In the early days of the pandemic, Migicovsky focused on fragmented messaging — the widely recognized fact that most people need to use a variety of different apps to stay in touch with their contacts. Migicovsky and Murray began building a service that aggregates all messages into an app container using an open-source, decentralized messaging protocol called Matrix.
But the holy grail for Migicovsky was to create SMS parity between Android and iOS. When an Android user sends a message to an iOS device, it typically appears as a green bubble, while blue bubbles are reserved only for iMessage. Beeper on Android would instead send secure, encrypted “Blue Bubble” messages to iOS devices.
The standard version of Beeper used hundreds of Mac mini computers as relay points, so Android messages to iOS devices were not sent via SMS by default. But Migicovsky and his team later created a forked “mini” version of their app that reverse-engineered how iOS notifications worked and enabled message flow between the beeper app itself and iOS messages. The blue bubble has been reached. Migicovsky charged $2 per month for this Beeper Mini app at launch.
As soon as the Beeper Mini hit the market in late November, Apple took steps to suppress it, citing safety concerns. Migicovsky and his team tried to find workarounds and have since made the app available free of charge. But by the end of 2023, it was clear that Beeper Mini was an unsustainable product, even though Beeper had managed to raise awareness of Apple’s tight grip on its software.
In December, more than a dozen regulators and digital rights organizations called on the Justice Department and Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate Apple for anti-competitive behavior. The U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into Apple had been in the works for a long time, but earlier this month the lawsuit finally ended – citing green bubbles as antitrust concerns.
Ultimately, Beeper was more of a symbol of the challenges faced by new entrants who challenge Big Tech’s established interests, rather than a product in its own right. But Migicovsky insists he is not disappointed with the results. He remains at Automattic as head of Beeper product and says he’s glad Beeper wasn’t sold to a giant tech company. “I think this has at least introduced another anti-competitive philosophy, like a company can have monopolies in some markets or certain parts of markets,” Migicovsky said.
Automattic also liked Beeper’s dependence on the open source Matrix protocol. Although usage of the Beeper app was not widespread, it managed to support more than a dozen different messaging platforms within its app. In this way, it’s similar to Texts, Automattic’s other messaging app, which aggregates messages from iPhone, WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger, Slack, and others into one container.
Mullenweg said in an interview with TechCrunch at the time of the Texts acquisition that he believed too many technology services had been “closed” and that “the pendulum is now swinging very strongly in the other direction toward more open standards.” While WordPress is currently Automattic’s flagship product, Mullenweg believes news rather than websites could have a greater impact in the long run.
At least Beeper will live to see another day, which is more than many tech startups can claim.