I grew up chatting online – shout-out to those who can still remember their ICQ number. But as someone who chats constantly with friends all around the world, I’m continually annoyed at the current state of chat apps. Among my many concerns, the main problem is that each app has its own private network. Because of that, I’m forced to switch between 5+ different apps every day to chat with all my friends. I simply want to chat, without needing to memorize which app each person is on.
This led me to start Beeper. At Beeper, we are building the best chat app on Earth. Yes, this is an audacious goal, but we’re excited, energized and confident we can do it.
What makes the best chat app on Earth? For us, this is what we believe in:
Chat with anyone on Earth from one app
You should never have to remember which chat app your friend uses. Or spend your day switching between different chat apps on your phone. Also, It shouldn’t matter which type of phone you have (iMessage 🤨). Tap in your friend’s name and instantly start chatting with them. That’s it.
Secure and trustworthy
Our chats can be deeply personal and private. You must be able to trust the people who make your chat app. At Beeper, our primary objective is to earn and keep your trust. We do this by using zero-access encryption on all messages stored on Beeper (more here), end-to-end-encryption between Beeper users and open-sourcing as much of our codebase as possible (Github). Unlike the other big chat apps (iMessage, WhatsApp and Messenger), we’re proud to have a transparent business model that is aligned with the interests of our users. In short – we’re not an ad network trying to harvest your data, or a hardware company trying to lock you into their ecosystem.
Fast and fun
If you’re anything like me, you likely pick up your phone dozens of times a day to chat. We’re building Beeper to be superfast and delightfully fun to use. To be honest, chatting with friends is one of the few activities on the internet that truly makes me smile. We’re going to keep it that way. We will not allow chat to become the spammy, transactional mess that email is today. Everything about Beeper helps focus you on the people you care about, and tune out the noise.
Sync to any device
I love chatting on my phone, but find myself in front of a laptop most of the workday. I want my chats to be synced on any device I happen to be using at the time. Most chat apps have terrible desktop clients. We’re fixing that.
One size doesn’t fit all
Over 3 billion people chat every day using apps that all look pretty much the same. Where is the creativity and ingenuity? One of my favourite things we created at Pebble (my first startup) was the vibrant developer ecosystem that sprung up around our smartwatch. It seemed like every day there was a new app, or hack that someone had built. It was exciting! We’re planning to do the same with Beeper. Expect Beeper to improve rapidly, both from updates we publish, and from the developer ecosystem around Beeper and the Matrix open source chat protocol on which Beeper is based.
All this wouldn’t be necessary if all 8 billion people on Earth decided to standardize and use the same chat app. But clearly this is not going to magically happen by itself. So, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands and build an app that fixes all these problems with chat.
I love working on these problems because we all spend an incredibly large portion of our day chatting. If Beeper can improve the experience each time you chat by just a little bit, our efforts will soon be felt billions of times per day.
We’re just getting started. I’m excited for you to try out Beeper and let us know what you think of it. We want to chat with you, let us know what you think of our plan and give us feedback 😃
After a year of hard work, the Beeper iPhone and iPad app is finally out of beta! We’re extremely proud of the improvements we’ve made to the speed, reliability and design of the app.
Beeper is now live on the iOS App Store
By no means are we done! We are working on numerous features and fixes to bring Beeper iOS to feature parity to our other Beeper chat apps.
Here’s what our iOS road map looks like for the next few months:
Fix slowness when opening a chat from a notification
Add ability to quickly react (tapback) to a message
Chat view UI design clean-up
Dismiss notifications if read on other client
Copious improvements to sending and receiving image/video attachments
Fix image compression problems
Re-enable sharing from other applications
Make GIFs and stickers work better
Re-enable sending voice messages
Improved search experience
Start app faster from closed
Send link previews
Fix problems with unread badge count
Show list of chat members in group chats
Fix latency problems that happen when using Beeper in train/subway/low internet
Preserve draft messages across conversations
Android user? We got you covered
We’re probably the only company in the world that published an Android app before their iPhone app 😂 Download it on Google Play.
