word choice.
I think you underestimate how painful wrangling the proliferation of chat apps can be!
Another application is resource-constrained devices. I love the netbook form-factor, but my little Intel N200 machine buckles under the strain of running what amounts to six web browsers simultaneously (because everything is Electron now) in order to receive notifications from all the chat networks I have people on.
It can also be nice to have a kind of buffer layer in between you and the chat network, which doesn't necessarily have your interests in mind. For example, Facebook Messenger's Android app somehow managed to wake up my phone's screen every time it received a notification, despite my turning off every related setting and permission I could find. So I put it behind Beeper and the problem is gone.
that FAQ is accurate but (rightly) doesn't cover high-security deployments.
if I'm running the bridges local-to-the-client (I am, on my McBook) it's not meaningfully any less e2ee. encryption happens in the matrix client (running on the laptop), the encrypted message is sent to the homeserver on localhost, the bridge (on localhost) grabs the encrypted message and decrypts it, then the bridge re-encrypts it and sends it to Whatsapp (or wherever). the content of the message is as secure over the wire with this approach as using first-party apps directly
if one hosts their own bridges they're person-in-the-middling themselves and should take all the necessary precautions. if they're using beeper's hosted options they have to delegate read/write ability to beeper (though I think the signal and imessage bridges might be device-local), and beeper is clear about that.
Bummer that you have to use and link Google messages for sms now. With the old app, it used the local sms database, though performance was never as good as other sms apps for some reason.
I guess it's good to join forces on this. However, I really hope the Texts app on Mac will survive this merge as it is lightyears ahead of the UI insult that Beeper is. I migrated away from Beeper to get rid of the ugly interface and in order to not depend on bridges on some server somewhere (yes, I can host them myself, but who wants to?) anymore.
For me that is a positive, not a negative. They have kept it alive, have not messed it up, and have not upset the apple cart with wild changes resulting in loss of compatibility with past versions. There can be cases where it's a negative but I think Automattic has been a near-perfect steward of Simplenote. I suppose my only concern as ever is how they keep it alive at their expense without freemium'ing and paywalling it to death. I assume they are just footing the bill for its continued operation right now.
Agreed re stewardship & hope for long-term viability. Operation + updates ~3x / year for the iOS, macos and Linux clients I use daily and also for Android and Windows. Freemium and paywalling hasn’t infringed on utility yet and they’ve kept the source code available and GPLv2
Many companies don't know when to stop and end up killing their products by introducing bloat which almost no one wants and costs money to develop/maintain. Simplenote works, is maintained, and does what it says on the name... more should be like them.
If all they do is keep Beeper running reliably and add new services as needed, then I'd say that's a good thing for most users.
Honestly, Automattic is probably one of the best exit routes for them. They have a history of being a good steward of their acquisitions. Compared to other companies that either shut them down or enshittify their products as a manner of course, it's valuable when a company can simply maintain their acquisitions alive and keep them running, at least giving them a chance to grow.
and they're rewriting Beeper in PHP as a WordPress plugin!
Kidding of course, but on a serious note what's the strategic value of Beeper here to Automattic?
From the post:
> Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans! I’m really excited about the future of chat
Why? Are they trying to eliminate a competitor (standard big tech co move)? Do they think texts.com doesn't have a bright future? I'm not trying to be negative (in fact I have a high opinion of Automattic due to their great open source work), just trying to figure out why this makes sense for them.
Is chat a diversification effort for Automattic, or does it tie into their overall strategy somehow?
Thank you! What does Beeper bring to the table that texts.com doesn't or can't? Is this elimination of a competitor or is it a merging of two mostly complementary things?
(to clarify, I don't mean "elimination of a competitor" with a value jodgment on it btw. It isn't inherently a good or a bad thing, just depends on lots of variables)
Smart of Beeper to accept an acquisition/exit as soon as possible before their product gets further eroded by non-public APIs they're reliant on. Tough to build a business where at any time your product can get wiped out by Apple/Meta.
My theory is Beeper being a sacrificial lamb so Google/Samsung can cry to EU about iMessage. ”See they’re restricting this poor little startup from competing! Pay no attention to the funding coming from Samsung, this is definitely a poor underdog of a company!”
