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 wonder if the plan is to merge Beeper and Texts.com.
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.
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?
I hope not, have you used both apps? Texts is much more stable and easy to use than Beeper in my experience.
The Beeper codebase is also in a pretty bad state.
Didn't they just do a ground-up rewrite?
What information is this based on?
Texts.com runs locally, Beeper runs bridges.
Beeper is cross platform. They have an app for iOS and Mac.
OP didn't day Mac. They were presumably referring to Apple's main platform, iOS.
I replied before the OP edited the comment substantially.
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
Does anyone know how the texts.com iMessage integration works?
EDIT - It’s macOS only. Nothing new to see here, I’m afraid.
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.
They have a graphic on their homepage that certainly implies you can use it as a replacement for iMessage on iOS.
You can. You run a "router" on your Mac, which allows iMessage interop without the protocol hacking that doomed Beeper.
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, 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.
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!"
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.
Exciting day for Beeper! It all started here on HN 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848278
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...
Are you planning to continue using Matrix to underpin Beeper?
Yes, all of Beeper is built on top of Matrix.
Do you plan on continuing contributing to open source, or is Automattic going to dictate your business plan and Beeper will be enshittified?
“We plan to be enshittified,” said nobody, ever.
That's a pessimistic take to say that Automattic will close up Beeper and make it a worse a product.
that's a naive take to think there's no chance they will
every. company. wants. money.
it's the SAME, EVERY.SINGLE.TIME
That's indeed what a purpose of companies are. Organizations that do not want money are registered as non-profit.
I think it's more of a criticism of asking the question as if that was ever going to be given as an answer, regardless of what the actual answer is.
in what scenario do you see anyone giving the negative answer truthfully?
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.
Laxative manufacturer?
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.
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.
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?
50% of our product is already open source
What parts are closed source? Are there any plans to open them up?
Congratulations! Must be an absolute thrill
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.
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.
Such an app/service would not work towards the interests of message recipients - but the message senders. Those interests are not aligned.
Why are they not aligned?
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, I can understand the appeal a bit more on a computer. On my phone, it's a problem that's already been solved at the OS level.
I agree. I even like to silence notifications on different messaging apps depending on my focus mode on iOS/macOS.
iOS/Messages is almost here. You can mute certain conversations, and set certain contacts as MVPs. But it has a few gaps w.r.t. focus modes.
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.
And what prevents these aggregator apps from having different settings for each network?
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 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.
"Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years. He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. "
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.
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...
What do you mean "no longer"? Beeper has always behaved like this.
No longer as in for a new user that currently uses individual apps.
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.
You can host the bridges yourself:
Still won't be E2E as per their FAQ
How does Automattic make money? Do they get paid to look the other way when people’s Wordpress blogs get spammed by SEO links?
They provide hosting for Wordpress blogs, and a number of their backend tools have premium versions, such as backups, etc.
WooCommerce is one.
They run a proprietary SaaS called jetpack that injects a lot of tracking into otherwise self hosted wordpress blogs.
I hope they don't change the pricing after this. I've been using Beeper for a few years now.
I’m not familiar with their business model - what value are you getting by paying for a messaging app?
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.
so I don't have to tell peopl thag I don't use WhatsApp now
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/
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.
Yeah, having all of your messaging in one place is amazing. Especially since they support a decent long tail of DM services as well.
I use iMessage, messenger/IG, WhatsApp, Snapchat and slack. Probably not much value for my specific use case.
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 paid $120 up front. I'm worried they'll switch to a monthly subscription after this.
Since texts.com has subscription and rumor says that they are merged, just a matter of time.
Our teams and products will merge
From the article, not a rumor.
Beeper thought it was good idea to piss off Apple…
Publicity stunt to raise their visibility in hopes of acquisition. Today’s news shows it worked.
If you haven’t heard of Beeper before, welcome! We make a universal chat app – one app to send and receive messages on 14 different chat networks.
I feel a little exhausted just thinking about needing to be on 14 different chat networks.
What are people using that for?
Marketing / customer service type chat stuff across networks?
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.
Trillian was my first client. It looks like it still exists and now runs on a subscription model:
Also looks like it no longer connects to multiple networks, but uses their own now.
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.
I wish that idea came back with some sort of iron hard contract protecting user data in perpetuity.
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.
And you don't have to convince everyone in your life to switch to The Messenger. You can just have it.
yes and sales and regular users too
linkedin, fb, ig, slacks, google stuff and so on - it adds up quickly
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 think it's about connecting people on 14 different chat networks not a single user on 14 networks?
