Beeper acquired by Automattic (opens in new tab)

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...

Hopefully a more "exciting day" for the users than when Pebble sold out to Fitbit...

> Exciting day for Beeper!

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.

Congratulations! Must be an absolute thrill

Automattic rescued Pocket Casts from NPR, and made them open source. Tumblr from Verizon. In general they're very good stewards.

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.)

>incredible journey'd away

I'm calling Webster's right now.

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)

Both Texts and Beeper are in active development while we work hard behind the scenes to combine the best parts of both under the Beeper brand.

So we'll only have Beeper on every platform.

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?

The bottom line of the post says as such (sorry if it was edited in after you posted)

"For Texts.com users... [...] Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!"

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.

Beeper is cross platform. They have an app for iOS and Mac.

Does anyone know how the texts.com iMessage integration works?

EDIT - It’s macOS only. Nothing new to see here, I’m afraid.

Yes, 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.

Merging the 2 will be interesting since they take opposite approaches? Texts doesn't use bridges.

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).

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.

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.

Where is the $175M number from?

Sounds like that was a time period where it was vaporware?

Ditching Apple is not stupid at all. There's plenty of options that are less hostile overall and provide more choice.

See also: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qcH2wgRLiV8

Thank you!

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.

Here's how it works: https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/how-beeper-android-works/

Probably on device encryption before anything is sent through their servers

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

For once, they are probably not acquiring users but the tech & the brand (fighting with iMessage was a genius marketing move).

Automattic owns a few properties other than Wordpress now. They also own Pocketcasts (podcast client), Tumblr, and Day One (journalling software).

Automattic is primarily four core businesses:

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.)

Pretty sure plenty of small commercial websites still host on wordpress.com. That and selling their user data to OpenAI.

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.

How does Automattic make money? Do they get paid to look the other way when people’s Wordpress blogs get spammed by SEO links?

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"

https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encryp...

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.

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.

> sometimes acquires companies and does nothing

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.

Our three missions are to democratize publishing, commerce, and messaging. This fits in the third.

Automattic also acquired Pocket Casts, so they don't only own things that fit into the WP ecosystem.

I would not be surprised if this was their plan from day 1:

(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.

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?

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 agree it must be a engineering nightmare, a whatsapp/imessage update and your app is gone.

> Is Automattic going to help them fight a legal battle against Apple’s practices

I'm no MBA, but it might be better business strategy to pile up a million dollars and light it on fire

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.

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.

I think it's about connecting people on 14 different chat networks not a single user on 14 networks?

> 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.

It's exhausting having different apps.

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.

> I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks.

That's the point, the vision is that you should only have to be on Beeper.

yes and sales and regular users too

linkedin, fb, ig, slacks, google stuff and so on - it adds up quickly

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.

I’m not familiar with their business model - what value are you getting by paying for a messaging app?

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.

I'm surprised Whatsapp hasn't gone after them yet. They are famous for going after small independant open source maintainers for similar projects.

I'm sure that's a non-zero factor. Plus Beeper has a lot of name recognition due to their epic standoff

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?

Given how bad the WordPress documentation is, it's a weird hope to have from that company.

Well if you consider private APIs/impersonating 1st party clients weird hacks then yes, none of these services have official 3rd party client support.

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.

Matt/Automattic is good at keeping things open source. On top of the work on WordPress and their plug-ins, when they acquired PocketCasts, they made the apps open source: https://blog.pocketcasts.com/2022/10/19/pocket-casts-mobile-...

Oh, you really should not.

- Never trust ANY money-making company IMPLICILTY.

- Go to https://apple.wordpress.com

See the cookie banner

Click View Partners in the bottom left

Browse that list, check the details

Find the company that Matt has sold your data to for over 11 years.

The data Matt sells is for every user and every visitor not just on wordpress.com (who clicks Agree, but we know most people do)

Are you still happy?

Beeper does plenty besides PR stunts (which seems to have paid off)

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.

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.

> elephant graveyard of past internet fads.

This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.

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.

That's a perfectly valid workflow, but it would certainly be nice for people who do want a unified workflow to be able to have that option.

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.

I agree. I even like to silence notifications on different messaging apps depending on my focus mode on iOS/macOS.

And what prevents these aggregator apps from having different settings for each network?

We're still here and still supporting tons of stuff... https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...

Pidgin is great

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39981276.

“We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.

Acquisitions go mostly wrong and the buyer usually kills of side projects - $200 gone.