WordPress.com and Tumblr owner Automattic has bought Beeper, maker of the Beeper mini app that challenged Apple’s iMessage dominance late last year. Although it ultimately lost that battle (after, oh, about three days), the incident gave the DOJ more ammunition for its antitrust lawsuit against the iPhone maker. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Automattic paid $125 million, a surprisingly high price for the startup.
Automattic already has an app called Texts that leverages the APIs of various chat services for a universal messaging experience. Beeper has essentially the same mission and branding, and the two competitors will now combine their teams under Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky, who will join Automattic.
You may also remember Migicovsky as the inventor of the Pebble smartwatch, the charmingly simple pre-Apple Watch device that helped spark mainstream interest in wearable technology in the early 2010s. On Tuesday he said The New York Times that Beeper and Texts will launch a joint service later this year. The two teams will reportedly begin work during a meeting in Portugal in two weeks.
On Tuesday, Migicovsky wrote in a blog post that the two companies are far behind. “Frosted [Mullenweg], CEO of Automattic, and I have known each other for years,” he wrote. “He was an early adopter, supporter and investor in Beeper. We are very well aligned in our goal (to build the best chat app in the world), our approach (open source where possible) and our independence (Beeper will operate independently as part of Automattic’s Other Bets division).”
Automattic’s purchase price is a bit jarring considering Beeper Mini’s claim to fame – iMessage integration on Android – was dashed after just a few days in the spotlight. Beeper characterized the brief showdown as a fight for open, secure messaging standards. (It also helped the startup make a bigger name for itself.) Apple saw it as a threat to one of the main attractions of its walled garden: the blue bubbles of iPhone-to-iPhone chats, with features like reactions and higher-resolution images video split.
Another reason to question Automattic’s purchase price is Apple’s plan to bring Rich Communication Services (RCS) support to iPhones later this year. Although the bubbles between iPhone and Android users remain green, RCS Chats replicates much of iMessage’s appeal with a similar feature set, including end-to-end encryption.
Toni Schneider, interim managing director of Automattic, said The NYT that he sees the regulatory headwinds blowing in a more open direction that will favor cross-platform, universal messaging apps like Beeper. Still, from my understanding, using other services’ APIs is something that the right programmers could easily emulate (including the Texts team that already owned Automattic). Perhaps the real main attraction was the brand that Beeper had built through its acquisition of Apple.
Update, April 10, 2024, 11:18 a.m. ET: Updated the first paragraph to clarify that Automattic owns WordPress.com (to avoid confusion with the open source WordPress project).