If you spot any other problems with the Beeper iPhone app, or have a feature you’d like to see, do not hesitate to send us a message! We want to chat with you and hear your feedback. No bug report is too small, no feature request is too big.
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 mostEasily 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 explicitlydo 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.
We’re still here! Sorry for the radio silence over the last 7 months. We’ve been heads down working on Beeper. Bad news: I’ve done a terrible job at keeping everyone updated about our progress. Good news: we’ve made an incredible amount of progress.
As of today, we are proud to share that Beeper is out of beta!
* except for the Beeper iOS app, it still needs a few more weeks of TLC
Our whole team has been working tremendously hard over the last few months to crush remaining bugs in the app. It’s been amazing to see how much progress we’ve made since our last update. You know that startup neologism about how you’re meant to be embarrassed about the first version of your product? Looking back now I can safely confirm that we abided by this rule! If you want to take a walk through memory lane, check out our changelog.
Ok, sounds great – when can I start using Beeper?
✅ Prepaid: We’ve sent out invites to everyone who prepaid for a Beeper subscription. Thank you for your support!
⏳ Reserved: We’re currently sending out invites to everyone who reserved a Beeper username during Spring 2021
Over 100,000 of you are on the waitlist for Beeper! Thanks for your patience as we work our way through the waitlist. Unfortunately, we can’t just open the doors and let everyone use Beeper right away. We are still working on scaling up our server infrastructure. Our primary objective is to make sure the service is stable for those who have already started using Beeper. As we improve our infrastructure, we will be inviting more of you off the waitlist!
Here’s what we’re working on next:
Fixing remaining bugs on our Known Issues list, including being able to start new chats from Beeper
Scaling up our server infrastructure
Moving from Testflight to iOS Appstore
Making it easier to get started and connect to other chat networks to Beeper
Want to see more of Beeper? A few Youtubers have been in the early group of beta users and posted reviews
(Hope you speak Hungarian!)
Slightly older reviews…
We’re really proud of the progress we’ve made so far, with lots more in the works. See you on Beeper soon!
Status update + Desktop and Android app walkthroughs!
To catch you up:Beeper is a new app that lets you chat on iMessage, WhatsApp, and 13 other networks all in a single app.
We appreciate everyone’s patience throughout the last few months! As a special thank you to the group of people that prepaid upfront for a year-long Beeper subscription, we are extending that subscription with free second year on us. And of course, your subscription will not actually begin ticking until you get access to Beeper. Questions? Feel free to email us.
Good news! We’re beginning to invite more people who have prepaid for Beeper to start using Beeper.
We had a brief slowdown earlier this month while we transitioned to new server infrastructure which enables us to scale up much easier. Onboardings were paused during this period, but we just restarted them and are continuing to work through the list of people who prepaid now.
There are still a few rough edges on the software, mainly centered around the getting-started process. We’ve spent most of our time working on the main app itself, since that’s what you spend most of your time using! I’ve covered up for the problems during onboarding by helping users one-by-one begin using Beeper over a Zoom call. That’s been great – as we always say you should talk to your users and do things that don’t scale! It’s given me a chance to spot any issues that come up and fix them immediately.
But it’s also held us back from opening the floodgates to the entire list of people with prepaid yearly subscriptions. We are now shifting our focus to improving the getting-started flow, and expect to complete that work in a few weeks. With the new server infrastructure and an improved getting-started experience in place, we expect to begin moving through the list much faster.
Here is our order of operations for invites:
People who prepaid for one year (now 2!)
People who reserved a username by entering their credit card information
People who signed up on Beeper.com but did not reserve a username
Open registration!
Check the Update video below for more info and a walkthrough of the Beeper Desktop and Android apps!
Reserve your Beeper @username and move up the waitlist!
To catch you up: Beeper is a new app that let’s you chat on iMessage, WhatsApp, and 13 other networks all from a single client.
