WordPress and Tumblr owner Automattic acquired Beeper, the maker of the Beeper Mini app late last year to challenge Apple’s iMessage dominance. Although it ultimately lost the battle (about three days later), the incident provided more ammunition for the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against the iPhone maker. Bloomberg Reports emerged on Tuesday that Automattic paid $125 million, a staggering sum for the startup.
Automattic already has an application called Texts that leverages the APIs of various chat services to provide a common messaging experience. Beeper essentially has the same mission and brand, and the two competitors will now merge their teams, led by Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky, who will join Automattic.
You may remember Migicovsky as the creator of the Pebble smartwatch, the charming and simple pre-Apple Watch device that helped spark mainstream interest in wearable technology in the early 2010s.On Tuesday, he told New York Times Beeper and Texts will launch a joint service later this year. The two teams will reportedly start work during a meeting in Portugal in two weeks’ time.
The two companies have a long history, Mijikovsky wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “Matt [Mullenweg]The CEO of Automattic and I have known each other for many years,” he wrote. “He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. We have a strong relationship with our goal (to build the best chat app on the planet), our approach (as open source as possible) and our independence (Beeper will be independent as part of Automattic’s other betting divisions). Operations) are very consistent.”
The Automattic purchase price is a bit of a head-scratcher, considering the Beeper Mini’s claim to fame — iMessage integration on Android — was squashed just days after it was thrust into the spotlight. Beeper described the brief showdown as a fight for open, secure messaging standards. (It’s also helped the startup make more of a name for itself.) Apple sees it as a threat to one of its walled garden’s main attractions: blue bubbles for iPhone-to-iPhone chat, with Reactions and higher Features such as high-resolution images and video sharing.
Another reason to question Automattic’s purchase price is Apple’s plan to bring RCS (Rich Communications Services) support to the iPhone later this year. While the bubble will remain green between iPhone and Android users, the RCS chat feature replicates much of iMessage’s appeal, with a similar feature set, including end-to-end encryption.
Toni Schneider, interim CEO of Automattic New York Times He believes that the regulatory trend will be more open, which will benefit cross-platform and universal messaging applications such as Beeper. However, from my understanding, leveraging other services’ APIs is something that the right coder can easily replicate (including the Texts team that Automattic already has). Perhaps the real main draw is the brand Beeper has built for itself as it competes with Apple.