I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics…
> Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper
It certainly sounds like…
Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage (brand aweness is only good if it means people actually want to use your product, not active distrust it), so the friend and early investor CEO of Automattic saved their failing personal investment by bailing them out and letting automattic foot the bill.
Nice having a friend CEO, huh?
I mean, you’ve got to hope/believe the other folk at automattic did their due diligence, but it does look like automattic is paying the bills for their CEO to bail out their friends.
That would make them gullible and seems pretty shady unless they really do have some astonishing reason to expect this to pay off… or they got it dirt cheap, in my opinion.
That's the script but reality is not exactly as the script says.
There are a lot friend and family members of so-and-so who are "worth" a few million dollars and that money was largely a gift. They largely spend a lot of time pretending to be "founders", "advisors" and "angels" but no, they got lucky.
Not everything is like that, but there's quite a lot of that within the billions of someone else's money's ocean that flushed SF during the last +20 years.
We don't actually know that it is 125 m, that's just hearsay. And we don't know how they were paid, with cash or shares, or something else.
My guess would be that the real number is very different, that this is just a matter of them hiring the Beeper people and getting the brand along with it. Then someone leaks the 125 m figure to the press, to the benefit of both Beeper and Automattic. Makes the latter look rich and the former successful.
Or maybe they actually did give $125 m to a broke startup without revenues or a working product, that was about to go bankrupt. But that does seem gullible.
From 2005 to the end Yahoo’s role in the SV ecosystem seemed to be the people who would buy any company if the founder had the right connections, for instance the son of a private equity lord who licensed a worthless patent from Stanford that Yahoo paid $100+ for.
It is a magical way to turn “anybody” into a successful founder or VC if they’ve got the right connections and in fact you can create both ex-nihilo in one transaction.
If you read the newspapers you’d never find out that 70% of acquisitions achieve their goals. A lot of that is you hear more about the ones that fail and not the ones that succeed. The ones that fail give many people the impression that there is nothing rational at all about how acquisitions happen in corporate America.
Every target was missed and financially the deal was a failure.
The board then stopped any further acquisitions.
I would guess that texts / beeper were cheap and that Matt is looking at a very very long time to profit. He was once a fan of the 'pizza/team' ratio that Bezos/Amazon pushed, so maybe that's where he is looking.
> Beeper was in the bin after the beeper mini fiasco, and resulting massive brand damage
I don't think that's true at all. I'd never heard of Beeper before their integration with iMessage and the fact that it was disabled by Apple was seen as a negative on Apple, not Beeper. They raised their profile, now they're cashing out.
It wasn't, they genuinely believe in Beeper, and the long term plan was rather to become the leading chat app in their own right, with users communicating over the Beeper protocol.
A bit of pedanticism here - it's not the Beeper protocol, it's the Matrix protocol. Beeper is built on top of Matrix (using bridges that you could host on your own server if you wanted).
What i meant was that the idea was that people would eventually stop using e.g. whatsapp on Beeper and just use Beeper, since eventually all their friends would also have the beeper app installed. Might sound a bit optimistic but there it is.
Except there are a lot of Beeper-only Matrix spec implementations that aren't available for everyone else. In other words, no other Matrix homeserver or client can benefit from the features Beeper has.
I'm confused, because it legally sounds like the opposite right? All these platforms are legally going to be requested to open up sooner or later because of recent EU rulings. Perhaps Beeper just ran out of runway? They thought they'd be making money in December with their iMessage move, and now it's April?
If all of these services fully open up there will be 100% free and/or open source clients available and Beeper won't be able to compete. Before all of these walled gardens we have tools like Pidgin and if they open up those will be viable again.
To be fair, almost all networks that Pidgin could connect to (Jabber/XMPP being a notable exception) used proprietary protocols, and their operators heavily discouraged third-party interoperability.
The difference is that there wasn't any way to do robust hardware attestation at the time (which is what Apple does to frustrate Beeper-like iMessage interoperability), so the reverse engineers usually won.
The bridges are already free and open source and I don't see my friends and family racing to get them running on their laptops. Pidgin is great, but something needs to be running on a server or you don't get notifications. And without notifications, what's the point of a messaging app?
That's a bit of my point. At any time your business model can get interrupted when you're doing things "that the big company isn't, but holds the gate to".
Big company might get more aggressive and make your life harder developing. Big company might get less gatekeeper and open up the gates so now you have more competition. Big company might do it themselves and add interoperability and now your product is almost useless.
