Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It’s a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn’t done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There’s going to be platform exclusive features that don’t have parity that wouldn’t be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.
I think Blackberry had the right solution with their Hub app. It was just a big inbox with a lot of integrations. It would show you all the conversations from different apps (including email) with all the typical filtering, sorting and searching. You had a single screen to see all your conversations nicely organized but clicking on a message would take you to the external app to send messages. It was super useful but of course apps had to provide some API for this to work and BB wasn’t popular enough so at some point it just stopped working. Android could easily do this but I think they are just not as good at UX as BB was (seriously, BB OS10 had lots of great features iOS copied a decade later and more, it was really nice).
Beeper Mini, I can agree the reason for existing is stupid. Not Beeper as a whole. I greatly like having a one stop shop for all of my messaging platforms. It’s a straight up fucking pain in the ass to have Messages, Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord, Telegram, LinkedIn, and more all having their own specific applications with separate lists of people in them. Gaim/Pidgin/Trillian/Adium had the right idea back in the day and if it isn’t done at an application level like Beeper, then I would really like it done at an OS level where all apps of a communication/chat type have their notifications and interactivity bundled. There’s going to be platform exclusive features that don’t have parity that wouldn’t be able to be part through or presented the same, but communications are such a base level function of these devices and the generally one-application-at-a-time type of display of phones makes the balkanization of communication mediums even more annoying.
I think Blackberry had the right solution with their Hub app. It was just a big inbox with a lot of integrations. It would show you all the conversations from different apps (including email) with all the typical filtering, sorting and searching. You had a single screen to see all your conversations nicely organized but clicking on a message would take you to the external app to send messages. It was super useful but of course apps had to provide some API for this to work and BB wasn’t popular enough so at some point it just stopped working. Android could easily do this but I think they are just not as good at UX as BB was (seriously, BB OS10 had lots of great features iOS copied a decade later and more, it was really nice).