Automattic Acquires Beeper

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Akismet, announced today that it has acquired Beeper, makers of the universal messaging app of the same name. Beeper is perhaps most famous—infamous, I guess—for trying to bring iMessage to Android and being thwarted by Apple repeatedly. But its idea of a single chat app built on open standards is a good one. And it fits neatly within the altruistic mission of Automattic.

“We’re excited to announce today that Automattic has acquired Beeper, a universal messaging app that combines 14 different chat networks in one inbox,” the announcement post reads. “We began investing in messaging last year when we acquired Texts.com. Now, two of the most exciting teams in tech will work together to push the boundaries of messaging, giving us one app that will improve our focus and the way we communicate.”

Automattic says that it will merge Texts and Beeper into a single cross-platform and open source messaging app that provides end-to-end encrypted, secure, and effective communications capabilities. They will move forward with the Beeper brand, and the app will provide integrated access to a dozen chat services, including Discord, Facebook, Google Chat, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, Slack, SMS/RCS (Google Messages), Telegram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and X (Twitter).

Beeper today is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPhone, iPad, Linux, macOS, and Windows. And the Android app is newly out of beta as of today, if you’d looked at it before. The app is built on an open source chat protocol called Matrix, and the hope is that this open standard for chat can someday replace proprietary, siloed chat networks.

Beeper also notes that while its app doesn’t currently work with iMessage, the U.S. government and several states recently sued Apple because of the conducts that caused it to block Beeper’s efforts to integrate with that service, and the FCC commissioner has called for an investigation as well. So fingers crossed and all that, but since Beeper already supports RCS, and Apple has pledged to support this messaging technology soon, that should be an effective workaround sometime later this year.

Beeper is free, though an optional paid subscription is an obvious possibility, the company notes, suggesting that the to add multiple accounts per network might be a feature of that future offering.

As for Automattic, yes, they’re best known for WordPress and Askimet, but I’m more interested in their broader strategy to “make the web a better place” and some of their smaller brands, like Pocket Casts, my podcasting app of choice, and the Simplenote minimalist and cross-platform note-taking solution. If you feel that open and cross-platform is the inevitable future of personal technology as I do, this is a company to watch, and it’s worth paying attention to its various acquisitions.