I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
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.
Huh, in my opinion people simply moved away, because the underlying messenger were used less and less. Once everyone ran around with smartphones using WhatsApp, fewer and fewer people cared about MSN, ICQ, etc.
Not “everyone” uses Whatsapp though - I deleted mine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and I know of a few others who also did so. As far as I know Whatsapp has still never changed their T&C to pass metadata upstream to Facebook.
This is really region dependent. In Europe (or at least the Netherlands) almost everybody with a smartphone uses Whatsapp
Talk to anyone in latin america, you must use whatsapp. There’s no avoiding it. Some have tried Telegram a while ago, but most have reverted back to their usual whatsapp or facebook messenger. It’s crazy.
I am in a different part of the world, and what you are saying is also true here for the older generation, while the younger one has no escape from Telegram.
I can vouch for this in a small town of like 5k people in zacatecas, Mexico. Everyone including government and businesses uses WhatsApp. You see the logo with phone numbers all over the place.
Same experience in Argentina and Paraguay
I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.
If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!
They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.
Most of the protocols supported by Trillian were walled gardens too - AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc were all proprietary.
Trillian had paid full-time developers too. I’m not sure what’d they’d be doing differently to what Trillian did.