I like chatting with my friends—who doesn’t?—but I don’t always know where to find them. There are simply too many apps.
Some of my friends text, others use WhatsApp, while others yet insist on using Discord or the DM feature in whatever random social network they prefer. It’s a mess, and it can mean keeping several tabs open all day just to keep the conversations flowing. It makes you wish some application could combine all of your conversations into one place.
This is a dream that used to be reality. Applications like Trillian, Pidgin, and Adium all combined instant messaging services like AIM, MSN, and ICQ in one handy interface. Over time, though, messaging services got more protective of their APIs, and these sorts of all-in-one portals slowly stopped working.
The dream, it seems, is dead.
Or is it?
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Messaging, minus the mess
Time to meet—or maybe just remember—an exceptional app that takes all of your messages and puts them in a single streamlined interface for easy, ongoing access.
The app is called Beeper. It can connect to all the major messaging platforms: Google Messages, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Signal, LinkedIn, X, Discord, and Slack.
➜ It’s one application for all of your conversations no matter where they might be happening.
⌚ Installing Beeper is quick—a minute or two, tops, but adding in all of your messaging services could take longer, depending on how many different things you’re connecting.
Now, if Beeper rings a bell, there’s probably a reason. You may recall a controversy around Beeper a few years back involving Apple. The application was initially launched as a way for Android users to send “blue bubble” messages to Apple users—a feature Apple then worked diligently to shut down. (These days, Beeper can connect to iMessage only via its desktop Mac version.)
In the time since then, the program’s been acquired by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress and Tumblr, and given both new resources and a new reason for existing.
- If you have an Android phone, you can use it to manage your text messages alongside messages from other applications (something that, as an iPhone user myself, makes switching to Android a tempting option).
- And no matter what type of phone you’re using, combining several little-used messaging apps into one that you keep open—on your phone and/or computer—is in and of itself worthwhile.
- I hardly ever open LinkedIn or Facebook, for instance, and yet I never miss any messages on either platform with Beeper in the mix.
I’ve personally been using Beeper for years, and I love that it creates a single inbox for all of my ongoing conversations across any applications. Before this tool, I would constantly see a notification, intend to respond, and then never get around to it because the message came in via an application I don’t check often. That doesn’t happen anymore. I honestly believe Beeper makes me better at keeping in touch.
I also like that you can archive messages, allowing you to create a sort of “inbox zero” for text messages. If I see something I intend to respond to later, I simply leave it un-archived in my inbox—the same as I do with emails—then power through my messages whenever I have a minute.
There are a bunch of other nice features beyond that. On the desktop computer front, Beeper’s keyboard shortcuts—including a built-in command bar—mean I can jump between conversations without ever touching my mouse.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Beeper is just a well-put-together piece of software that solves a common problem. It takes a little bit of fidgeting to get going at first, but the results are 100% worth it.
- Beeper runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, ChromeOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux—so basically, everything.
- The service offers a free version that supports up to five accounts on different messaging services, which is probably plenty for most people. If you need to connect to more than that, you’ll have to spring for a paid subscription, starting at $10 a month (or $100 a year).
- Many of Beeper’s integrations run in the cloud, meaning an encrypted copy of your messages does get stored by the company. The privacy policy is pretty solid, though, and there are no ads or data monetization built into the application. It’s funded entirely by subscribers.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletter—starting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app that’ll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.