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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

I hope someday we get the real story of what Eric was hoping to accomplish with Beeper. His previous company Pebble was basically annihilated by the Apple Watch—was this an attempt to give regulators the opening they needed to take Apple down? If so, the choice of iMessage is utterly baffling, as it's only popular in the US and has plenty of very popular alternatives.

The whole thing just feels like a monumental waste of human effort.

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I loved Pebble. My wife and I had multiple watches and I was very active in the dev community. If Pebble were still around I’d still be a customer.

Pebble’s problem wasn’t the Apple Watch, although it certainly didn’t help. What killed Pebble was its growth. They hired a lot of people and rented a very expensive office, but they just didn’t have the sales to support it. The Time Round was an absolute marvel of engineering, but it should’ve been put on the back burner until the OG and the Time actually sold.

Out of all the money Pebble spent very little was for actually advertising their product. Outside of tech circles it just wasn’t a known thing, which was a shame.

It also didn’t help that their app store had no payment solution. One was eventually released by a third party but that didn’t help draw developers. Their SDK was a joy to use and Pebble Cloud was awesome. But if you can’t really get a return on investment because you can’t sell your app then nobody is going invest.

I miss Pebble a lot. I still pull out my Time Steel every so often just to admire it.

> I hope someday we get the real story of what Eric was hoping to accomplish with Beeper

Beeper is bridging many services, such as LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter DMs, Slack etc. I really like this, as I miss an all-in-one messenger app like Pidgin.

Just because Beeper includes iMessage, I wouldn't view Beeper as his personal vendetta against Apple for the Pebble vs Apple Watch thing.

I still have my pebble(s, actually, originals and time). I haven't yet found any smartwatch with as much of a community around it as it had (and still does, many years after the company was sold).

My (attempt at a) replacement is a withings scanwatch, but it doesn't do color or have apps. The pebble physical buttons are awesome for doing something when you're restricted from using your phone somehow. The two weeks of battery life was also amazing. Anybody know any smartwatches with two weeks or more of runtime on a charge?

Beeper was always about more than iMessage. It just turned out to be the most desired/special integration, despite supporting so many other networks. A good example is one of the employees posted an image from 2020 in the community server. It was of back when it was called "NovaChat" and the purpose then was still just to aggregate all your chat apps, no specific mention of Apple or iMessage even.

It bothers me because they poked the bear and i lost a feature, to use iMessage from my work computer (Linux). Really makes me dislike Apple, but still - Beeper basically nuked the feature themselves by making such an odd move.

I really need to switch away from Apple. Ugh.

Beeper was always going to grow and go (back) to being paid. It would have happened eventually, even without Beeper Mini.

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