[mustacheemperor]

Before this entire debacle unfolded, I really liked having Beeper on my iPhone to send and receive texts from my Windows computer and mix my chat platforms together like the old days of IM. I was on the waitlist early and I even got the Beepy Mini and have had a lot of fun messing with it. The visual design of their app/logo is distinct and charming. I told people to try it out. I would make detailed bug reports for issues I hit and the team would reply, and fix them.

But the shine really wore off over the last couple months, and I finally uninstalled it yesterday. It’s just become less and less reliable throughout, with messages arriving out of order, etc. There was plenty of room left to polish and improve the experience as an iPhone messaging client too, but instead of doing that they picked this fight with Apple and it feels like any other roadmap items and general stability fell by the wayside.

I wonder what the master plan for Beeper was here. Because I feel like as a user of their original offering I was pretty much left aside so they could fight this battle that unfolded exactly as futilely as skeptical HN commenters predicted it would on day 1. Were there just not enough of us using the original offering, they had to throw this Hail Mary?

The updates channel used to be full of incoming features and enhancements, once it became a constant drumbeat of the next flailing attempt to circumvent Apple with the Android client I figured we weren’t ever getting Stickers support. iMessage sending and receiving performance in my iPhone and computers has generally degraded over the last couple months too, and I have to assume it’s related.