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Comment by wolpoli | Hacker News Reader

MSN Messenger played a similar cat-and-mouse game with AOL Instant Messenger long time ago. Unlike MSN Messenger which used this publicity to grow their own market share, I am not sure what's the end game for Beeper.

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attention? this has brought beeper _tremendous_ publicity. i think it’s naive to think that beeper didn’t expect this—its win-win for them no matter what.

they could and so they did.

Win-win no matter what? An extremely likely scenario is that Beeper becomes completely defunct, and Apple has no legal or regulartory pressure applied to them. What's the win for Beeper here?

Beeper (Beeper Cloud) is a cross-platform stack that supports multiple messaging systems (not just iMessage) and has been in development for years.[1] This is different from Beeper Mini, which is a recently launched Android-exclusive app that only supports SMS/MMS and iMessage.[2]

The release of Beeper Mini certainly gained publicity for Beeper Cloud, and I don't see why Beeper Mini would cause Beeper Cloud to go defunct.

[1] Beeper Cloud: https://www.beeper.com/cloud

[2] Beeper Mini: https://blog.beeper.com/p/introducing-beeper-mini-get-blue

It’s better than a message app that no one knows about.

beeper is more than beeper mini.

The end game for Beeper is a significant presence on the most popular OS on the planet.

I don't think their interested in replacing iMessage directly, if that's your question.

I suspect they're angling to be bought out. Whether they maintain it, or kill it, they're likely just hoping to survive long enough that Apple decides buying them out is easier.

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