It's a business model that works to get to some point, and then exit as soon as possible, IMO.
They are running Matrix bridges in the cloud for people that do not want to self host. Don't think the iMessage stunt was really planned. It was an opportunity to get visibility. Should rather thank them: they put regulatory pressure on apple.
With all the new regulations coming out of the EU, I think that if Beeper stays around long enough they might actually live to see the day where these networks have official APIs.
I wonder what the angle is here. Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices with locking down their computing devices and platforms? Do they even have the resources for that? Or is this just an acquihire and abandonment of that whole messaging thing?
Beeper is a unified messaging app that supports multiple services, the iMessage thing was a separate app called Beeper Mini.
I think Beeper will continue to be useful to people, regardless of whether it supports iMessage or not. Obviously, supporting iMessage would be a big plus, but from what I gather, many people use it for other services.
This idea has existed and been implemented for a very long time- Pidgin was the first client I can remember that would try to bridge across various chat networks. You likely are on 14 different chat "networks" already- you might not think of them as chat networks, but as apps with chat functionality.
Just real quick off the top of my head I can name a bunch:
FB
Instagram
Twitter
WhatsApp
Telegram
Signal
Gchat/whatever google calls the chat in gmail these days
kik
sms
Irc
Discord
This is just a matter of keeping all those separate apps, or consolidating them into one single one. Back in the early 2000s when I did indeed have friends across AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc... I did use an all in one app to consolidate everything.
I believe EveryBuddy was the first multiprotocol client, but then Gaim got revived and took a bunch of the work the EveryBuddy developers did. As time went on Gaim became Pidgin, and EveryBuddy became Ayttm.
Not a user but I imagine it's like the blackberry model where texts, messenger, whatsapp, and whatever else all go to the same inbox rather than having to check 40 different apps. I really wish that idea would come back.
Rarely a single user would use 14 different chat networks. For example for me, I have two WhatsApp accounts (number for my current country + home country), Twitter, Instagram to chat with old friends, Facebook for some relatives, LinkedIn for networking, Signal to chat with my lawyer, Telegram for hobby communities.
I simply wouldn't talk to a lot of people in my life if I had to use a different app for each.
We also aim to be the best chat app, period. So even if you are using only a single account on a single network, we want to supercharge your chat experience with AI, snippets, good search, labels, advanced notification options, and much more.
> feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks.
You do not need to be on all 14 to find Beeper useful! Even if you only use a few you might still want them to be together in a single app. As to why you might be on several different chat networks, you might have different friend or family circles that use different chat networks and may have failed to convinced them to move to a single one or, like me, may think it is a bad use of time to even attempt to convince them to. I'm using Beeper for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Discord and it's great!
I would imagine most people are not using all 14, but some subset. If you have friends and family that are not all on the same services, having a unified inbox to talk to them all without having to remember who you talk to on what is convenient.
I use SMS for talking to friends in the US. I use WhatsApp for talking to most international people. I use Telegram to talk to Australians. I use Line to talk to some people in Asia.
What pricing? I've been on Beeper for a few months and i've not seen any.
Ironically i joined because of iMessage, which got almost immediately ripped from me because Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple (... sorry, annoyed). When i joined the service was great, but the last couple months (basically since the iMessage drama) it has been weirdly unstable. I see a lot of encrypted messages (as in, the message doesn't receive properly and all the receiver sees is "message encrypted"), images failing, gifs failing, generally bad behavior when connection is poor, etc.
I was interested when i joined because i thought they were just going to offer a service i could pay for, like Kagi. Yet now this feels like another enshittification just waiting to happen.
Not having to use multiple messaging apps. Some people would pay for this convenience. i.e They support several messaging apps so I don't have to tell peopl thag I don't use WhatsApp now.
Yes, and you can get most of the Matrix bridges that Beeper uses and host the service yourself.
Beeper is just a skin over Matrix, and they are hosting and managing the bridges for you. So that when any of protocols they support breaks because the other company changes something (or intentionally breaks things to stop connections from clients they don't want), Beeper fixes it rather than you having to wait for the open source community to do so and you implement that fix. Which who knows how long either scenario will take.
Paying for Beeper is not having to manage the self hosting, which many are not willing to do. Because as with most open source solutions, it's not very simple and is intimidating for many. Not to mention having some box open to the internet, and having to maintain security updates for that box.
