Beeper is a unified messaging platform that integrates multiple chat services including Whatsapp, Signal, and RCS. Recently, the app enabled direct on-device connections to messaging networks, eliminating the need for their cloud to sync to chat apps.
Chat history is stored e2e in the cloud and their business model seems to be based on selling subscriptions.
What do you think of this service?
Avoid.
Care to elaborate? I’m sure they collect some telemetry but for those of us with only a few friends on Signal it seems like a good way to declutter
Thanks for offering helpful information in a kind and respectful way
Use it myself.
Works quite well for getting chats into one place.
Ideally more people need to get with the times and get onto signal rather that being stuck in the past with Facebook/whatsapp
Only thing is that as others have pointed out, is that you are trusting a 3rd party to your chats but then you are forced to use Facebook anyhow so it’s not too bothering
I sincerely apologize for that response. I wasn’t in a good mood but that is no excuse.
I’ll try again:
The usage of Beeper, even in the on-device mode, is still a breakage of trust the trust of yourself and your contacts by introducing a third-party.
You have to expect this third-party to (re-)implement all of the existing security measures that the original app does and hope they stay in sync.
Even if you don’t trust say Facebook, they likely did do their encryption correctly and that can’t be said for a third-party like this.
As this app is a bit different compared to say Molly which just forks the official client and makes changes on top, Beeper on the other hand is reverse engineering the implementations for their own implementations which is inherently error prone.
Furthermore even if they have a seemingly clear business model right now, that can always change in the future, especially given the large amount of $$$ invested so far, and there should be no reason to trust them with such sensitive data.
And again, Signal is (nearly entirely) open-source, using Beeper to interact with Signal is just not a great idea.
But you might ask “Didn’t we have tools like this in the past like Pidgin?”. Yes, but those services back then were all much similar and simpler protocols, and encryption wasn’t really a thing back then so it was far easier to implement.
I’ll re-iterate again, just because you’re having to use one bad company doesn’t mean you should subject yourself and your contacts to additional bad companies. This is a very bad outlook.
I’m not so sure this is true. While it is certainly true that it can’t literally be as secure, in my testing connecting WhatsApp and Signal, all Beeper does is use both of those apps’ existing sync solutions. For example, I used Signal’s Linked Device feature in set up.
Idk, for the layperson, it seems like a solid solution.
Connecting via the linked device feature is irrelevant to how they’re reimplementing protocol, that is just how they’re binding to your account.
All my points still stand.