The Beeper Story: What Has Been Done? How Has Beper Migicovsky Led the Beeper App? What Has It Learned About Beeper?
As of now, the combined Texts and Beeper team will work on Beeper, as well as being automattic’s head of messaging. (No word yet on exactly what’s happening to the Texts app.) 450,000 people on the Beeper waitlist can now use the app with anyone else they choose, as the team prepares the app. There’s also more work to bring the more secure version of the app to all of Beeper’s platforms — right now, Android is far ahead of the rest. Migicovsky says there’s a lot of work ahead of them. I am looking forward to it.
There’s a fascinating backstory here on all sides of this acquisition. For Beeper, it comes a couple of months after Beeper launched a new app called Beeper Mini that found a way to let Android users tap into the iMessage protocol and become blue bubbles in the Messages app. Apple didn’t like that; the two sides played a cat-and-mouse game for a while, and eventually, Beeper just gave up. (Now that fight is prominently featured in the antitrust complaint against Apple.)
On the other side, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has been saying for months that he believes messaging is the next big pillar of the company. The Automattic helps oversee half of the websites on the internet. With WooCommerce, it’s a powerful player in online retail. When he told me last fall that he saw another chance to work on something big and important, I thought he was crazy. He said that communication is fundamental to the human condition. Open-source communication is a fundamental human right.
Beeper was founded three years ago, and has been acquired by Automattic, the parent company of the well-known blogging and content management platform, as well as its acquisition of Tumblr in 2019. Beeper cofounder Eric Migicovsky said that the company will continue to exist as a stand-alone product within Automattic, and that all of Beeper’s 27 employees—who, like Automattic’s employees, are entirely remote—will be absorbed into the larger entity.