I would love for libpurple to come back and make these things relatively simple. But the reality is that companies have walled off their gardens to control the experience, and many other reasons ranging from greed to security to spam mitigation.
I have a paid irccloud account entirely for the goal of being able to talk to Slack users without dealing with the Slack client(s).
My IM situation is only currently tolerable because all of my frequent contacts are either via WhatSapp or twitter DM.
Even having the handful you do would be enough to make -me- want to consolidate.
(this is not at all meant to be an argument that -you- should want it, but I think is at least a good case that there will be people out there in your -situation- that will)
How much of this is a long-term bet that the US DOJ's antitrust case against Apple (at least the iMessage-specific argument) will result in the forced opening up of the platform, such that Beeper (now Automattic) will sustainably function?
It would be very surprising if they forced Apple to let competitors use their protocol and servers. Worst case scenario they might force them to let any chat app on the iPhone include SMS, that's the only real advantage that the first-party Messages app has over competitors.
Is it really anti-trust if you reverse engineered something (deliberately breaking the ToS of said service - Apple can suspend your accounts for doing so) while said service ToS, a contract you sign when you use their service, explicitly forbids reverse engineering?
A more succinct question would be "can antitrust laws override the ToS?" The answer is "yes". The FTC can even make Apple change its ToS through a consent decree (and possibly through other mechanisms as well). A ToS can't shield you from antitrust enforcement. In this case, it might even hurt Apple, especially if it can be shown that Apple doesn't consistently apply this rule.
But let's say it's not antitrust, which is what your question is trying to imply. Apple will still need to answer to the other ways it makes third-party messaging apps worse on iOS - automatic offloading and share extensions being two examples.
At some point, it makes sense to join forces for Beeper and texts.com to create a unified messaging app. The idea was realized a number of times, but I hope we’ll see the best it’s iteration now.
The hopeless romantic in me is hoping the real reason Automattic acquired them was actually to get some useful developer documentation written for the Beepy.
Interesting, I think the WordPress docs are pretty decent. There's always room for improvement, but I love how it links and shows you the source code. They could definitely expand documentation coverage for plugins and stuff though, that's a little lacking.
I was thinking about this after seeing the announcement.
It's fine for open integrations like Matrix/IRC but all other are with proprietary services provided by for-profit companies.. that usually doesn't go well in the long run (e.g. Twitter clients).
It seems to be a really high risk investment. I wonder how they plan to pull this off if/when they start to grow and attract more attention.
Sounds like they're planning to still run the Beeper service, perhaps merged with Texts. I'd bet they'll still use Matrix, it seems to be the very core of how Beeper works.
I dislike that third-party advertising network stuff too, hopefully we can get rid of it soon and replace with Blaze, no calls to third-party ad networks.
Honestly given how dim of a view Apple takes of others tearing down their artificial walls, having the (legal) backing of a large company might be a good thing... assuming they don't shut it down of course.
You mean the other chat apps, right? Or do they do something other than chat as well?
In any case I'm not sure if I'd call their iMessage thing a PR stunt (okay, the tweets were likely PR), I'm just happy they support as many standards as they can. (I'm also not sure if my original comment was seen as wrong or controversial judging by the downvote)
Sure, but Automattic also bought Texts.com... this seems to be part of a bigger strategy on their part.
Even friends don't spend $150M on friends for no reason. Automattic is doing well, but they don't have $150M to drop (plus future salaries, hosting, etc) just to help someone save face.
I've said this before, but Automattic's catalogue of products reads like an elephant graveyard of past internet fads.
I view an acquisition like this as a relative death knell, but only insofar as we have seen unified messaging attempted time and again only to fail due to combinations of social pressures and anticompetitive technical choices. Beeper will be absorbed into another also-ran messaging platform that won't be able to compete with whatever communities already have critical mass.
However, as far as exits go, it sort of seems like the best possible outcome for the folks at Beeper, so congrats.
That's unfair to Automattic I think. I think they're really good to maintaining the products with less relative harm. Yes, I know the recent change in terms to feed their data to AI (you can pay them to avoid it).
I'm still hoping they can revamp Tumblr but atleast they keep the lights on.
I think what they're saying is, Automattic buys products that are on the way out, not on the way up. So while Automattic might be great stewarts of has-beens, is that a good fit for Beeper, a company in a market that demands up and comer-ness?
