[ad_1]
Beeper is a new universal chat app that attempts to unify 15 different chat platforms into one interface. The app is the work of a team that includes Eric Migicovsky, CEO and founder of former smartwatch maker Pebble, who announced its launch on Twitter. Beeper’s site notes that the project was previously known as NovaChat and requires a subscription of $ 10 per month.
While Beeper integrates with the world’s most popular messaging services such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Slack, Twitter, Discord, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, it’s Apple’s iMessage support that may be. -be the most interesting. iMessage is officially only available on Apple devices and it is often cited by users as something that keeps them from upgrading to Android. Migicovsky says Beeper should allow iMessage to run on Android, Windows, and Linux, but admits he’s “using trickery” to do so.
And yes, iMessage even works on Android, Windows and Linux using a trick 🙂
– Eric Migicovsky (@ericmigi) January 20, 2021
An FAQ on Beeper’s website gives a more in-depth explanation of what exactly this trickery entails. If you have a Mac still online, you can install the Beeper Mac app to act as a bridge, similar to the approach used by AirMessage. But things get really crazy if you don’t have access to a Mac, at which point Beeper says it will literally send each of its users a “jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed” to serve as a bridge. At this point, we should probably mention that using Beeper involves paying a subscription fee of $ 10 per month, which may or may not include the cost of the iPhone.
Just in case you thought Beeper was joking, in a follow-up tweet Migicovsky said he currently has 50 older iPhone 4Ss in his desk, ready to be recycled for use with Beeper.
If the workaround works as Beeper claims, the result should be a universal chat app that works on MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, offering a unified inbox and the ability to search through each of the messages. 15 services. It is based on the open source Matrix email protocol (Migicovsky previously described NovaChat’s relationship with Matrix as similar to Gmail’s relationship with email), and although the client app itself is not open source. , the bridges connecting it to other chat services are.
Oh, and there’s a dark mode coming in the next Beeper update, naturally.
While the short-term goal is to make it easier to chat with people through different chat apps, Migicovsky eventually raised the possibility of everyone using the Matrix itself to chat with friends and colleagues, rather than just use it as a bridge between services.
Although Migicovsky says he has been using Beeper as his default chat client for two years, it does not appear to be widely available yet. Instead, Beeper asks potential users to fill out a form on its website for an invitation.
Here is the full list of chat services currently supported by Beeper:
- Facebook Messenger
- iMessage
- Android messages (SMS)
- Telegram
- Soft
- Hangouts
- Skype
- IRC
- Matrix
- Discord
- Signal
- Beeper network
[ad_2]
Source link