Summary
- Beeper now offers local chat connections, enhancing privacy and making end-to-end encryption actually useful.
- New premium features include Send Later, reminders, and Incognito mode, and a lot more other stuff.
- iMessage support is still missing, but Beeper is improving under new ownership.
You might be familiar with Beeper. The app made a name for itself by offering Android users a pathway to accessing iMessage, and while that's now gone, it's still a pretty useful app that offers the ability to keep all chats from all your apps in one place. Now, it's becoming even better, and fixing one of its biggest problems—but it's also leaving its other biggest problem unsolved.
The core Beeper application remains free for all users, but the company is now introducing a new paid subscription, "Beeper Plus," to provide a suite of more advanced features. We have "Send Later," which allows you to compose messages and set a specific future time and date for their delivery, and reminders, which help you set follow-up reminders for specific conversations and help you manage your very busy inbox.
We also have a new Incognito mode, which lets users read incoming messages without sending a "read" receipt back to the sender, as well as AI-powered voice transcriptions, which allow you to convert audio messages into text. We also have the ability to add multiple accounts from the same service within the app, and with a higher-tier Beeper "Plus Plus" subscription, you can add unlimited accounts to your heart's desire.
It's cool that we finally have the ability to run your chat connections locally—not only is it going to make the experience more usable and reliable, but routing chats through the cloud was probably a privacy concern for many, even with encryption ensuring that the middleman server can't really read sent/received messages.
As cool as these additions are, though, we still don't have iMessage support back, which is probably the very reason why Beeper became popular in the first place. Most of Beeper's current users probably don't care too much about this at this point, and the fact that the app is now owned by a "serious" company probably means that it won't try to reintroduce iMessage support anytime soon. A man can dream, though.
Source: Automattic
