While I agree that it would be nice to only have one app installed in order to chat with everyone, the fact that it’s not open source makes me question the privacy involved. I’ve already sold my soul to these individual chat apps. I’d rather not compound that problem.
Performance was not great and I didn’t like the apps design that much but most importantly: this is not what I want. I want chat apps to be interoperable. I don’t want to be on WhatsApp and Signal and Matrix and yadayadayada. I want to be only on Matrix in the future. I hope the EUs DMA makes that happen.
There's reasons people moved away from multi-network apps like Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin... They were always playing catch-up with the official clients, and frequently broke when there were server-side changes. Protocols for proprietary messaging apps were (and still are) undocumented. I'm not convinced they've actually solved any of these issues.
This looks like a promising application; and as long as the business models stay sustainable and the company remains ethical; it should be a good place.
Well universal chat (like universal e-mail) is either going to be a common open protocol (does not seem very likely given Apple and all the other players) or is going to be something like this on the client side. Although its a lot of work, it does seem more possible. The only pity is it can't solve connecting to services that I don't use like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp.
Been using their bridges for over 2 years, super happy that I no longer need WhatsApp installed on my phone.
If you're like me and live in a country where a shitty chat application is required to be able to function in society, software like this is a breath of fresh air. The bridges are also super stable and incredibly well written.
Note: to be clear, I don't use beeper itself, but use their open source bridges (what beeper is using internally) on my own self hosted Matrix server.
I remember trying to setup matrix bridges using these exact repositories a while ago!
So if this company does the dirty job behind like server management and brings it nicely packaged as product, I'm fine with this. I'm tired of having to install more than 2-3 apps (lots of families abroad) just to communicate.
"pebble notification support" then show just the generic default support with no action? (No black dot on the right). I can reply to WhatsApp messages using the pebble but here doesn't look like, seems just basic support handled by the pebble app
Meh, there is always some kind of feature it's missing that I want from the official app or one of it's competitors. I tried it for a while but ultimately went back to my regular apps.
tell me how this is better than simply changing all my usernames to "CorsicanGuppy is only on Jabber now, so reach out there" and shutting them all down.
(Actually I liked when pidgin worked, as I could receive on walled platforms and respond on open platforms)
But still, continuing to use closed platforms allows them to perpetuate. Sendmail killed bitnet, and we need to only continue that trend.
These universal chat apps often do not offer all of the features the underlying apps have. Which makes sense but is probably a reason they never get massively adopted.
Overall it's been pretty good. I mainly needed it to stop the problem of having an Android phone and MacBook, where sometimes texts from iPhone users "slip" to Messenger on my laptop and I don't see them until I'm at my computer. I cant get it to take over my native Android messages, and it glitches when I get a call on WhatsApp where I have to open WhatsApp manually to answer, but still worth it.