Beeper, Pebble and Apple: A Big, Big, Small, Open, and Privacy-Preserving Messageing App for the Next Generation of Robots

The combined messaging team will first build a great messaging app. The long-term plan here is clear and the team intends to use an open source system in the future. Beeper is built on top of Matrix, an open-source protocol that is being used by companies and governments around the world. He stated that he bets on all open-source, not just Matrix, but also on Beeper.

Beeper, a messaging app, raised the ire of Apple last year when it created a way to emulate Apple’s famous “blue bubble” messaging. Beeper has been acquired in a $125 million deal, but Apple later hobbled the startup.

On the other side, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has been saying for months that he believes messaging is the next big pillar of the company. With WordPress projects, Automattic helps oversee something like half the websites on the internet. With it, it is a powerful player in online retail. I was told last fall by Mullenweg that he saw another chance to work on something important and big with messaging. “Messaging is communication, and communication is fundamental to the human condition,” he said. “And so private, free, encrypted, open-source communication is a fundamental human right.”

Beeper was founded in 2020. Pebble was founded in 2010 and appealed to the nerd crowd for its open source approach to software and E-ink display. (The Beeper deal is, by all accounts, a better outcome than the Pebble acquisition in 2016, when the flailing smartwatch company was sold to Fitbit.)