The Antidote to Too Many Messaging Apps
How many messaging applications do you use? Here’s a few of them:
- SMS / RCS text messaging
- Discord
- Slack
- Facebook Messenger
- LinkedIn Messaging
- X / Twitter Direct Messaging
- Signal
- Instagram Direct Messaging
- Telegram
Imagine being able to use all of these in just one app organized by threads. That actually exists!
A relatively new app called Beeper aims to be a one-stop-shop for all types of messaging apps. According to their manifesto, they created the app based on the belief that the current landscape of messaging options were too siloed and “ambi-social” - meaning users had to keep track of which friends were on which network in order to message them.
Image sourced from Beeper’s blog.
At first I was extremely skeptical since each platform has its own ideocracies (reactions, embedded replies, media uploads, etc.) and I wondered how this new app would account for those differences. However, I soon found in general it gracefully handles those features.
For it to work well, it involves installing a desktop application, connecting all of your accounts, and then after that, using the mobile app, you can scan a QR code to pair any other device you need. So it’s theoretically a one-time connect process for each network.
For context: I actually do use each of these platforms and have active threads/direct messages active in each of them as of the past month or two.
I gave it a week, moving every app (except for Slack) to it and using it full time. Here were my initial takeaways:
- It broke on me one time, so I had to reinstall it. But not a big deal since the desktop app made it easy to reinstall and not have to reconnect everything.
- I’m shocked at how good the UX is. It captures reactions, replies, and a bunch of network-specific activities I didn’t expect it to.
- It can’t do EVERYTHING though. For example, you can’t react to peoples’ messages with Discord emotes.
- It was nice as a way to group notifications together for some networks, and it was annoying for others (like Discord and SMS).
My conclusion when I was 1-week in is that Beeper is fantastic for the messaging apps you use less frequently or don’t care about that much. It’s a great way to aggregate your “etc.” messaging apps into just one.
So after that, I pulled out SMS/RCS and Discord from it, and kept those independent. But I’m happy to continue combining Twitter DMs, LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, FB Messenger, and Instagram DMs into the Beeper UI and have it handle notifications as well.
For weeks two and three, I’ve been using Beeper in a partial capacity to handle those “etc.” apps and it’s much more convenient to manage. I have one Signal group chat and and a WhatsApp group chat that are particularly active, so being able to just see them as threads next to each other with their respective names in one list is extremely continent - not to mention much tidier from a notification standpoint. I’m now far more messaging platform agnostic since I can add anything pretty easily to Beeper - and for that I’m grateful!
On top of these benefits, it hasn’t broken on me at all since the first week.
Keeping Discord sperate has been nice, mostly because I use it for so many other things and the ability to use custom Discord emotes to react is something I surprisingly missed. SMS / RCS being handled separately just feels right as well, but it’s definitely from “old-school mobile phone” thinking. Combining text messaging with web-based messaging apps just feels odd to me for some reason.
Other than a few hiccups now and then, the app is surprisingly reliable considering all it’s doing. The biggest headache is going in to each app you have installed like Instagram or LinkedIn and manually turning off notifications for messages specifically. But that’s not too bad.
I wonder what pricing model Beeper will use going forward. For now it’s completely free to use, but there’s an optional paid subscription coming, and I’m not sure what features will be offered or removed from the current free tier.
All-in-all, I do recommend giving it a try, especially if you think it will simplify your life. There is an initial bit of setup to do, but once that’s done it’s smooth sailing. For now I have just SMS/RCS, Discord, and Beeper on my phone’s home screen, and it works out perfectly.
9/4/2024 Update: I’ve since had to remove Instagram and Facebook Messenger from the application. Instagram thought my account was suspicious or automated and temporarily limited it, and Facebook just kept signing out and it was annoying to repeatedly have to reconnect it. I may pair it down to just WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.