Automattic is buying Texts and betting large on the way forward for messaging

Automattic, the corporate that runs WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and quite a lot of different well-liked net properties, simply made a special form of acquisition: it’s shopping for Texts, a common messaging app, for $50 million.

Texts is an app for all of your messaging apps. You can use it to log in to WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Signal, iMessage, and extra and see and reply to all of your messages in a single place. (Beeper is one other app doing related issues.) The app additionally provides some extra options like AI-generated responses and summaries, however its major goal is to unify your many inboxes right into a single interface.

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, says Texts isn’t just a product acquisition but in addition the start of an enormous new funding for the corporate. So far, he says, Automattic’s two predominant areas of focus have been on publishing and commerce — now, messaging is the corporate’s third pillar. “I like to pick areas I feel are so fundamental to the human condition that I can work on this the rest of my life,” he says. “Self-publishing, commerce, and messaging covers a good chunk of all human activity, and they’re also three areas where I think an open-source solution is necessary for the long term.”

In that long run, Mullenweg says he’s bullish on options like Matrix, which provides a decentralized and open-source messaging community, and different up-and-coming requirements for messaging. He’s already enthusiastic about how Texts may gently nudge folks towards extra open protocols over time. But for now, “I think the most user-centric thing to do is not try to pick one of those standards and force people into it, but actually support them all and let the market and users decide.”

Mullenweg factors to 2 different issues he likes about Texts particularly. First, its founder, Kishan Bagaria: “Kishan is, I think, a generational tech genius who we’ll be talking about for many decades to come,” Mullenweg says. The second is Texts’ safety mannequin, which depends on on-device encryption quite than storing a duplicate of all of your messages within the cloud. “Just as an engineer, I can’t ethically support” the cloud-first mannequin, Mullenweg says. He additionally thinks the cloud safety mannequin may give present messaging apps a purpose to close down Beeper and different makes an attempt at interoperability. “I think the argument that there shouldn’t be interop is more difficult to make, politically, especially with regulators,” he says. “But the technical argument for why it’s not as secure is a good one for why to block things.”

The very first thing the Texts staff will do at Automattic, it appears, is end its cell app. “To do this on mobile with push notifications, and efficient battery, and everything, is pretty tricky,” Mullenweg says. “But I think we’ve cracked it in a way that maintains all the end-to-end encryption, and where Automattic has no access to your keys, your anything.” Right now, Texts is a $15 a month power-user software, however Mullenweg says that might change over time. “There might be some limited free version in the future,” he says. “But if you’re serious about this, you’ll want the paid — for less than like the price of one streaming service or two cups of coffee a month, you’ll get something that you’ll be able to use for hours a day.”

Mullenweg and Automattic see an enormous future for messaging, as extra on-line interplay shifts away from public-first social networks and towards issues like group chats. Hardly anybody has found out construct a significant and sustainable enterprise from chat, however Mullenweg thinks it’s potential. And he thinks it begins with making your messaging rather less messy.