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.
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.
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.)
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)
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?
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)
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.
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
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!"
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.
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.
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 :/
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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...
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
309 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThe 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.
I'm calling Webster's right now.
If an "indie service" I loved had to get bought by somebody, Automattic would be among my top choices.
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?
Because you actually are using WhatsApp?
> Some people would pay for this convenience
Some remember when this used to be widespread and free: https://www.pidgin.im/
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.
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)
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.
Publicity stunt to raise their visibility in hopes of acquisition. Today’s news shows it worked.
From the article, not a rumor.
They both look verify similar in their features. Maybe texts.com for the Apple Ecosystem and Beeper for the Android one ?
After all, Beeper just released their new version of the app for Android.
"For Texts.com users... [...] Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!"
EDIT - It’s macOS only. Nothing new to see here, I’m afraid.
You can. You run a "router" on your Mac, which allows iMessage interop without the protocol hacking that doomed Beeper.
One app for Apple and another for Android kinda defeats the purpose of "all in one platform", wouldn't it?
It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription
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 :/
> 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.
So we'll only have Beeper on every platform.
(1) Create a product which relies on non-public APIs which can be disabled at any time.
(2) Generate lots of press visibility.
(3) Sell itself to some gullible org before the whole thing comes crashing down.
> 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.
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.
A "CEO friend" isn't going to give you $125m out of the goodness of their heart so some random shareholders can save face.
Worst case, the business fails, everyone happily moves on.
How do you think automattic is funding this transaction? There are underwriters. And underwriters need rigorous dd to justify $1,000 let alone $125m.
Even if it's an all-stock deal, a transaction like this would need board approval, and a good board needs ... rigorous dd.
Did it work? No, but I don't know of any examples of an entrepreneur who bats 1000
Matt promised targets.
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.
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.
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.
When a similar acquisition was made a year ago? And it perfectly aligns with a their stated thesis that texting becomes a CLI in the future?
The more successful an entrepreneur, the more allergic they are to spending money
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.
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.
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.
Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
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)
My prediction is that by 2030 Wordpress will be just as popular as it is today :)
Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.
My own personal site is static HTML mirrored against Cloudflare, I do definitely see the advantage when it's there :)
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.
Also they hire all around the world where $100k/yr is the exception and not the norm.
Some users on Reddit reported that they get suspended by Instagram because of Beeper.
See also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8
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
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.
Automattic is a fantastic home for us. We needed a home (or new investors) to keep working on Beeper.
Is the added investment necessary to scale out specific features, or is it to address challenges related to profitability?
What parts are closed source? Are there any plans to open them up?
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.
Although I'm the plugin's developer, so I may be a little biased :D
Shitty to whom, on a personal level? Tim Cook? People really aren't kidding when they say HN is the orange Macrumors, huh?
> at the direct expense and risk of a non-profit community built around it.
I don't know where you learned the definition, but iMessage is not a non-profit product. It's not even an open one.
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.
Serial spoofing is, but Apple cracks down on that too: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/t9p5ff/psa_usin...
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.
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.
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...
Yes, all of Beeper is built on top of Matrix.
March 9, 2021: Paid $120
June 2, 2021: It's your turn to start using Beeper
June 10, 2021: Invite code for upcoming Beeper onboarding
July 2, 2021: totally locked up now
At which point, I had a few more back and forth emails (looks like about 27 from 7/2/2021 - 7/16/2021), and finally gave up.
Good for them to get that exit. They put a lot of work into it, but it seemed like an impossible problem to solve.
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]
1: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...
I'm no MBA, but it might be better business strategy to pile up a million dollars and light it on fire
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.
https://github.com/Automattic/simplenote-electron
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.
Beeper were not important enough to be listed: https://audrey.co/
"Our privacy policy and terms of service remain the same, though they may change in the future."
Reminder: wordpress.com shares data with 851 other companies.
"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"
https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...
https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager
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.
They usually call it E2B (end to bridge)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
If I send someone a text and they receive it in their email inbox because that's their preference, what difference does it make to me as the sender?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.
I'm still hoping they can revamp Tumblr but atleast they keep the lights on.