For those who don't know - Eric's new company, Beeper [1], is a proprietary Matrix chat client with hosted Matrix bridges to other chat platforms. The bridges are open sourced which is a huge contribution to the Matrix ecosystem.
Surprised the FAQ doesn't say anything about encryption/privacy.
The big selling point for Signal et. al. is knowing that corps/govs/etc can't spy on my conversations. If I was going to give another app permission to use my Signal, I'd need assurances I'm not sacrificing my security.
You are, by design. Beeper gets around the e2e encryption by just running WA themselves on their side; there is no other way for them to be doing what they say they are doing…
I run several bridges from my home. With End-to-Bridge Encryption enabled this gives you about the same security guarantees as E2EE with a second device added (Signal Desktop, etc). With Beeper you can do the same, IIRC.
Their value proposition then hinges on how good their clients can aggregate conversations and different chat networks, I guess.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but from the above link:
> Yes, iMessage works even on Android, Windows and Linux!
How could this be sustainable long-term? I've hacked together tools to forward iMessage content before and it's very unappealing.
I suspect they must be using a makeshift solution. I hope it works (and would sign up if there was a way on the landing page), but this seems like building on sand.
From my understanding, they use a Mac the same way you would, and they forward the messages over by sheer force of will and also money.
It works fine for me so far, though there's no out-of-the-box solution for forwarding iMessages that go to your phone number. That requires extra hackery.
I'm using Beeper! The app is solid, feature set meets my needs, and overall works quite well. It's still rough around the edges in a few spots. I'm waiting for the e2e protocol to have a self hosted bridge option, but once that's rolled out I'm a happy camper.
Some smart people are running this, that's for sure.
Beeper is based on Matrix and the bridges they use are almost all open source. It's an amazing Matrix client (including on Android and, reportedly, iOS) and that makes it pretty great at everything else. Though the Discord integration could use a bit of work still.
Texts looks entirely proprietary and the FAQ says they're working on an iOS app.
Mobile app is the big one. iMessage too. Texts iMessage solution is wanting. It requires leaving messages open on the computer you have it installed on. Might be Mac only.
Texts was too buggy for me to keep using. I still think it has potential though.
What is it that you are looking for with this comment? If you already know texts.com is there a degree of comparison you cannot glean from reading beeper.com?
I'm a bit surprised to not see Jabber on there; surely there's a Matrix/Jabber bridge? Or perhaps I'm the only one of their potential customers that still uses jabber...
I love the idea of paying for hosted bridges but I'm not willing to switch my main ID to one they own. (And I don't want to have two accounts because that sort of defeats the the whole point.) If they would allow accessing the bridges with an arbitrary matrix account I would have been paying months ago.
That's disappointing, but I guess it's the reality of today if you want a cross-platform application with full design freedom. I mean personally I think application developers should just pay for and hire development teams for native platforms, with one small team per platform you can do a lot.
But it also means compromising on your designs, I think, because I'm fairly sure it's a lot more difficult to implement a custom design on a Linux app. And Apple MacOS apps have certain design guidelines and Expectations as well.
I wonder if they could make this into more of a client-server architecture; a crossplatform server that runs as the back-end on the user's machine (or an embedded core), and a native client implemented for the specific OS. With an open protocol so that the community can build alternative clients, e.g. CLI based, or native with less bells and whistles, or more compact.
I dislike electron apps a ton. But if an app is going to take over for a bunch of messaging apps, many that have bloated apps themselves, I don’t see it as a major problem.
[1]: https://www.beeper.com/