Wire is now on F-Droid

E2EE messenger Wire comes from the people who created Skype and contributed to the royalty-free audio codec Opus (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opus-codec.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opus-codec.org&#x2F;</a>) which now enables WebRTC (used by modern conferencing apps including Zoom, Jitsi, GoToMeeting). They contributed to the IETF encrypted group-messaging protocol MLS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datatracker.ietf.org&#x2F;wg&#x2F;mls&#x2F;about&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datatracker.ietf.org&#x2F;wg&#x2F;mls&#x2F;about&#x2F;</a>), which will live alongside TLS.<p>IETF MLS is one step on a long path to messenger interoperability, e.g. Matrix plans to implement MLS. Contributors to MLS include Apple, Cisco and Facebook.<p>Wire does not mandate disclosure of phone number or address book contacts. Their free client has been relatively stagnant for a few years as they focused on business customers, but it was so far ahead of others on usability that it&#x27;s still relatively current.

I think Element (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;element.io&#x2F;</a>) is worth looking at for anyone who wants something decentralized. Unfortunately I have exactly 1 contact who uses it, but that was true of Signal as well 8 years ago

This is a great news and an excellent addition to F-Droid. I hope this is a little nudge to Signal to reconsider inclusion. I believe they&#x27;re mostly there, they already have an APK built as a reproducible build (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reproducible-android&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;reproducible-android&#x2F;</a>) with FOSS components (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;android&#x2F;apk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;android&#x2F;apk&#x2F;</a>)

It&#x27;s always great to see new software titles land on F-Droid. The rub with messengers is that for each new messenger we&#x27;ve further fragmented our ability to communicate with one another. Rember the telephone? You used to be able to call literally anyone and you didn&#x27;t have to ask which operator they were using.

I have never heard of wire, I will check it out. Looks interesting on first glance. One thing from the marketing page stood out to me:<p>&gt; Organizations can set up customized alerts, bypassing silent mode on all devices, and trigger responses for crisis teams.<p>Not a knock against Wire, I guess this is just where we are as a society, but I am not a fan of this whatsoever. I would refuse my company access to do this on my personal device. Mail me a pager, I&#x27;ll turn it on when I&#x27;m up.

I think it was the original private and polished messaging app in the recent times but Telegram went past it.<p>While Signal is fighting tooth and nails to not be on F-Droid.

Amidst this positive news, note that Wire does not allow you to export your chat data, if you ever decide it’s not for you. I recall that this was an explicit decision by the company. Its backups are also platform specific. So if you switch from one mobile platform to another (or between desktop platforms or any other combination), you can’t restore your chats from a backup.<p>I still like that Wire doesn’t require a phone number, is multi platform and syncs conversations across all devices. But the above caveats meant that I had to stop using it.

Session (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getsession.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getsession.org&#x2F;</a>) is also worth looking into. Recently our group moved from Signal to here. Anyone have experience to share here?

Recommend using SkyDroid to download Fdroid apps, much better search and UI.

no one came here for politics, this is HN.<p>real questions for the hackers: how&#x2F;why does this apk contain nonfree assets in a GPL codebase?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wire_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wire_(software)</a><p>Wire&#x27;s source code is accompanied by the GPLv3 but the readme file states that a number of additional restrictions specified by the Wire Terms of Use take precedence<p>the legal stipulations here seem to conflict with GPL3.

Looks promising. Happy to see a diversity in secure messaging solutions and app stores.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wire.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wire.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;</a><p>gives Error 404, so we have no idea what license they are under and we are supposed to trust and use them.

from the wire.com pricing page, it costs $$$ for more than 5 users, I assume that means connecting to their servers.<p>Does that mean if a group of friends used the wire service for IM they have to pay to join a group chat of more than 5 users?<p>It does mention the server can be self hosted - If self hosted is it free from all licencing costs?

Does it still send your password to the central server, as mentioned in Wire&#x27;s Wikipedia article? I do not see a mention that they changed it.

I downloaded an app from F-Droid once, it was Spotify. Later that week I started getting strange spanish songs on my recently played. Checked my logged in sessions and there were several from latam. I deleted the app.

Wire is now on many music streaming services ...