Beeper Brings WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, More Chat Apps Into a Single Inbox, Including iMessages on Android

Beeper is a new app that brings 15 chat platforms into a unified inbox. It acts as a central hub and combines your chats from apps like Facebook Messenger, Signal, Twitter (Direct Messages), Telegram, WhatsApp, and more. Interestingly, Beeper can even bring Apple's iMessage to Android, Linux, and Windows. Besides messaging, you can search, snooze, and archive through your chats on Beeper. It is a subscription service with monthly fee of $10 (roughly Rs. 730).

The fifteen chat services that Beeper supports are Android Messages [SMS], the Beeper network, Discord, Hangouts, iMessage, Instagram, IRC, Matrix, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Skype, Slack, Telegram, Twitter, and Whatsapp. New chat networks will be added every few weeks, as per Beeper.

Beeper, formerly known as NovaChat, is built on the open-source Matrix messaging protocol. It was created by the founder of Pebble smartwatches, Eric Migicovsky. You can sign up for Beeper through this form, after which you'll receive an invitation to join.

While Migicovsky tweeted that the app gets iMessage to work on Android, Windows, and Linux using “some trickery,” Beeper's FAQ offers an explanation on how it does the same. The Beeper team sends each user a jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed, that bridges to iMessage. This is apparently not a joke – Migicovsky shared a picture on Twitter of what appears to be old jailbroken iPhones. In response to a tweet, he said that he currently had 50 iPhone 4s models at his desk, meant to be upcycled to use with Beeper.

This makes the $10 monthly fee more justifiable. However, if you have a Mac that's always connected to the Internet, there's a slightly less crazy way to use iMessage through Beeper. Users can simply install the Beeper Mac app, that acts as a bridge.

If you want to self-host, Beeper's site has instructions that can let you do so. The website also assures users that there will be a dark mode available for the app in the next update.

Does WhatsApp's new privacy policy spell the end for your privacy? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.