Beeper’s all-in-one messaging app relaunches with an on-device model and premium upgrades

Beeper’s all-in-one messaging app relaunches with an on-device model and premium upgrades | TechCrunch

Tech-news Automattic, Beeper, messaging July 17, 2025

Multi-service messaging app Beeper, which allows people to connect to all their chat apps from one interface, is relaunching its app on Wednesday to offer a more secure version that no longer requires use of its own cloud services. In addition, Beeper is introducing premium offerings that provide access to more accounts than its free tier and include power-user features like reminders, the ability to send messages later, an incognito mode to read messages without marking them read, AI voice note transcriptions, and more.

Now owned by WordPress.com maker Automattic, which bought Beeper for $125 million in 2024, the app has almost entirely integrated with competitor Texts.com, which Automattic also acquired the year prior for $50 million.

With a combined 30-person team (including contractors) and now operating under the Beeper brand, the messaging app supports WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, X, Telegram, Signal, Matrix, Slack, Google Chat, Discord, LinkedIn, and Google Messages (SMS/RCS). On Mac computers only, Beeper can also connect users with their iMessage chats, though Apple has shut down this access in prior versions.

Image Credits:Automattic/Beeper

The overall goal, according to Automattic, is to simplify the problem of having too many messaging apps to keep up with, while also keeping those chats secure.

The app previously first connected with Beeper Cloud before communicating with the messaging network, said Beeper CEO Kishan Bagaria. While that system remains the default, users will now have the option of switching to Beeper on device, which will see the app connecting directly to the messaging network and skipping the middleman.

“That ensures that end-to-end encryption is preserved and your privacy is as good as the official app,” Bagaria told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the app’s relaunch. Whether the companies involved will appreciate having their own apps bypassed, however, remains to be seen.

“We have good relationships with some of these companies, and some of them are OK with this,” Bagaria said. “Others, we have not really heard from much.”

To stave off any potential shutdowns by messaging network providers, Beeper aims to support the business models of the first-party apps whenever possible. For example, if Telegram is showing ads, those ads will be shown in Beeper, too.

In addition, EU regulations requiring that messaging platforms be interoperable could put pressure on messaging app providers to leave a solution like Beeper’s alone.

Alongside the relaunch, there will now be an option to upgrade to a new $9.99 per month premium plan, Beeper Plus, which allows users to connect with 10 messaging services instead of just the five that free users have access to.

In addition, Plus subscribers have the option to schedule messages to send later, can set reminders to follow up on chats, read messages in incognito mode so they don’t feel pressured to respond immediately, access multiple accounts per network, view AI voice note transcriptions (processed via OpenAI’s Whisper model with user consent), and swap out their app icon for a custom version.

An even higher tier, Beeper Plus Plus, which starts at $49.99 per month, offers access to unlimited accounts and is designed with the needs of businesses or social media managers in mind. (Annual subscriptions are also available at a discounted price of $99.99 per year for Beeper Plus and $499 per year for Beeper Plus Plus.)

After Automattic acquired Beeper, the company combined its team with Texts.com to develop a new product that offered the best of both services. With Wednesday’s relaunch, those apps are now 99% integrated, Bagaria said, as only a few smaller features remain to be ported over.

Eventually, Automattic’s latest acquisition, the personal CRM Clay, which may later be rebranded, will also be integrated with Beeper, though it will remain a stand-alone app.

“It will mostly be built on top of the Beeper platform — it’ll stay complimentary,” Bagaria said. “Clay is an amazing app [as it] works today. Then, with Beeper, it can just ingest more interactions and data, which will make it like 2x to 10x better. Once that is done, I’m sure Clay can be a very powerful product.”

Beeper today has millions of registered users, including those from Texts.com. A small portion of those who are still using Texts.com are now being offered the option to migrate to Beeper, since it has added the on-device technology, which they prefer.

Bagaria said there may still be some remaining issues around reliability when moving to the on-device model, but those are being worked out as edge cases pop up. At some later point, Beeper Cloud will be deprecated once the company is sure the on-device model is capable of being everyone’s daily driver.

Further down the road, Beeper aims to make its data available to other companies, with user permission and controls to protect privacy. For instance, an MCP (model context protocol) Beeper one day could let users connect to chat apps via Claude or ChatGPT to ask it things like “summarize all my important messages from this evening.”