I’ve been working on Beeper (née NovaChat) as a side project for about 2 years now. My primary partner is Tulir, a prolific Matrix contributor and fantastic software developer. You can read more about my motivation for working on this problem in my post from last year The Universal Communication Bus. Progress has been slow but steady and I’ve been happily using the app as my primary messaging client for over 1.5 years now.
We launched Beeper on Hacker News at the end of January. I figured it was time to show off what we’ve been building! My expectations were modest - Beeper is a paid app ($10/month) and I wasn’t sure how many people would be comfortable paying for a chat app. Well, we got our answer very quickly. Tens of thousands of people have signed up for Beeper. Thank you! 🙏 We’re shifting gears and getting the app ready to work for all of you! What started out as a side project has evolved very quickly.
If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely signed up for Beeper and are patiently waiting to get the app. Today, we’d like to invite you to reserve your @username on Beeper and (only if you’d like to) jump to the front of the line by prepaying for a Beeper subscription. Check your email for a message from info@beeperhq.com. Every week, we will be inviting more people to start using Beeper, working our way through the waitlist. If you haven’t signed up for Beeper yet, head over to beeper.com right now!
Chat is only the latest incarnation of human communication. Technology gave us the ability to extend in-person conversations over large distances beginning (probably) with papyrus + carrier pigeons and continued with the postal system and telegraph, reaching its pinnacle recently with the invention of the Yo app.
The problem, now, is that basic communication is too complicated and time-consuming. Today, even with fancy smartphones and LTE networks, exchanging bits of text is getting more difficult instead of easier! There are too many different chat apps. I can’t search across all of them. I can’t even remember which of my friends are on each app. It’s become even worse than the rat’s nest of cables we had to deal with before USB.
This is meant to be human communication. Technology needs to fade into the background, so I can simply chat with my friends, family and work colleagues. We need a universal communications bus.
Chat Woes
Network Proliferation
In general, there are two distinct types of people:
Siloed — People who only use one chat network (eg iMessage) and force other people to use their preferred network in order to get in touch with them.
Ambi-social — These folks use many chat networks, have 5+ chat apps on their phone, need to keep track of which friends are on which network so they know how to contact them.
Maybe life would just be simpler as a siloed chat user but probably less fun! Many of us are cursed blessed with having friends in different countries, or in different age groups. We’ve experienced the proliferation of chat apps first-hand and fall into the ambi-social club, with a few good friends on every single platform.
Keeping track of which networks are friends are on is a communication tax. It’s extra cognitive load on simple stuff, like remembering where my friend sent me the name of the restaurant, or thinking ‘Should I send the photo I took to her via Whatsapp, iMessage or Instagram?’
My pet theory around why business is gets done so much faster in China: because there is only one channel for everything — WeChat. No confusion about how to get in contact with someone. One scrollback to WeChat makes it easy to introduce friends to each other. Voice and video calls just work. And because the default is chat, not email, everyone sends shorter messages, responds quickly and keeps their inbox at zero. I want that world! Minus the authoritarian overlords reading all your messages.
Known caveat: sometimes the medium is the message. A postcard is noticeably more personal than an email, a phone call conveys more emotion than a text, an Instagram message is more friendly than a Linkedin message. TBD how this is works out if all chats are merged into one.
Slow-to-no innovation
WhatsApp is fine, but how come you still can’t make a voice or video call from the desktop client? Signal may finally let you sign up without a phone number as the main identifier…5 years after the ecosystem got its move on?
There is a dearth of innovation in chat. It’s all weighed down by network effects. If you’re a developer, not only do you have to create your cool new feature (see Houseparty or Squadapp), you also need to bootstrap a network so that your users have friends to chat with.
How come I can’t search across all my chat networks instantly?
Why don’t my ‘work’ WhatsApp notifications switch off after 6pm?
Why is there still a risk of losing message history when I switch phones?
How many tabs do I need to have open on my laptop at once just to stay in touch with my friends?
Why can’t I reply by voice to a text from my wife on my Google Home, or an Instagram message while I’m driving?
