Right, and it is a very US-centric downside, as a result of somewhere else these third-party messaging apps are extra dominant.
Yes. So iMessage is built-in within the iPhone working system in a really deep approach. But that’s not “premium.” That’s anticompetitive.
You wrote in a weblog put up late final month that each time there’s an outage to Beeper Mini your credibility takes a success and you can’t preserve taking part in the cat-and-mouse sport with Apple to maintain it working. But you additionally mentioned you’re nonetheless decided to construct the perfect chat app on earth. What does it seem like?
Well, Beeper Mini was referred to as that for a motive. It was a secondary app with a extra restricted characteristic set than our major app, Beeper. Beeper helps 15 chat networks. Beeper Mini supported one. So we determined to refocus our power again to our major app.
So, theoretically, Beeper may grow to be a extremely nice chat app that competes with Signal or WhatsApp, the place each events—iPhone customers and Android customers—obtain your app and go to that app container and message, proper? But Beeper Mini was attempting to really carry interoperability to 2 totally different methods. How dedicated are you continue to to that imaginative and prescient?
That’s an vital level. We’re in 2024, and you’ve got a portion of your contact record on every of those totally different apps as a result of entrenched gamers have gone out of their strategy to make it very arduous so that you can depart their platforms.
It could be virtually inconceivable to begin a brand-new instantaneous message app immediately 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 prevailing networks. And you make the transition as clear and straightforward as attainable. That’s what we’re engaged on.
Part of our imaginative and prescient is to embrace an open supply protocol that already exists, Matrix, and so if you use Beeper, you’ll get an account on this open supply protocol. You can nonetheless message your mates utilizing all of your different apps, however if you need, you’ll be able to ship them a message from that open supply protocol as properly. Right now that’s not the first focus for us, however will probably be over time as an increasing number of folks be part of this community.
Well, thanks for taking the time to talk, no pun meant.
You know, you requested, “Were we expecting 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, this is a great experience compared to the kind of crappy green bubble chats we’d been having before.” It all occurred fairly shortly after that.