Those developments will take some time, as Bagaria says he’s also a “very privacy-conscious user,” and would want a solution that’s very transparent about what data is accessed and when, and one that allows users to even manually say yes or no to data requests, perhaps.

“We also don’t want to have server farms where we have models trained on your data. That’s a complete no-no,” he said.

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#Beepers #allinone #messaging #app #relaunches #ondevice #model #premium #upgrades #TechCrunch

Tag Automattic Beeper messaging

Jordan Chiles Creates Monochromatic Look With Sky-high Louboutins at ESPY Awards 2025

Image may contain Electronics Mobile Phone Phone Accessories Baby and Person

#Vertu #Folding #Phone #Powered #bySurprisean #Agentphones,smartphones,android,shopping,luxury,design">

mwasimuddin125 0

Vertu is a company known for making extraordinarily gaudy smartphones with outdated technology, luxe materials, and eye-watering prices. Now the brand is here to meet the AI moment with its first-ever book-like folding phone, complete with an AI agent on board.
The company announced the AlphaFold smartphone on Thursday—targeting business executives—which comes outfitted with the Hermes Agent. This agent can purportedly handle schedules and tasks on a user’s behalf and “connect to enterprise systems.” Agents are big in the smartphone world right now, with companies like Google and Samsung offering ways for Gemini on Android smartphones to perform tasks such as booking an Uber or ordering DoorDash. Vertu is cashing in on that trend.
But the company has a checkered past. Originally, Vertu was a Nokia subsidiary that made handcrafted luxury Nokia phones (in the UK!) in the early 2000s. Each phone came with access to a live concierge service. The company faced headwinds with the smartphone revolution and fell behind the times. Vertu then changed hands over several years, with various acquisitions, eventually shuttering its UK factory and laying off staff.
Courtesy of Vertu
In the last few years, the company has been churning out luxury Android smartphones again—it debuted a folding flip phone last year that starts at $4,300 (with a calfskin backplate, naturally). In late 2025, it unveiled the Agent Q, which it calls the “world’s first AI agent phone for entrepreneurs.”
While the company still claims a British heritage, its phones are no longer made in the UK, and according to its website, its head office is in Hong Kong. Vertu spokesperson Viki You tells WIRED that the phones are “still handcrafted,” but they’re assembled in China. “We have different factories,” You says, noting that the company sources its high-end materials from other countries, like the full-grain calfskin from Italy.
The AlphaFold has all the markings of a high-end Android smartphone. It’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset from 2025 and is 11.8 millimeters thick when folded, 5.4 mm when unfolded. Not quite as svelte as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7, but not far off from competitors like the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Vertu says the hinge and screen architecture were tested to withstand 650,000 folds, which is more than Samsung’s claim of 500,000 folds.
Inside is a 6,500-mAh silicon-anode battery, an up-and-coming battery technology that’s been making waves in Chinese smartphones and has only recently made its way into Western smartphones from the likes of Motorola. There’s 65-watt fast charging, a 120-Hz screen refresh rate for the inner 8.05-inch screen, and a 6.53-inch outer screen. There’s a triple-camera system with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel telephoto.

#Vertu #Folding #Phone #Powered #bySurprisean #Agentphones,smartphones,android,shopping,luxury,design">Vertu Is Back With a Folding Phone Powered by—Surprise—an AI Agent

Vertu is a company known for making extraordinarily gaudy smartphones with outdated technology, luxe materials, and eye-watering prices. Now the brand is here to meet the AI moment with its first-ever book-like folding phone, complete with an AI agent on board.

The company announced the AlphaFold smartphone on Thursday—targeting business executives—which comes outfitted with the Hermes Agent. This agent can purportedly handle schedules and tasks on a user’s behalf and “connect to enterprise systems.” Agents are big in the smartphone world right now, with companies like Google and Samsung offering ways for Gemini on Android smartphones to perform tasks such as booking an Uber or ordering DoorDash. Vertu is cashing in on that trend.

But the company has a checkered past. Originally, Vertu was a Nokia subsidiary that made handcrafted luxury Nokia phones (in the UK!) in the early 2000s. Each phone came with access to a live concierge service. The company faced headwinds with the smartphone revolution and fell behind the times. Vertu then changed hands over several years, with various acquisitions, eventually shuttering its UK factory and laying off staff.

In the last few years, the company has been churning out luxury Android smartphones again—it debuted a folding flip phone last year that starts at $4,300 (with a calfskin backplate, naturally). In late 2025, it unveiled the Agent Q, which it calls the “world’s first AI agent phone for entrepreneurs.”

