If you haven’t already heard of Beeper, welcome! Beeper is a universal chat app for Android, iOS and desktop. Our goal is to build the best chat app on earth.
[…]Beeper is built on an open source chat protocol called Matrix. Over time, we’ll help people migrate from proprietary, siloed chat networks to an open standard for chat. If you’re interested in learning about this, we’ve written more about our intentions.
↫ Beeper team
Beeper is just great. Because I’m European and have ties to two different countries with vastly different chat preferences, as well as a number of friends living all over Europe and the US, I’ve always had to deal with at least four different instant messaging applications. Beeper, and especially the recent completely redesigned Android version, is so good and seamless that I no longer need to use the individual applications at all.
It’s not perfect – the new Android version (the iOS version is old and outdated compared to the Android one) still has some issues. If you receive a video and play it, it doesn’t maximise unless you perform a very delicate zoom in pinch. Sometimes, sending video fails. Some emoji replies on some services look huge and pixellated. I’m sure these are all relatively low-hanging fruit types of bugs that’ll get fixes over the coming weeks and months now that the application is out of beta. However, the actual core of the application has been working amazingly well for me.
Beeper also has another major announcement.
I’m excited to announce that Beeper has been acquired by Automattic. This acquisition marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter as we continue our mission to create the best chat app on earth.
↫ Eric Migicovsky
Automattic is the company behind WordPress, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a whole load of other products and services. Beeper seems like a good fit, since Automattic recently also acquired Texts.com, another multi-platform messaging client.
Not a fan of the way they’re being cute about how much they are charging for what.
Even in the faq at “how much dus beeper cost” they refuse to name an amount and what precisely one is buying with a subscription.
For me, it would be nice to avoid installing apps on my GrapheneOS phone that are only available from the Play Store or rely on Play Services for notifications. For example, Facebook Messenger. Unfortunately, Beeper too is only available from the Play Store and relies on Play Services for notifications.
And my understanding is that E2EE is broken by using Matrix bridges, so I am not interested in using Beeper for Whatsapp or Signal.
Finally, some Matrix bridges exist but are not integrated in Beeper, for example Kakaotalk (an app that I rarely need to use but still need to have installed for certain contacts).
So, all three put together, I actually don’t have any use case for Beeper at the moment.
I’m not a Beeper user so I’m not sure, but according to their latest blog post it looks like they found a solution for that:
https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-does-beeper-connect-to-encrypted-chat-networks-like-imessage-signal-whatsapp