Pebble founder launches Beeper, a universal chat app that works with WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram

About a decade ago, apps like Nimbuzz, Trillian, Adium, Digsby allowed users to chat with their friends across multiple instant messaging services. However, as the years went by, their popularity waned among consumers.

Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky wants to attempt this again with the current crop of messaging applications with his upcoming app Beeper.



The subscription-based app will enable users to chat with others and have a unified inbox across 15 different messaging services, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Instagram and Twitter direct messages, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Hangouts, Slack, and Discord among others.

The company said it will be adding new chat networks every few weeks. Users will be able to search, snooze, archive messages and set reminders from the unified inbox.

Beeper is built on the open-source federated messaging protocol Matrix. While the client app itself is not open source, all the bridges connecting it to other chat networks are open source, available on Gitlab. Users will be able to run the company's backend stack on their own server or pay the company for a hosted option priced at $10 per month.

In terms of encryption, Beeper encrypts all messages on the client before they reach the company's servers and they cannot decrypt contents of any message, Migicovsky told Gizmodo.

The app is currently available on an invitation-only mode, and will support Windows, Linux‍, MacOS, iOS and Android.