Beeper: All Chats in One App Come True!
The success and future challanges
Beeper was founded by YC alumni Brad Murray and Eric Migicovsky in 2020 and raised its seed round in 2021. It is an app that aggregates messaging platforms like iMessage, Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram Messenger, Discord and others into an easy-to-use app.
Since the early 2000s, Short Message Service (SMS) has been the means of communication for everyday life and business. In recent years, tech giants like Apple have also built their own messaging systems, ie. iMessage. Apple strongly tries to consolidate its user base and doesn’t allow cross-compatibility with android devices.
Today, platforms such as iMessage, Whatsapp and Instagram dominate global messaging. While Whatsapp has a global user base, iMessage is very popular in the US. While newer messaging apps dominate unique niches, Telegram is for political opposition groups, Discord is for gamers, Slack is for internal corporate communication of corporations and many others.
Almost everyone, who uses a smartphone, has multiple messaging platform accounts and is bombarded with direct messages from at least one of the social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
So Beeper comes in with a sleek design, organised folders and the ability to see the messages you see as relevant. As an entrepreneur and member of an immigrant family, I heavily use Whatsapp to manage employees and suppliers and to stay in touch with family and friends. I am sure many people nowadays are members of Whatsapp groups. They don’t even know why or they don’t need to check it all the time. A Sunday football group or the group with your neighbours is irrelevant if you are not in town for a couple of weeks or waiting for an important message from a client with whom you don’t chat over Slack. I love the idea of different notifications for each platform, and the ability to tag specific conversations as Low Priority, so you don’t see them in your primary inbox.
The desktop app of Beeper is far superior to its mobile app. The apps feel like separate projects made by the same company. The intuitive transition direction is unclear about the native app, is it the desktop or the mobile? Creating UI/UX designs in complex workflows already made by different platforms is undoubtfully challenging. The most basic KPI would be to stop the need to go to the desktop app.
A unified messaging app is not a new idea. Disa, All in One Messenger, IM+ and others have tried and have been doing it for years. These predecessors and, nowadays, competitors have had challenges that Beeper has been able to tackle so far.
I see a few challenges for the future of my recent favourite app. I was a happy user of Disa and, at one place IM+; however, when something changed on the API of the primary messaging app, they struggled to activate, and for Disa, Whatsapp never returned. So would Whatsapp permanently allow Beeper to bridge their app via their web browser feature? I don’t think so! Beeper sees itself as a competitor of Whatsapp in the long run. Using the app, you create a Beeper Messaging username, similar to what you’d have on Telegram or Twitter.
The other challenge of the app is not about software but believe it or not, it’s about hardware. They run a very old-school hack to enable iMessage on android devices; they run a bridge via physical Apple devices. In 2021, they started sending jailbroken iPhone 4s to users. The user had to keep the phone plugged in somewhere and connected to the internet all the time. Nowadays, the company do it themselves via Mac computers. Imagine the amount of work involved in maintaining thousands of Macs, like a server farm. What would the ratio of Mac computers needed for every thousand Beeper users be? Doable, but we will see the maths as they scale.
I hope Beeper thrives and continues its growth, as it is becoming my go-to app for social and work-related communication. They are the first to adequately address a well-known and already explored challenge we all live with.
