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Comment by Belphemur | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the plan is to merge Beeper and Texts.com.

They both look verify similar in their features. Maybe texts.com for the Apple Ecosystem and Beeper for the Android one ?

After all, Beeper just released their new version of the app for Android.

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Both Texts and Beeper are in active development while we work hard behind the scenes to combine the best parts of both under the Beeper brand.

So we'll only have Beeper on every platform.

Seems that way. From the announcement: "This is a big bet. Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging. It will take a bit of time for us to integrate and combine forces under the Beeper brand. We’ve got big plans!"

They will likely dismantle Texts and focus on Beeper as it received more investment while taking the good of Texts. They will probably introduce Texts monetization model to Beeper though.

One app for Apple and another for Android kinda defeats the purpose of "all in one platform", wouldn't it?

I hope not, have you used both apps? Texts is much more stable and easy to use than Beeper in my experience.

Not my experience. I’ve tried (and am still trying) texts and not once I was able to have it just work. Constantly messages not showing up, accounts not loading, or something else missing. I’ve been submitting heaps of feedback to the Texts team.

It looks great but feels very alpha/beta to me, and I decided to not renew my subscription

I'm a pretty avid Texts user, and I both agree and don't… as much as I ~regularly run into hiccups of some kind, I feel they're pretty inevitable with this sort of thing, and the parts of Texts that _could_ be stable definitely are. The overall product feels polished and snappy IMO.

I've not had a day without issues. I don't know if this is something wrong with my account (instagram), but it's so unreliable that I can't trust that what I see in Texts is actually how the conversation looks like. Funnily enough, I ran Beeper in parallel as backup.

Weird things from a message missing in between other messages, new messages not showing up at all, messages I send not arriving, etc.

(The iOS app is on a completely different level with it not even refreshing my messages most of the time until I disable and enable certain accounts again. But it's in TestFlight so I'll treat it as a beta and not expect too much polish yet)

I've religiously submitted feedback constantly to them, together with console logs and error dumps, but now my trial expired and I just can't justify paying for it in the current state :/

ah, yeah their instagram integration is often pretty rough.

Texts.com runs locally, Beeper runs bridges.

The Beeper codebase is also in a pretty bad state.

What information is this based on?

The codebase

Didn't they just do a ground-up rewrite?

Let’s hope so

The bottom line of the post says as such (sorry if it was edited in after you posted)

"For Texts.com users... [...] Over time, we will work to integrate the teams and products. More news to come in the future!"

Yes, it mentioned Texts and Beeper teams will be merging under the Beeper brand. So essentially the end of Texts. Presumably will bring some parts of Texts app to Beeper that doesn't exist, but overall glad I abandoned Texts little while back, since while loved the idea, was very buggy with notifications delayed, or sometimes unable to send certain types of messages through certain services etc. And no pathway at the time for support on iOS. With all the EU stuff, there is a chance maybe people will be forced to open up more as would love to have a single app to manage all messaging but certainly far from hopeful that will come to be, at least without downsides.

Beeper is cross platform. They have an app for iOS and Mac.

Both of our apps are cross-platform. Both Texts and Beeper are available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Texts for iOS is in public beta, you can join the TestFlight: https://texts.com/install/ios

OP didn't day Mac. They were presumably referring to Apple's main platform, iOS.

I replied before the OP edited the comment substantially.

Does anyone know how the texts.com iMessage integration works?

EDIT - It’s macOS only. Nothing new to see here, I’m afraid.

Came to ask the same, is that really true? They have a graphic on their homepage that certainly implies you can use it as a replacement for iMessage on iOS. I can't imagine anyone doing that if you can no longer actually reach anyone on iMessage.

> They have a graphic on their homepage that certainly implies you can use it as a replacement for iMessage on iOS.

You can. You run a "router" on your Mac, which allows iMessage interop without the protocol hacking that doomed Beeper.

Yes, from the post:

> Automattic is doubling down on chat after their acquisition last year of Texts.com, a messaging app with a similar mission. Our teams and products will merge, and I will take on the role leading the team as Head of Messaging.

Merging the 2 will be interesting since they take opposite approaches? Texts doesn't use bridges.

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