I find this a bit confusing though. It seems like this was an inevitable outcome, but what do they gain from this technical investment aside from exposure. Their website doesn't steer users to anything other than the now cut-off Beeper mini?
Exposure is something. The fact the developer had the chops to do this is now on the public record. That could be very valuable for getting a job or a college scholarship (since they’re in HS).
I did something similar, built an entire app around an undocumented developer api, got a lot of users and then ended up in a good enough position to find out there was a "hidden" official api for sale and it opened a lot of doors as well even to the same site had gotten it from. For someone as young as that with nothing but time, I'm sure they knew the outcome and it blowing up was probably more than they could ask for.
What do the Beeper investors get out of the kid having better job prospects? I don't think anyone is questioning that the whole situation has been great for the kid, the question is what the Beeper execs were thinking.
Who cares about the investors? Why is this an important question? Corporations and investors aren't the only people in the world with an ability to reap their rewards.
What technical investment? They bought an open-source project from a high-school student.
Beeper Mini is an app they would have built anyway. They simply implemented the bare minimum of iMessage functionality there. Which is a couple of days worth of work, maximum. Maybe a week. And some for testing.
I’m somewhat certain it cost them less than 5 figures. And if it did, what a great marketing campaign. I had no idea what Beeper even was before this whole fiasco.
More like a few weeks to months since there‘s also emoji support and endless scrolling etc, but yeah. I agree it’s doable by one developer and that’s quite affordable to do, considering the scale Beeper is at now.
I still have no idea what Beeper is, because beeper.com only talks about Beeper Mini. I'm getting from some people here on HN that there's another product... somewhere... but if the purpose of the whole exercise were to draw attention to that product shouldn't they be doing that somehow?
As is all I know about is the chat app whose primary sales pitch is the now-broken iMessage interop.
Bottom of the page, click Beeper Cloud. They signalled that they want to move all of Beeper Cloud's features to Mini eventually and just call it Beeper.
They have another product, Beeper Cloud, does the same thing + includes a bunch of other messaging services but (as the name implies) runs in the "Cloud"
They send your Apple credentials to a machine (possibly virtual) that runs macOS, which sends and receives messages. Those messages get relayed through Beeper.
