Proper, and it is a very US-centric drawback, as a result of in different places these third-party messaging apps are extra dominant.
Sure. So iMessage is built-in within the iPhone working system in a really deep manner. However that’s not “premium.” That’s anticompetitive.
You wrote in a blog post late final month that each time there’s an outage to Beeper Mini your credibility takes a success and that you could’t preserve taking part in the cat-and-mouse sport with Apple to maintain it working. However you additionally mentioned you’re nonetheless decided to construct the very best chat app on earth. What does it appear like?
Nicely, Beeper Mini was referred to as that for a motive. It was a secondary app with a extra restricted function set than our main app, Beeper. Beeper helps 15 chat networks. Beeper Mini supported one. So we determined to refocus our power again to our main app.
So, theoretically, Beeper may turn out to be a very nice chat app that competes with Sign or WhatsApp, the place each events—iPhone customers and Android customers—obtain your app and go to that app container and message, proper? However Beeper Mini was attempting to truly deliver interoperability to 2 completely different techniques. How dedicated are you continue to to that imaginative and prescient?
That’s an essential level. We’re in 2024, and you’ve got a portion of your contact listing on every of those completely different apps as a result of entrenched gamers have gone out of their technique to make it very laborious so that you can depart their platforms.
It will be virtually inconceivable to begin a brand-new immediate message app as we speak as a result of the entrenched gamers have such a powerful maintain on being the default app on an iPhone or having a large set of customers. So the best way that you just construct a “new” chat app is you interoperate with the present networks. And also you make the transition as clear and simple as attainable. That’s what we’re engaged on.
A part of our imaginative and prescient is to embrace an open supply protocol that already exists, Matrix, and so whenever you use Beeper, you’ll get an account on this open supply protocol. You possibly can nonetheless message your folks utilizing all of your different apps, however if you’d like, you may ship them a message from that open supply protocol as properly. Proper now that’s not the first focus for us, however will probably be over time as increasingly more folks be a part of this community.
Nicely, thanks for taking the time to talk, no pun supposed.
You already know, you requested, “Had been we anticipating this response?” No. The reality is, we constructed this app and we’re extraordinarily proud of the way it got here out, as a result of folks have been like, “Wow, it is a nice expertise in comparison with the form of crappy inexperienced bubble chats we’d been having earlier than.” All of it occurred fairly shortly after that.
