Sarah Gooding
Automattic has acquired Texts, an all-in-one messaging platform, for $50 million. Texts is a newer company founded in 2020 that creates a centralized inbox for all major messaging platforms, including iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, and Discord.
The proliferation of messaging apps and inboxes has made responding to communication more complicated than it was in previous years. Most companies would prefer to keep users on their own platforms, but Texts offers a new level of interoperability between messaging apps that doesn’t require the use of its own servers. The website states that users’ messages never touch Texts’ servers. They are encrypted and sent directly to the messaging platforms. Texts charges a monthly subscription, instead of making money by selling users’ data. It also offers a number of AI-powered features for chat summaries, drafts, and translation.
Automattic’s Texts acquisition announcement states that the company is moving “into a fourth market that’s integral to the modern web experience: messaging.”
Mullenweg has been eying the messaging market for years and has previously spoken of his fascination with messaging platforms and their relationship with the independent web. In an interview with Om Malik at WordCamp Europe 2017, he mentioned that Automattic was experimenting with Telegram’s group broadcasting feature. More recently, it 2020, Automattic invested $4.6M in New Vector, a company founded by the creators of Matrix, an open standard that powers decentralized conversations with end-to-end encryption.
Texts’ founder, Kishan Bagaria, will take on a new role as Head of Messaging at Automattic and the rest of the 10-person team was retained to continue working on the product.
In response to an inquiry about the status of the iOS and Android mobile apps for Texts, a representative from Automattic said the company is currently testing an iOS beta with a subset of users. Android support is on the roadmap. The representative also confirmed there are no plans to change pricing right now but Automattic is considering the addition of a freemium plan in the future.
Texts will be expanding its coverage to streamline messages across more platforms. Matrix, Tumblr, and many more integrations are on the roadmap, including Snapchat, Google Messages, and Reddit.
The reason why all these softwares fail is because messaging throw the apps delivers an unique experience, that these are actually stripping out. Unless you are a company that needs to get messages from clients in one place, being a consumer and using that wouldn’t make sense. People from the US must understand that the reason why people in Europe and other places use applications is because of the unique experience that is way different and better than the simple SMS/iMessage from their phones.
I’d like to Aleksandar’s reply. While I live in Canada, I am from Croatia. If I were to send Aleksandar a text/sms messag…I am giving him my phone number.
With my a message app, you usually have usernames. Most people keep the same username everywhere. I have miroslavglavic as my username everywhere. When I go to Croatia or anywhere outside Canada, My phone is essentially in airplane mode, no calls or text/sms messages. I manually activate the wifi. I have my laptop.
By Aleksandar says “we people in Europe” I am assuming he is in Europe somewhere.
If he was going to call me or text/sms me, he’d incur long distance charges. Same for me. No cost if he sends me a message via a message app.
The reason why SMS/iMessage NEVER gets traction in Europe is because we didn’t have unlimited SMS/MMS and the MMS quality was bad and pretty much most people didn’t confirm it. I remember few years ago one SMS costs like 0.5 of your USD. Unlimited SMS is somehow new here. In Western Europe Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp is huge, in my country it’s Viber and Facebook Messenger. Not all of the apps require usernames, phone numbers are enough. With the decline of the US on the world stage, it’s time for you to start realizing that the world is not US-centered and that we have different history. Also, Android – very popular here.
Stripping out experiences from the apps ain’t going to transit people to all-in-one service.
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Automattic Acquires Texts, An All-in-One Messaging App – WP Tavern
