8 months ago I prepaid an entire year subscription in order to skip the wait list for the Beeper beta testing group.
Today, I wrote the following to the development team:
I’ve been alpha/beta testing for decades and have enjoyed every moment starting with Gmail and Orkut.
I know that I have pre-paid for one year and I want your team to have my remaining subscription time as a donation.
I wish all of you the best and I’ll spread your service, by word of mouth, amongst everyone I know that may be interested in your product.
I, personally, do not have enough chat contacts to warrant my continued subscription.
Please, delete my account with Beeper and let me know when you have done so.
Thank you again for allowing me to test your brilliant software.
And I thought I wouldn’t hear anything from them and just be silently removed. But…
Eric Migicovsky wrote back:
Hi Chris, it’s Eric. Thanks for testing and working with us over the last few months! We’re sorry to see you go. Is there any chance we might be able to win you back as a user in the future? If so, it would be better for us to leave your account open, but disabled. It would be really hard to recover your account in future, and someone else might grab your username. As a thank you for your help, I would be happy to offer you free service on Beeper for life! I have already canceled your subscription so you will not be billed again, ever. - Eric
TIL Beeper exists. Now I am on the wait list, and kind of sad I can’t prepay for a year to skip the line.
I used to use Trillian back in the day - I occasionally miss the convenience. Chatting on mobile mitigates the multi-chat annoyence a little through notifications but it’s still irritating to try to remember where people are when I want to message them.
I seem to recall the downfall of Trillian was data breach. Also of course shortfalls where on different platforms there was different niche functionality that didn’t carry across to Trillian.
The tech landscape has changed a lot since then, Beeper looks like it’s got potential.
I used Trillian for ages, then got a mac and switched to Adium for a while. Then smartphones happened and everyone switched to text. Now most of my friends are on Facebook messenger, which I loathe but am sort of stuck with. Beeper would at least let me delete it from my phone…
I just find it mildly weird to use FB messenger because I remember MS messenger.
I don’t like Meta/Facebook and I’m eternally butthurt about the Facebook app chewing through my battery on my phone, back when I had it on my phone. Honestly I wish I could get them all to move to Signal but that’s a doomed enterprise.
Everyone on Signal. Wouldn’t that be nice.
Wow that’s freaking cool on them! When I had an android phone I was trying to use this.
IKR! I absolutely love having all of my chats in one app. It’s so unbelievably convenient. I’ve been a Beeper user now for 2 years.
Tbh if I got beta access to it I may have waited just a little longer before the switch to iPhone
As a diehard Pebbler, I still stand in awe of Eric and wish he’d give watches another go.
Seems like a great app. I just signed up. Thanks for telling us about it.
@admin been a fan of eric’s ventures since the Pebble watch - Beeper is very much the same kind of “i have this problem and WILL build a product to fix it” energy, although I can’t say I have a zillion chat accounts either.
I do love the raspberry/epaper display tiny client device sideproject they built though: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-x-sqmfi-beepberry
Love that they’re aiming to offer self-hosting, even though it’s limited.
https://github.com/beeper/self-host
This is a phenomenal idea and the only pause I have is related to storing messages on their servers. Oftentimes, people use different messaging apps to discuss different types of information. The convenience of consolidating may not overcome the need for security, which means I wouldn’t be able to consolidate every app.
Great solution to a frustrating problem I didn’t even know I had, though.
I was like “whats this beeper thing?”. Searched it up and now im on the list (the good kind of list). Thanks
Hadn’t heard about this app before, seems interesting, in particular being able to iMessage on android… how does that work though, with an apple account login? curious
As long as you have an account with any of these chat networks, the Beeper app handles the rest. It’s like magic!
That’s the part that I’m not certain about - I have a work phone that’s apple, is the iMessage associated with the apple account? Given that I can’t access the app on any other device I really have no insight, but I’m guessing yes?
iMessage is Apple’s proprietary chat network. Yes, in order to use iMessage you must have an Apple ID.
Beeper seems neat but I have serious security concerns about proxying any E2E messenger (like Signal) through it. Kind of defeats the point of using those secure apps.
It’s more limited because it’s just WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram but Element One does the same thing (and no waitlist): https://element.io/element-one
I use it and it’s great - it’s “just” a paid service that runs on a Matrix server with the relevant bridges running. This is actually the same technology underneath that Beeper is built on (Beeper uses all the matrix bridges to do its work).
I was looking into setting up Matrix with all the bridges I need (Discord, Telegram, iMessage, SMS) but wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. Since I got onto Beeper, the configuration has been pretty simple, and was pleasantly surprised I didn’t need my Mac Mini constantly running to get iMessage working.