Automattic's Strategic Takeover of Beeper: Envisioning a Revolutionary Future for Messaging Services - Insights From ZDNet

Beepers Joins Automattic Empire - Strategic Acquisition Fuels Future Messaging Platform Ambitions

Automattic

Automattic owns Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and other popular websites. As of April 1, the company is also the new owner of Beeper.

Remember Beeper? Just a few short months ago, the company made it possible to use the iMessages protocol on Android and turn those bubbles blue… for a brief period. Apple naturally put the kibosh on the success, which ultimately led to Beeper throwing in the towel. That ordeal is now part of one of the many antitrust complaints against Apple.

Also: Want to use iMessage on Android? This app is the most secure way (but it’ll cost you)

The purchase price was $125 million, according to a Bloomberg report . Beeper’s 27 employees have joined Automattic and Beeper co-founder and CEO Eric Migicovsky has taken on the head of messaging role.

According to Migicovsky’s X post , “After years in beta, Beeper officially launches today. We’re just getting going. I have TONS of product ideas that we haven’t even started on yet. Chat feels like a bottomless well of potential, haven’t even scratched the surface yet. We each use chat apps hundreds of times per day. Each interaction is an opportunity. Chat as a product has been woefully underexplored. Due to platform lock-in, there effectively have been no new entrants into the market in the last 10 years. We believe we can sidestep the chicken-and-egg problem that kills new chat companies. Instead, we spend the majority of our time actually building a better chat app, rather than requiring users to spam their contact list with invites just to grow the network.”

Newsletters

ZDNET Tech Today

ZDNET’s Tech Today newsletter is a daily briefing of the newest, most talked about stories, five days a week.

See all

It’s not quite clear what Automattic ultimately intends to do with Beeper. Migicovsky partially answered that question in the same post when he wrote, “One of our long-term goals is to help the world migrate to an open chat/communication protocol. Imagine 50 years from now - do you think the current set of chat networks will be around? What about email? I have high confidence that we will be emailing til we die (for better or worse). I think open beats closed in the long term.”

Even if that was Beeper’s only goal, it is certainly lofty and commendable. With so many chat apps in stagnation, maybe this acquisition can be the kick in the pants the landscape has needed for some time.

In October 2023, Automattic acquired Texts.com, another messaging app, for $50 million. The two teams and products will now undergo a merger of sorts under Automattic. In the official Beeper blog post , Migicovsky ends with, “It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans! I’m really excited about the future of chat.”