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SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

He also screwed a lot of the employees on the way out from Pebble, and he also bailed on Beeper the minute it got complicated. Sold it to Matt Mullenweg a year or two after getting pimp-slapped by Apple because he had no real plan for what to do if Apple started banning the devices he was using as Matrix bridges.

I have personal experiences with Beeper that make me less than trust Eric Migicovsky, and I really don’t think he seems like a “nice guy.” He actively sucks, doesn’t have plans for sustainability and then sells it all off to someone else at a personal profit while the people doing the actual work get fucked out of a job.

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sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Beeper is an instant messenger software that enables using a variety of chat services and protocols all from the same application. It was created in 2020 by Eric Migicovsky, Brad Murray and Tulir Asokan

On December 5, 2023, the company released Beeper Mini, an Android app that can send messages through Apple’s iMessage instant messaging service.

Beeper Mini was downloaded more than 100,000 times within two days of launch. After the release, Apple repeatedly blocked Beeper Mini from sending messages through iMessage, and Beeper updated the app multiple times to circumvent Apple’s blocks.[18] On December 21, 2023, Beeper issued its last update to Beeper Mini, which requires users to access an iOS or macOS device to enable the app to send messages through iMessage.[20]

That timeline is crazy. It’s a chat app for years. It breaks into iMessage and gets crazy downloads. Then 16 days later they’ve given up. Four months later he sells the whole thing.

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- SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah, he seems to have a bad habit of bailing on his pet projects once they become “difficult” partially because he never seems to have an actual plan to get them to financial stability. It’s why I’m so hesitant to have any hopes for this reboot of Pebble after he bailed on it the first time around.
  
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Wigglytuff@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What’s the gist of your “personal experiences with Beeper”?

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- SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I was very excited when it was first announced and I got on the wait list.
  
  I finally got onboarded, and this was when you still had be walked through the setup by one of the Beeper employees.
  
  I got into the Zoom meeting, and got a warning that it was going to be recorded. I had not, up to that point, had ever been disclosed that it was going to be recorded. I declined to join the meeting and sent a follow-up email with some pertinent privacy related questions, especially since in the case of some of the Bridges that were being used for this service essentially meant Beeper would have access to my credentials. They would later create a more secure system, but it was not very secure early on.
  
  My main question regarded Micigovsky’s past in selling Pebble and I asked what gaurantees of the privacy policy were being made in regard to a potential sale of the company (considering it eventually got sold, I guess a good question to ask), and what, if any, promises were being made for the privacy policy to stay unchanged through a sale.
  
  I never got a response to my questions. Not being told I was going to be recorded, and not ever getting an answer to reasonable privacy policy questions led me to never signing up for the service.
  
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