While the company still claims a British heritage, its phones are no longer made in the UK, and according to its website, its head office is in Hong Kong. Vertu spokesperson Viki You tells WIRED that the phones are “still handcrafted,” but they’re assembled in China. “We have different factories,” You says, noting that the company sources its high-end materials from other countries, like the full-grain calfskin from Italy.

The AlphaFold has all the markings of a high-end Android smartphone. It’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset from 2025 and is 11.8 millimeters thick when folded, 5.4 mm when unfolded. Not quite as svelte as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7, but not far off from competitors like the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Vertu says the hinge and screen architecture were tested to withstand 650,000 folds, which is more than Samsung’s claim of 500,000 folds.

Inside is a 6,500-mAh silicon-anode battery, an up-and-coming battery technology that’s been making waves in Chinese smartphones and has only recently made its way into Western smartphones from the likes of Motorola. There’s 65-watt fast charging, a 120-Hz screen refresh rate for the inner 8.05-inch screen, and a 6.53-inch outer screen. There’s a triple-camera system with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel telephoto.

#Vertu #Folding #Phone #Powered #bySurprisean #Agentphones,smartphones,android,shopping,luxury,design

Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalogue.

Released in August 2025, Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.

Currently, if you’re stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move on to the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.

How to play Pips

If you’ve ever played dominoes, you’ll have a passing familiarity with how Pips is played. As we’ve shared in our previous hints stories for Pips, the tiles, like dominoes, are placed vertically or horizontally and connect with each other. The main difference between a traditional game of dominoes and Pips is the color-coded conditions you have to address. The touching tiles don’t necessarily have to match.

The conditions you have to meet are specific to the color-coded spaces. For example, if it provides a single number, every side of a tile in that space must add up to the number provided. It is possible — and common — for only half a tile to be within a color-coded space.

Here are common examples you’ll run into across the difficulty levels:

Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.
Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.
Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.
Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.
Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.

If an area does not have any color coding, it means there are no conditions on the portions of dominoes within those spaces.

Easy difficulty hints, answers for May 28 Pips

Greater Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 3-3, placed horizontally.

Greater Than (3): Everything in this space must be greater than 3. The answer is 4-0, placed horizontally.

Greater Than (2): Everything in this space must be greater than 2. The answer is 3-1, placed vertically.

Equal (1): Everything in this space must be equal to 1. The answer is 3-1, placed vertically; 2-1, placed vertically.

Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 2-2, placed horizontally.

Greater Than (6): Everything in this space must be greater than 6. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.

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Medium difficulty hints, answers for May 28 Pips

Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 4-3, placed vertically; 5-5, placed vertically.

Number (5): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 5-5, placed vertically.

Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.

Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 5-2, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed horizontally.

Not Equal: Everything in this red space must be different. The answer is 5-6, placed vertically; 4-4, placed horizontally; 3-3, placed horizontally; 2-2, placed horizontally.

Hard difficulty hints, answers for May 28 Pips

Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally.

Equal (3): Everything in this space must be equal to 3. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally; 3-3, placed vertically; 3-2, placed horizontally.

Greater Than (1): Everything in this space must be greater than 1. The answer is 3-2, placed horizontally.

Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 6-5, placed vertically.

Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 6-5, placed vertically; 1-0, placed vertically.

Equal (0): Everything in this space must be equal to 0. The answer is 1-0, placed vertically; 0-0, placed horizontally.

Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 1-4, placed vertically; 3-0, placed vertically; 2-6, placed vertically.

Less Than (3): Everything in this space must be less than 3. The answer is 0-6, placed vertically.

Greater Than (3): Everything in this space must be greater than 3. The answer is 4-6, placed vertically.

Equal (6): Everything in this space must be equal to 6. The answer is 0-6, placed vertically; 4-6, placed vertically; 6-6, placed vertically; 6-1, placed vertically.

Equal (1): Everything in this space must be equal to 1. The answer is 1-3, placed vertically; 6-1, placed vertically; 1-1, placed vertically.

Number (3): Everything in this space must add up to 3. The answer is 1-3, placed vertically

If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

#NYT #Pips #hints #answers">

mwasimuddin125 0

Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalogue.
Released in August 2025, Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.
Currently, if you’re stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move on to the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.

How to play Pips

Here are common examples you’ll run into across the difficulty levels:

Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.
Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.
Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.
Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.
Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.