I find it interesting that so many people want to unify all their messages. For me, I like having different apps that I can check with different frequency. I am glad that I can get my iMessages immediately but that LinkedIn messages don't get delivered to me until I open the app/website. I have literally never had an issue where I didn't get a message in time because it was sent via the wrong platform. People who need to reach me urgently know how to do so.
The problem arise when your friends can text you on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter, Bsky, Mastodon, Skype, Slack, Email.
It's not that you don't receive messages but that you need to keep installed 14 different applications on your phone or get used to 14 different UIs to do the same thing.
The major problem is the WhatsApp vs Telegram split for me, if all my friends were on Telegram I wouldn't really need it.
Self hosted Matrix sounds like a good solution and I'm happy with managing my own server - but the UI quality (Elements) is just not on par with Telegram, so I'm still there.
I agree with you, it's nice to relegate spam to Linkedin / Email, but that can be achieved with marking contacts as friends vs random people and having a unified messaging platform.
Yes, this is exactly it. And in an age where people are terminally on their phones, having 14 different apps that can all launch notifications from the background as long as they are installed and you are logged in is perhaps fine. On a Mac or PC in particular it would be nice to have other options around aggregating these messages in a single interface as we used to be able to do 20 years ago.
For sure. I just wonder who these people are and how large the market is, since none of my friends/family are in it. It's possible this is much more popular on Android, or outside the US (perhaps because they use WhatsApp more than iPhone-using Americans). But if this is the case, I wonder how much they will be able to charge, since Android users are less monetizable than iPhone users, and the US has a good chunk of the highly-monetizable mobile audience.
For me, my unified workflow is my phone, which I have tuned to receive notifications from various platforms in various different ways (push, pull, manual). Even if I could tune Beeper to do the same, I would prefer not to have to duplicate my effort in setting preferences, which I've already set at the OS level.
When you send an SMS text message, there's a understanding (and therefore, an expectation) that it goes directly to the recipient's phone/smartwatch and that they can reply immediately; i.e.: it's a system for high-priority (and therefore highly-intrusive) communications - this is why people generally don't give-out their mobile-phone number to strangers.
Unless you go to the effort to tell people that you route your SMS messages to e-mail and therefore reply in-your-own-time (hours/days/weeks delay), the people trying to contact you aren't going to expect that: they're going to expect you to reply much sooner. I'd be out of a job if my boss' panicked SMS messages about how our prod website is down went to email instead of my phone.
-------------
Any kind of "universal" messaging platform that anyone can use to send anyone a message needs to allow recipients to set how maximially intrusive those messages are - but senders might also want a way to set how minimally intrusive those messages are. Those requirements cannot be easily reconciled in a way that protects privacy and prevents abuse while also allowing anonymous and unsolicited messages or senders. So far the "best" way to do that today is by segregating senders (not recipients) by system (e.g. private SMS for high-intrusive; less-private-but-guarded e-mail for low-intrusive; public social-media, etc).
Consider services that tried to work-around that, such as LinkedIn's paid messaging feature - which didn't exactly go very well.
I like having apps I can check with different frequencies. What I don't like is when I have two apps that I have to check regularly. Thankfully, almost everyone I talk to regularly uses Signal, but there's those few stragglers who stubbornly cling to SMS.
You can't receive messages via iMessage without disclosing your phone-number or Apple ID e-mail address to the sender. Furthermore, doing anything that changes your phone-number (e.g. using a local SIM abroad instead of roaming) invalidates your phone-number with iMessage, but because most people use iMessage via phone-numbers it means you're forced to use roaming ($$$) when travelling, and so on and so on.
So long as iMessage is sold as "better SMS" then that's fine, as it inherits SMS's limitations (above) - but it isn't a portable, platform-agnostic, geography-neutral, messaging platform, and I'd rather people didn't try to use it as such.
I imagine this is possible, but as someone who has tuned these settings in the OS-level notification preferences, why would I want to do it all over again within an aggregator app?
I think the flavor of the answer says a lot. A vague negative answer will make me suspicious, as will one based in good intentions and moonbeams. But a negative answer rooted in principle and mentioning specific choices is one I'll take more seriously.
Enshittification is the default path for leaders with MBA brain, but some still manage to avoid it.
