Beeper sets a good premise. Talk to your friends without ever bugging them about hopping over to a completely new app. You might convert some, but not most.
There's a downside to E2EE on bridged chats but if that's not acceptable within your threat model then you wouldn't be using it in the first place.
there are exactly three messaging apps: Signal, Matrix/Element/SMS or RCS. anyone that wants to reach out has those options. I've had a lot of Signal converts.
Replace RCS with XMPP, one is in practice only available through Google's approval while XMPP is a standard created by the same organization that create IP (Internet) and SMTP (Email).
Appreciate the comment. I would like to do that but RCS is basically the default "SMS" option on Android making it broadly available to nearly half my contacts, the onboarding is basically "text me", whereas I'd have to provide some sort of instruction if I wanted to onboard anyone onto XMPP, in addition to recommending a good client depending on what OS they're running.
Since when is RCS the default SMS? Maybe on Google devices (perhaps Samsung), and even thats only recently.
Plus RCS is too little, too late, and has delivery/notification issues every bit as problematic as SMS.
Samsung alone is ~25% of the global Android smartphone market share [0]. This means 1 in 4 Android users will send "SMS" messages via RCS. You're right, it's not actually default, but it may as well be considering the app has over 5 billion downloads [1] and over 800 million monthly active users (MAU) [2]. This makes Google's Messages app slightly more popular than Telegram with 700 million MAU [3]. It may be a recent change, but its already taking over some of the more popular apps in terms of usage and general availability.
RCS is is late to the game but it's caught up and only getting better.
[0] You'll need to subtract Apple from the market share total to calculate the 25% as they include Apple in these numbers and I'm only talking about Android devices. Source: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-smartphone-share/
[1] Source: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.messaging
[2] Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/rcs-800-million-users-3323216/
[3] Telegram MAU. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234038/telegram-messenger-mau-users/
The neat thing is that Beeper is natively a Matrix app with bridges to the other services.
Is Beeper open source? If not, I'm unfortunately unable to extend my trust to yet another 3rd party with unverifiable code.
Their client is a closed source fork of Element, but you can use Element and other Matrix clients instead. Likewise, the bridges are open-source and you can self-host it all.
