What do you need to know about a messaging app? A few things Mullenweg says about Beeper, Texts, Tumblr, and WordPress

Mullenweg told me that in October as he was announcing another acquisition: a $50 million purchase of Texts, an all-in-one messaging app that is Beeper’s main and maybe only direct competitor. The space was being thought about the right way, but he took issue with some of the Beeper security models that required it to store and de-crypt your messages. The best argument that the big tech folks will have is that it is breaking security, he said. Since then, Beeper has rolled out some security upgrades that change the way the app handles security and prevent Beeper itself from seeing unencrypted messages from Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted apps.

Late last year the messaging app Beeper raised the ire of Apple when it found a way to recreate Apple’s infamous “blue bubble” messaging on Android. Beeper has been acquired in a $125 million deal, but it is still an unhappy ending.

On the other side, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has been saying for months that he believes messaging is the next big pillar of the company. With WordPress projects, Automattic helps oversee something like half the websites on the internet. It is a powerful player in online retail. And with messaging, Mullenweg told me last fall, he saw another chance to work on something just as big and just as important. He said that communication is fundamental to the human condition. “And so private, free, encrypted, open-source communication is a fundamental human right.”

Beeper was founded three years ago and is being acquired by the parent company of WordPress as well as the online content creation and publishing platform, Tumblr. Beeper is a stand-alone company that will remain so, along with all of its 27 employees who will be absorbed into the larger entity.