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.
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 :)
WordPress.com isn't self-hosted, it's the freemium cloud version comparable to Wix and Squarespace.
Automattic isn't making any money on the open-source version that can be hosted anywhere.
You’re right, that distinction’s very important. I’d never recommend WordPress.com, I’m just a fan of Wordpress the OSS.
Automattic does like $200~$300M in revenue.
And profits?
Maybe.
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.
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.
The Verge reports:
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.
How?
Probably on device encryption before anything is sent through their servers
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.
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.
It's a journalist's take, they probably mean that Bleeper doesn't phone home the messages from the client.
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.
Wow, that's ... surprising.
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.
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.
incredible journey'd away
I'm calling Webster's right now.
Welcome to our incredible journey: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
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 rescued Pocket Casts from NPR, and made them open source. Tumblr from Verizon. In general they're very good stewards.
Oh wow, thank you for posting this! I did not realize that they open sourced Pocket Casts. That is really neat of them.
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.)
How does Automattic even survive and remain profitable (?) nowadays? What’s the niche?
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.)
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.
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.
Pretty sure plenty of small commercial websites still host on wordpress.com. That and selling their user data to OpenAI.
Automattic sometimes acquires companies and does nothing with them - like with Simplenote. As an early Beeper user, I am disappointed!
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 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.
Beeper does plenty besides PR stunts (which seems to have paid off)
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)
Kinda sad. Beeper owns a ton of Matrix bridges. I wonder what will happen now.
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-...
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'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.
elephant graveyard of past internet fads.
This makes it sound like they acquired Evernote, which perhaps wouldn't have been the worst thing ever.
Their mini tech was built on weird hacks - is all their tech the same or is there something legit powering it?
Well if you consider private APIs/impersonating 1st party clients weird hacks then yes, none of these services have official 3rd party client support.
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.
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.
Given how bad the WordPress documentation is, it's a weird hope to have from that company.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
This is an odd match, and at a time when the strategic value of Beeper seems to be very low.
Matt, Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years
Could it perhaps be a favor for a friend to give a plausible reason for ejecting from the business without admitting failure?
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.
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?
I'm sure that's a non-zero factor. Plus Beeper has a lot of name recognition due to their epic standoff
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.
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
Here is my Beeper timeline:
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.
Sounds like that was a time period where it was vaporware?
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?
Automattic also acquired Pocket Casts, so they don't only own things that fit into the WP ecosystem.
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?
Automattic owns a few properties other than Wordpress now. They also own Pocketcasts (podcast client), Tumblr, and Day One (journalling software).
Oh noooooooooo. And I have two Beepy.
Acquisitions go mostly wrong and the buyer usually kills of side projects - $200 gone.
I trust Automattic implicitly. This seems like a good move.
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?
I am using Beeper desktop app on Windows for the express purpose of being an iMessage client.
Their press release (https://blog.beeper.com/2024/04/09/beeper-is-now-available/) says "Beeper does not currently support iMessage". Does that refer to the Android client?
I hope they continue to support iMessage on the desktop.
What's the acquisition amount?
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 just hope they don't kill Beepberry/beepy
I don't see the win for Automattic here. Beeper seems to be a dead product with its main use case gutted.
Are there other capabilities that I'm missing?
Either way, congrats to the team!
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]
1: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa...
Congrats! Matt and the team at Automattic are a good group of folks. It seems like a great fit, and I'm excited to see what you guys do together.
Good for both products, Beeper and Texts, but seems like there will be layoffs coming
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
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.
What makes automattic gullible?
I mean, maybe the reality is more nuanced but the optics…
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.
This isn't how business works.
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.
This is the same board that approved the Tumblr acquisition, presumably. So...a good board...?
For pennies on the dollar, and for a very specific strategy, which Mullenweg outlined pretty thoroughly.
Did it work? No, but I don't know of any examples of an entrepreneur who bats 1000
They approved the tumblr deal.
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.
DD?
Due Diligence
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.
$125 million dollars. To "help" a friend save face?
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
counterpoint: Tesla/Musk/Solar City
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.
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).
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'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.
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?
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.
Here's an interesting story from that time: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/
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.
I guess I didn’t think about it like that. If everyone opens up, Beeper’s competition is suddenly WhatsApp, instead of being one of their assets.
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.
Then Beeper would just be replaced by bigger fish (or open source fish)
All the bridges used by Beeper are already open source, and Beeper itself uses Matrix which is open source too.
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.
I agree it must be a engineering nightmare, a whatsapp/imessage update and your app is gone.