Our quest to make Beeper the best chat app on Earth continues. Recap the progress we’ve made, ICYMI.
I was on the beta testing team and have been using Beeper for a little over two years now.
The convenience of having an application to house all of your chat networks is amazing.
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Been using their bridges for over 2 years, super happy that I no longer need WhatsApp installed on my phone.
If you're like me and live in a country where a shitty chat application is required to be able to function in society, software like this is a breath of fresh air. The bridges are also super stable and incredibly well written.
Note: to be clear, I don't use beeper itself, but use their open source bridges (what beeper is using internally) on my own self hosted Matrix server.
The one thing that sucks about bridging and is never likely to be solved is voice calls through bridges. Theres really no good way to implement it as you would essentially need to have the bridge call you through matrix after you get a WhatsApp call.
Yes, this is very correct.
As a person who's been using said bridges as his primary form of contact for years, it's very difficult to tell people: "Hey, I'm not actually reachable on Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram, please just call me instead".
As a result, I have a backup "net phone" in one of my cupboards with each of those apps installed. If I'm dealing with a particularly stubborn person I have to use it as a fall back.
So, while I love these bridges, your comment is completely valid and anyone thinking of using them should be aware of that.
TLDR, my Matrix chats are filled with:
Person A (WA): Incoming call
Me: I don't have whatsapp, needs to be a normal call :(
Person A (WA): Ok. Calling in five minutes.
Yeah this is especially difficult if you're dealing with people overseas who have generally bad cellular voice service. I've had to relaunch whatsapp in another profile on my phone just to answer their calls.
Yep. Shame that we're so reliant on shit like this.
It gets even funnier when the other person can't even distinguish between a phone call and a whatsapp voice call.
Me: I can't answer WA calls, I will call you back.
Person: What???
Yeah, as a result I just see matrix + Tulir's bridges as a system that I've deployed just for me.
I get all my chat networks in one place, and others get to see me online on their networks of choice. Not perfect, but not the worst.
And it's leagues ahead of Trillian and the rest of those older solutions.
