Beeper

You would think that accomplishing a simple task, such as communicating with others using text, would be straightforward, well, it can be.

Backstory

I used WhatsApp for all my messaging for a very long time since that was pretty much the de facto in the area I live. Then the accusations on WhatsApp came a couple of years back, and I decided to look into alternatives, settling on Telegram because I liked their approach to open-source clients and overall feature set. So, I converted all my important contacts to use Telegram too. But there was still one group I couldn’t get transferred from WhatsApp since people using Telegram are a minority, and there really isn’t much incentive for your average WhatsApp user to switch to it.

This led me to try bridging WhatsApp using Matterbridge, which utilized the WhatsApp web interface running on my server. That ran nicely for a couple of days or so until WhatsApp decided to kill the session, and I had to re-login again. This continued for a while until I decided that the constant maintenance just wasn’t worth the effort, gave up on the idea, and reinstalled WhatsApp again.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I watched some videos on the heated blue bubbles vs. green bubbles argument on iMessage. I thought it was utterly stupid but still looked at the projects promising to bring the blue bubbles to Android. There’s the Nothing chats powered by Sunbird (apparently very bad implementation), and then there is Beeper. I thought nothing of them since I didn’t have anyone to chat with blue bubbles, making the service unnecessary.

A bit later, I stumbled across someone recommending me to join a local Matrix instance. I joined and noticed that the instance provides bridges too, so I set them up. The provided bridges were kind of messy, so I started looking into alternative bridge solutions again and found out that a massive portion of them is made by Beeper. This sparked my interest in the project again, so I went to look at their website and signed up, noticed the long-ass waitlist, skipped it using a random code from Reddit, and I’m in.

Thoughts on the app

After all of that useless backstory, how is the app itself? Well, it’s modern-looking, simple to use, and has all the bells and whistles you would want from your average chat app. Linking all the accounts was super quick and painless. I was able to delete WhatsApp for good finally. Even linked Signal to it just for good measure, even though I have nobody to message there.

Now to the cons. I couldn’t merge all my chat apps; the Discord bridge, while it worked, left a lot to be desired, so much so that the official Beeper help page tells you to use the native apps instead. For some reason, scrolling through message history too quickly is stuttery (maybe decryption?). Linkedin integration was also broken, telling me to plug in my security key, while I have none, but I didn’t really need it anyway. There is also one big feature completely missing: calling of any kind, which means that you still need to have all the chat apps installed for receiving calls from your contacts. Lastly, while the app is currently free, they will introduce a paid subscription, meaning the free experience you can now get might be way worse in the future.

Overall, I think Beeper will be my go-to app for chatting for the foreseeable future and can recommend it for anyone in the current state.