During the early days of the pandemic, Migicovsky became focused on fragmented messaging — the generally recognized fact that most people have to use a variety of different apps to stay in touch with their contacts. Migicovsky and Murray began building a service that would aggregate all messaging into a single app container using an open source, decentralized messaging protocol called Matrix.
But the holy grail for Migicovsky was to create texting parity between Android and iOS. Normally when an Android user sends a message to an iOS device, it appears as green bubbles, while blue bubbles are reserved for iMessage only. Beeper on Android will send secure, encrypted, “blue bubble” messages to iOS devices instead.
The standard version of Beeper used hundreds of Mac Mini computers as relay points so that Android messages on iOS devices would not default to SMS. But Migicovsky and his team later created a forked “mini” version of their app that reverse engineered the way iOS notifications work and allowed messages to flow between the beeper app and iOS Messages. Blue bubble achieved. Migicovsky charged $2 per month for this Beeper Mini app at launch.
As soon as the Beeper Mini launched in late November, Apple took steps to eliminate it, citing security concerns. Migicovsky and his team worked hard to create a workaround, and made the app free in the interim. But by the end of 2023 it became clear that the Beeper Mini was an unstable product, although the Beeper was successful in raising awareness of Apple’s tight grip on its software.
In December, more than a dozen watchdog and digital rights organizations called on the Justice Department and the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Apple for anti-competitive behavior. The DOJ investigation into Apple was already long-running, but earlier this month that case finally came to light — and the green bubble was cited as an antitrust concern.
The beeper was ultimately more a symbol of the challenges faced by upstarts challenging the entrenched interests of Big Tech than it was ultimately a stand-alone product. But Migicovsky says he’s not disappointed by the results. He will remain at Automattic as head of beeper product, and says he’s glad Beeper wasn’t sold to a giant tech company. “I think it at least introduced another anti-competitive philosophy, such that a company could have a monopoly in certain markets or specific parts of markets,” Migicovsky said.
Beeper’s reliance on the open source protocol, Matrix, was also appealing to Automattic. While the use of the Beeper app was not widespread, it had managed to support over a dozen different messaging platforms within its app. In this way it’s similar to Text, the other Automattic-owned messaging app, which aggregates messages from iPhone, WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Slack, and others all into one container.
Mullenweg said An interview with TechCrunch At the time of the Textx acquisition he believes that too many technology services became “closed”, and “the pendulum is now swinging very quickly in the other direction towards more open standards.” While WordPress is Automattic’s most important product at the moment, Mullenweg has said he thinks messaging, not websites, could have a bigger impact in the long run.
At least, the beeper gets a chance to live another day, which is more than many tech startups can say.
