WordPress.com owner acquires Beeper, giving it two chat apps to rule them all

Beeper, the multinetwork messaging app that recently gave up on trying to engineer around Apple's walled-off iMessage service, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. It is now open to everyone and has a completely revamped Android app.

 

All of Beeper's workers will join Automattic and will continue operating as an independent team, according to a press release. Eric Migicovsky, creator of the Pebble smartwatch and co-founder of Beeper, will become Automattic's head of messaging. Beeper and Texts.com, acquired last year by Automattic, will work together.

 

Given that Texts.com provides a similar "all your chats in one place" function but also an iMessage bridge using an app you run on your own Apple computers, it's likely that Beeper and Texts will consolidate into one platform that more closely hews to the "all" part of the companies' mission statements.

 

Migicovsky said in a statement that he's known Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg "for years," and that Beeper is "extremely excited to have the support of an organization known for supporting fantastic open source projects like WordPress, WooCommerce, Pocket Casts, and Simplenote."

 

On the same day, Beeper announced that it is dropping its waitlist to use the service. Beeper claims that 115,000 have helped test its apps and that it will now invite 466,000 people on its waitlist onto the service. Beeper's Android app, recently rebuilt from the ground up, is also out of beta and is now publicly available, and it can now set up networks without using a desktop.

 

I've used Beeper throughout its beta years and find it quite useful, especially for messages on networks that I rarely check: X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I'd used the iMessage service without issue when it was based on cloud-hosted Macs. I tested out Beeper's clever-but-fraught native iMessage service, was caught out by its up-and-down battle with Apple engineers, and have returned to keeping SMS separate from other chats.

Should a Texts.com-like offer to more easily run a little Beeper server on an always-on Mac arrive, I'd likely take it up. There is a compile-your-own option for Beeper's iMessage bridge, but I'm not hurting for free-time projects.

 

Beeper declared that it was giving up on its goals of opening up encrypted iMessage access to everyone in late December 2023. Yet it may have helped push regulators to take a deeper look at Apple's members-only messaging. The Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against Apple, filed last month, takes pains to note the perception issues around iPhones' green bubbles.

Apple has pledged to support enhanced RCS features for SMS messages sent to non-Apple devices. The company avoided having to open up its iMessage protocol by the European Digital Markets Act because iMessage was deemed not influential enough in business communications.

 

Listing image by Beeper