What the future may hold in store.
Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read about our new app, Beeper Mini. If not, check it out first!
In addition to the Beeper Mini news, we’re also announcing a product name change and sharing our near-term product roadmap.
Beeper is now Beeper Cloud
Today, we are renaming our original Beeper apps to Beeper Cloud to clearly differentiate its cloud-based architecture from Beeper Mini’s client-side architecture.
A little bit of history. We started inviting our first beta users to Beeper Cloud in 2020. Even though it’s still in beta, over 25,000 of you sent messages on Beeper Cloud yesterday! With your feedback, we’ve been iterating rapidly on our quest to build the best chat app on earth. One of our most difficult challenges has always been to securely integrate with encrypted chat networks, like iMessage. Our first system architecture used Mac servers in a data center as relays, but this system wasn’t perfect.
Everything changed in August when a security researcher reverse engineered the iMessage protocol. He published pypush, a proof of concept Python library that enables any type of computer to send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages over the iMessage protocol. This had never been done before – it was a groundbreaking, gigantic achievement of genius and hard work. We immediately began working with him to integrate his research into Beeper Mini and eliminate the need for Mac relay servers.
Unlike Beeper Cloud, which runs Matrix bridges on cloud servers, Beeper Mini connects directly to the remote network. No Matrix server or cloud bridges involved.
If you already use Beeper, you can use Beeper Mini alongside Beeper Cloud. It’s still useful to have Beeper Cloud because there are no Beeper Mini desktop or iOS apps yet.
Product Roadmap
Beeper Mini is now available on Android for anyone to download, no waitlist. There is a waitlist to use Beeper Cloud. Why? Because its cloud server architecture is quite expensive for us to operate and scale up.
At a high level, here’s our product plan for the near future (in very rough order, and very subject to change):
Listen to feedback, fix bugs and build a few quick win features into Beeper Mini. Some of the things we’re working on:
Import past chat history
Full text search
Block list
Chat history backup and export
Android OS chat bubbles
Foldable/tablet UI
Facetime audio and video calls
Scheduled messages
If you have suggestions/feedback/bugs, please send us a message in-app: ⚙️ gear icon → Report a problem. We read every single bit of feedback and use it to help prioritize our roadmap.
Add support for SMS, WhatsApp and Signal into Beeper Mini, using the same end-to-end encrypted client-side connection architecture. No cloud servers in the middle.
Add Matrix support, and the other 10 non-encrypted chat networks into Beeper Mini.
Update our desktop and iOS apps with our beautiful new design language, and client-side end-to-end encrypted connection architecture.
Rename Beeper Mini to Beeper, since it’s not very mini at this point.
Deprecate Beeper Cloud and migrate all users over to Beeper.
The speed at which we do steps 3-6 depend entirely on how many subscribers we get for Beeper Mini, and therefore how much money we have to spend on development. If you are a Beeper Cloud user who has been using the app for free, now is the time to support us! Please buy a subscription to Beeper Mini and help us fund development.
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