Amazon Plans To Close Up Shop on Wickr's User-Centric Encrypted Messaging App

An anonymous reader shares a report: A little more than a year ago, Amazon, specifically Amazon Web Services, flashed its stacks of cash as it announced it was buying up the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Wickr. AWS users could suddenly use Wickr's services, and some reporters speculated Amazon could have been trying to make a move in the increasingly crowded encrypted messaging space. That's much more unlikely now as Amazon announced Monday it was nixing its secure messaging app Wickr Me.

The tech giant said that Wickr would instead be focused on business and public sector communications, specifically through AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise. The company will no longer allow registrations for Wickr Me after Dec. 31, and a year later, at the tail end of 2023, the app will be but a puff of smoke and a memory. Wickr was worth in the ballpark of $60 million when it was purchased, but just a few years ago Wickr was spouting off about its features that encrypted conference calls, which was a major evolution in the encrypted messaging space. Amazon's other messaging app, Chime, does videoconferencing without encryption. In September, Amazon finally added end-to-end encryption for the data sent to users through its Ring doorbells.

Makes sense

[saloomy]

We have so many feature rich encryption messaging platforms. It is unlikely they will be able to compete meaningfully.

Re:Makes sense

[slaker]

WhatsApp is owned by Meta. Out of the question, no matter how much Europe likes it.
iMessage lives in a closed ecosystem. No.
RCS is only sorta open and it only seems to work when Google runs everything. Also no.
Telegram is run by a bunch of shady Russians.

We have ONE feature rich messaging platform with baked in encryption... which just took a hit to its user numbers because it decided to drop support for reading SMSes on Android. Signal would be OK, if it got adopted as a mainstream tool. Too bad that's just never going to happen.

But hey, I can still send email with PGP, which has been working fine for 25+ years of messaging.

Re:

[Martin Blank]

But hey, I can still send email with PGP, which has been working fine for 25+ years of messaging.

For various definitions of "working fine," sure. It also has even less uptake than Signal, and its own creator doesn't use it anymore. The last key he seems to have created was a 1024-bit DSA key in 2007.

Re:

[r1348]

Whatsapp was popular in Europe before it was acquired by Meta, the switch was invisible enough that most users didn't feel the need to migrate, but I get your point.
I've been trying to move over to Signal since a few years now, but it's the usual chicken-and-egg problem with IM: you need your other contacts to follow you too. Only a few have, I'm nowhere close to ditching Whatsapp.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Very interesting. In New Hampshire I have hundreds of friends on Signal, one on WhatsApp and one on Wickr.

Normie acquaintances like Facebook Messenger.

The sociology of these disparities might be worth studying.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

I was on Wickr for about a year but no matter how much I wanted to like it the neverending bugs and problems eventually pissed me off to the point where I deleted it and told anyone still on it I was moving to Signal. Within a short time of firing the starting shot everyone else I knew who had been on Wickr also jumped ship. I was actually surprised to see it was still going.

More than one

[virtig01]

Threema, Wire, Session.... securemessagingapps.com [securemessagingapps.com]

kind of a bummer

[LatencyKills]

I've been using Wickr off and on for a couple of years. It works well and is more or less foolproof, but it is a bandwidth hog, especially for video.