Beeper — gave up his iMessage for Android ambition — is instead moving forward with a new Android chat app released publicly on Tuesday. The company also announced that it was being acquired by WordPress creator and current Tumblr owner, Automattic.
Beeper’s new Android app, previously available in beta, has a similar feature that the company provided last year with its own iMessage integration: a central text messaging application that allows you to send text messages to contacts on services such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal and other services within the Beeper application. While Apple successfully shut down Beeper’s method of getting into its iMessage network, the new Beeper connects to 14 other chat networks and can be accessed from mobile and desktop devices. This includes integration with Google Messages for RCS messaging, which Apple will support at some point this year.
Beeper is available in Android and iOS apps, though even the latter doesn’t support iMessage, and CEO Eric Migicovsky told CNET via email that the iOS version will eventually get its own update to be more similar to the new Android version .
By joining Automattic, Beeper is also now under the same ownership as services such as WordPress, Pocket Casts and Tumblr. While those blogging platforms aren’t expected to get any integration with the Beeper app, Migicovsky said in a blog post announcing the acquisition that it will merge with similar messaging app Texts.com, which Automattic bought last year. This combined team will continue to operate independently under the new ownership.
Migicovsky said the acquisition has no immediate changes planned for either Beeper or Texts.com, the latter of which he now also oversees as the new head of Messaging Automattic. He said that while Beeper is currently available for free, the company still plans to provide a premium service in the future.
Although Beeper is still an open source project, it is still important to note that Beeper does not officially cooperate with any of the chat networks it interconnects with. This means that while Beeper promises to support many of the features that a particular service provides for communication, it won’t necessarily be the same as using the service directly. Beeper also guarantees that its settings do not allow it to see sent or received messages, but several services it supports require users to trust Beeper with their account’s access tokens and keys.
In short, even though Beeper has been running for three years, there is still a degree of privacy risk that you need to be aware of if you want to try it out. But with so many chat apps and messaging services out there, efforts to try to streamline all the noise could be very interesting as they evolve.