Beeper, an emerging messaging app that attempts to bring all messaging services into one inbox, is being acquired by Automattic, the company that operates WordPress.com, Tumblr, and many other hugely popular web properties Giant. The deal closed last week and was officially announced on Tuesday. Along with the news, Beeper also opened its app to everyone across platforms for the first time and permanently closed its waitlist.
Every aspect of this acquisition has a fascinating backstory. For its part, Beeper launched a new app called Beeper Mini a few months ago, which found a way for Android users to take advantage of the iMessage protocol and become a blue bubble in the Messages app . Apple didn’t like this; the two sides played a cat-and-mouse game for a while, and eventually Beeper gave up. (The fight now figures prominently in the antitrust lawsuit against Apple.)
Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky told me not to think of this moment as an admission of failure — Beeper couldn’t do what it wanted to do, so it gave up and sold out. Instead, he said, Beeper is looking for a better, more sustainable way to get to where it’s always wanted to be: a single application that combines messaging services, transforming messaging into a people-centric system rather than a platform priority system. “We worked on this for three and a half years,” he said, “and seeing how difficult it was to bring something like this to life, we realized we needed to know who our friends were in this game.” Automattic is open software is a long-time strong advocate, was an early investor in Beeper, and has a solid reputation as a buyout manager. For Mijikovsky, this felt like the right place to land.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, on the other hand, has been saying for months that he believes messaging is the next big pillar for the company. Through WordPress projects, Automattic helps manage about half of the websites on the Internet. With WooCommerce, it becomes a strong player in the online retail space. Mullenweg told me last fall that through messaging, he saw another opportunity to do something equally important. “Messaging is communication, and communication is fundamental to human existence,” he said. “Therefore, private, free, encrypted, open-source communication is a fundamental human right.”
“Messaging is communication, and communication is the basis of human existence.”
Mullenweg told me that last October, he announced another acquisition: a $50 million purchase of Texts, an all-in-one messaging app that is Beeper’s main and perhaps only direct competitor. Mullenweg said at the time that Migicovsky and Beeper were “thinking about this space in exactly the right way,” but he took issue with some of Beeper’s security models, which require Beeper to store and decrypt some messages. “The big tech people are going to want to shut it down, and I think their best argument is that it breaks security,” he said, somewhat presciently. Since then, Beeper has rolled out a number of security upgrades that changed how apps handle security way, and prevents Beeper itself from seeing unencrypted messages from Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted apps.
Going forward, Migicovsky will serve as Automattic’s Head of Messaging, and the combined text and Beeper teams will work on Beeper development. (There’s no word yet on what exactly happened to the Texts app.) The team’s first order of business: Get the app ready for the 450,000 people on Beeper’s waitlist, who can now compete with anyone else who wants to use it of people using the app. There’s more work to be done to bring more secure versions of the app to all Beeper’s platforms – and currently, Android is well ahead of the rest. “We still have a lot of work to do,” Mijikovsky said. “But I’m very excited about it.”
Automattic’s joint messaging team will continue to build great cross-platform messaging apps first. But the long-term plan here is clearer than ever: Mullenweg, Migicovsky, and the entire Automattic team intend to replace many messaging methods with open source systems. Beeper is currently built on Matrix, a popular and powerful open source protocol used by companies and governments around the world. Mullenweg was careful to tell me that he was betting on all things open source, not just Matrix; but a bet on Beeper was a bet on Matrix.
Mijikovsky has long had a vision of not just incorporating your messaging habits, but changing them. Now that anyone can use the app, more Beeper users will message other Beeper users directly, all through Matrix, he said. “The vision is to leverage our connections with other companies and other networks,” he said, “but over time, migrate people and give them the opportunity to move to open messaging standards.” If Automattic and Beeper make it this far At one point, the blue bubble battle no longer matters.