Product roadmap (April 2022)
A good conversation over on the Beeper Community chat room (#beeper:beeper.com, or a read-only view is available here) the other day reminded me that we haven’t published any roadmap recently! So here’s a quick update on the new features and bug fixes we’re aiming to ship in the next few months, in order of our internal priority.
Message sending/receiving reliability
This is and will always be our #1 priority. Since exiting beta in February, the Beeper servers have been quite stable and message sending/receiving has been reliable (with a few exceptions). Our servers are now handling 50-100k messages per day without breaking a sweat. 🤞I think we’re in a good spot here. If you notice any issues, please do not hesitate to report the bug. When we receive a ‘Hey why didn’t I receive this message?’ report, we drop everything and investigate it.
Primary networks
We have support for 12+ chat networks in Beeper, but some chat networks are more important than others (based on usage among current and prospective Beeper users). We use this list when prioritizing new features and deciding when to fix smaller bugs.
Beeper iOS
As mentioned many times before, our iOS app is still under heavy development to fix some major issues. Among many other issues, the app is very laggy and may take a long time to show your inbox. Rest assured that we will not rest until all problems with the app are fixed. Despite rumours to the contrary, our app is 100% native (Swift + SwiftUI) and we are committed to making it the best damn chat app on iOS. Expect lots of improvement to basically every single part of the app in the coming months!
Install and getting-started flow
This isn’t as important for people who have already started using Beeper, but you may recall confusion around which features Beeper supports, how Beeper syncs messages etc. We are working on streamlining this flow and making it easier to start using Beeper.
Make Beeper feel less overwhelming!
One of the most common pieces of feedback we get from new Beeper users is ‘Oh wow, I am getting more new chats each day than I realized!’. Because Beeper aggregates all your inboxes into one, it may feel a bit more overwhelming seeing all your chats in one place.
We hear you loud and clear. We experience this with Beeper as well! To solve this, we’re focusing on building features that help you:
Prioritize the conversations that matter most
Easily filter, sort, snooze, archive and ignore chats in your inbox
Task 1 starts with the concept of Favorites, but will be something that we continue to work on and improve forever. We explicitly do not want to turn chat into email. Email feels like work. Chat still feels fun. We cannot lose that!
Task 2 is what we are calling Inbox 3.0. It’s a made up number (true version is probably way higher!) This will include new tools to quickly triage chats and take action (snooze, pin, archive), and a new interface that is organized around the concept of an active chat. You can turn it on now in Beeper Desktop → Settings → Labs.
We’re also working on customizable folders that you can use to organize chats. In the future, we’re planning to let you set different notification settings for chats in a given folder. Eg ‘toggle push notifications on for chats from friends after 6pm’.
Start new chat
Long awaited new feature is on the near horizon! Soon you will be able to (finally) start a new chat in Beeper. Initially, you will only be able to start new 1:1 chats (DMs). For group chats, you’ll need to open the native chat app.
Infinite chat history sync
This feature will sync all your chat history into Beeper. We’re focused on supporting WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram and Android SMS. Initially, this will only work for fresh new accounts, but we are looking into how to sync chat history for existing users.
Contact list management
We’re also creating a contact list that pulls data from Google Contacts, iCloud Contacts and each chat network. Your contact list will be encrypted with your security key and (eventually) synced between all Beeper apps.
We’re also working on a grab bag of other things:
Show better error if message fails to send
Improving desktop app speed and performance (especially reducing time to switch between rooms)
Improvements to the iOS and Android apps interface (especially the inbox and conversation view)
Rewrites of the Slack and Discord bridges
Improve chat network settings
Future tasks that we haven’t started on yet :
Voice message improvements
Spam filtering
Keep in mind that your feedback is what drives this roadmap! Please continue to report bugs and send us feedback. In particular, we would love to hear from you if you try Beeper but then decide to switch back to using native chat apps.
Cheers,
Eric + Beeper Team
My #1 priority I would like to see would be the ability to "combine" users, so you can talk to them regardless of the network they are. Ie, I have a friend Joe Smith on SMS, in FB messenger, we send Instagram posts and chat in there, and we also send each other tweets. I'd highly prefer if I can just open "John Smith" chat and all the networks that I have with him are combined into one chat "area". Maybe tabbed/switch between different networks on the chat screen, or even combine all of them on one chat (with different color messages for what network I'm on).
This looks incredible, thank you guys for the work you are doing! Especially excited for the anti-overwhelm features.