I tried out Beeper a few months back. The whole point is that it’s just one app that combines your inboxes from lots of other apps. For me, that would be: Messages, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, and a sprinkle of Signal and Facebook Messenger once in a while. I can’t remember the entire list of apps they support, but they are in the business of supporting as many as possible.
It didn’t stick with me in the end, probably because of my thought at the time:
Perhaps the very biggest hurdle, for me, is I’m not sure I have a problem with separate messaging apps in the first place. While it seems like it would be annoying to have so many, I don’t think I actually am that annoyed, which probably just makes me not the perfect customer.
I’m thinking about this again, because after I heard of Automattic purchasing Texts for 50m, with Texts being another combined messaging app, it seems like something is in the water here.
I can’t weigh in on if Texts feels any better, because I haven’t tried it. I’ve been on the waitlist for weeks. I have no idea if it’s just an alpha or what. If it is, it makes that 50m price tag pretty surprising. I wasn’t enamored with the Beeper UI, and from the screenshots of Texts I’ve seen, it does look cleaner, so I’d probably give it a shot. Although I’m feeling pretty monthly-service-fee’d out at the moment so I’d be quick to cancel the $15/month if I wasn’t loving it.
Here’s my main thought though: I don’t know if I want all messaging to be a commodity.
I feel like the “combined messaging app” idea pushes messaging into being a complete commodity. Perhaps it should be. Perhaps fighting over users by making them communicate in proprietary formats is bad for the world and messaging should be just one big universal standard. There are pushes toward that, like Matrix, but call me when a major messaging player buys into that.
So instead, messaging is different on each platform. Usernames and handled differently, finding each other is different, reactions are different, threading is different, groups are different, media handling is different, limitations are different, etc. Messaging systems are entirely free to innovate on ideas on how to make messaging better. Those innovations are almost sure to never make it back to a combined messaging app. Say some messaging service made some feature that made sharing snippets of code super cool and compelling. Will Texts add that to itself to support it? Maybe? But I’d think probably not. Texts can’t be in the business of supporting every single niche feature of every single messaging app. Instead, it’ll be in the business of smoothing all that over and sticking to the basics.
SMS, sure, let’s keep that simple and standardized. But I don’t think I care that much if other messaging platforms become a commodity.
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