Owner of Tumblr and WordPress, Automattic, has acquired Beeper, the company behind the Beeper Mini app that defied Apple‘s iMessage hegemony towards the end of last year. The episode provided the DOJ with more ammo in its antitrust lawsuit against the iPhone maker, even if it ultimately lost that battle (after, oh, about three days). Automattic paid $125 million, a remarkably high sum for a startup, according to a Tuesday Bloomberg story.
For a global messaging experience, Automattic already provides an app called Texts that connects to the APIs of several chat providers. With nearly identical goals and branding, Beeper and its rival, Automattic, will now combine their teams under the leadership of Eric Migicovsky, the former CEO of Beeper.
You may also remember Migicovsky as the creator of the Pebble smartwatch, the charmingly simple pre-Apple Watch device that helped kickstart mainstream interest in wearable tech in the early 2010s. On Tuesday, he told The New York Times that Beeper and Texts will launch a combined service later this year. The two teams will reportedly begin work in two weeks during a meeting in Portugal.
On Tuesday, Migicovsky wrote in a blog post that the two companies go way back. “Matt [Mullenweg], Automattic’s CEO, and I have known each other for years,” he wrote. “He was an early user, supporter and investor in Beeper. We’re very well aligned on our goal (build the best chat app on earth), approach (open source where possible), and independence (Beeper will operate independently as part of Automattic’s Other Bets division).”
Automattic’s buying price is a bit of a head-scratcher, considering Beeper Mini’s claim to fame — iMessage integration on Android — was squashed after only a few days in the spotlight. Beeper framed the brief showdown as a fight for open, secure messaging standards. (It also helped the startup make more of a name for itself.) Apple saw it as a threat to one of its walled garden’s main attractions: the iPhone-to-iPhone chats’ blue bubbles with features like reactions and higher-resolution image and video-sharing.
Another reason to question Automattic’s acquisition price is Apple’s plan to bring RCS (rich communication services) support to iPhones later this year. Although the bubbles will remain green between iPhone and Android users, RCS chats replicate much of the iMessage appeal with a similar feature set, including end-to-end encryption.
Automattic’s interim chief executive, Toni Schneider, told The NYT that he sees the regulatory tradewinds blowing in a more open direction that will favor cross-platform, universal messaging apps like Beeper. Still, from my understanding, tapping into other services’ APIs is something the right coders could easily duplicate (including the Texts team Automattic already owned). Perhaps the real main attraction was the brand Beeper built for itself in taking on Apple.