Compare the speed of chat innovation with email. Front, Superhuman, Inbox (RIP😢), Substack and more continually push the boundaries of what is possible with email. It feels like there’s a new email app every week on Product Hunt! On the work chat side, Slack has certainly enabled some great new features with bots and integrations, but switching between workspaces is still a pain.
Most new chat apps die before they build a network. And since all the major networks are closed-source and not federated, it’s hard to hack on top of an existing network and add in just one or two new features. It’s sad that there is nothing like Gmail plugins for WhatsApp. Even Signal, an open-source chat app, enforces a ‘no-federation’ rule — which means that you can’t host your own Signal server and add new features.
Enter the Matrix
A year ago, I discovered Matrix. It’s an open-source federated, encrypted and decentralized database protocol. The main use for Matrix is chat, but theoretically it could be used to synchronize any bits of data across a network of federated servers.
Matrix actually caught my attention because it solves the exact problems that I outlined above, without exacerbating everything by creating yet another chat network. See, the Matrix folks know their XKCD. Instead of creating a new siloed chat app, they enabled developers to write ‘bridges’ between Matrix and other chat networks, like Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Skype and even more obscure networks like Keybase. Now, instead of keeping 5+ different chat apps open, you can use just one app (Matrix) and talk to friends on their preferred chat network. The other person won’t even know that you’re using Matrix!
I had been searching for something like this for years! I loved using Trillian and Meebo back in the day.
When I started getting into Matrix last year, bridges were still missing to many networks I used regularly. I wanted to contribute but since my coding abilities peaked on my TI-83 20 years ago, I started by funding developers to create open source Matrix bridges to popular chat networks. Bounties start at $500 or more per bridge — I’ve had fun funding the Hangouts, Slack, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter bridges and pressured my friend into building one for WeChat. I still have bounties out for Line, Linkedin, Airbnb, Tinder, Gmail (getting a jump on jwz’s law), Snapchat and more. Ping me @eric:beeper.com!
These bridges are actually just an intermediate step. Since Matrix itself is an amazing chat network, eventually as more people start using bridges on Matrix, they’ll notice that their friends are already on Matrix, eliminating the need for bridges gradually over time.
I really believe that the world will be a better place when everyone is in the Matrix. Matrix is the non-proliferation treaty of chat. I think Matrix could form the basis for a true universal communications bus.
The only downside to Matrix is that it’s still very complicated to set up and use with bridges. That’s a pretty big downside! A few Matrix developers and I are working on a way to make it easier to use — we’re building an app called Beeper. Our goal is to make Beeper the best chat client for ambi-social people. Beeper (client) is to Matrix (protocol) as Gmail is to email. Interested?
Life on the UCB
Cool, we’ve started using Matrix and bridged all our chat networks into one client. Now what’s possible?
Glorious productivity and time-saving. One desktop client that contains all your chats — no more alt-tabbing between apps and switching slack workspaces. Search across all networks instantly
Sort your chats into ‘work’, ‘friends’, ‘family’ regardless of which network they are on. Avoid context switching during the workday, and switch off all work notifications when you need a break.
Merge all communication with an individual person into one continuous timeline. I’m excited about this feature. My mom still hasn’t mastered the art of using one communication channel, she prefers to sprinkle messages throughout the week across Whatsapp, SMS and email.
Hackable interface on which to experiment and build new chat features. It’s much easier to prototype new features if all your chat messages are in one database. We’re envisioning a plug-in framework allowing Gmail addon-like extensions.
Escape Sauron’s eye. Matrix itself is a fantastic chat network. It’s end-to-end encrypted and federated, making it hard to block. The Matrix team is even working on portable identities — don’t like your host? Switch to a different provider. They even have a prototype of a p2p server that runs entirely in your browser.
Communicate beyond the display. Networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter rely on ad impressions to make money, so there’s little incentive for them to work on devices without a display. Matrix can easily support new platforms like AirPods, Google Assistant and Alexa.
If you’re as interested in chat clients as I am, you should try out Beeper. We built it to solve this problem 🙂
Beeper Blog 
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