I must say that my first impression is beyond positive.
One to one and group chats, group video and audio calls, GIF search built-in, doodles, the best implementation of photos in the message stream that I've seen, poking and playable Spotify and Soundcloud music by just sharing links? All with end-to-end encryption?
I have that "too good to be true" feeling but, still impressed. Just waiting for possible audits and more feedback from the security community.
Edit: It's also Switzerland based, already supports Win10, MacOS, Web, Android and iOS, and to complete has the cleanest design I've seen in a messaging app.
I've been using it with friends and family for awhile on Android and macOS and it's fantastic, in theory. It has however been plagued with lots of bugs. The calling functionality, which I've used a lot, often stalls at "joining" and then nothing happens. It's not as polished or flawless as Telegram. It does not have a feature to compress video before sending for instance. But I can only expect that to change. Especially now, when anyone can write their own client.
Please do, I just tried sending a 100 MB video file recorded with the stock camera and I got a message saying "Are you sure you want to send 100 MB via the mobile network?"
I discovered Wire several weeks ago and started using it (more as a replacement for Signal, while my go-to app is still Telegram). I was pretty impressed that the feature set was quite rich (compared to say, Signal, which is also end-to-end encryption by default), with multi-device sync, multi-OS support, photos, videos, sketches, voice messages, video calls, etc.
Wire is still behind Telegram in a few aspects, and I hope it'll become better soon. The main issues I see with Wire currently are:
1. No message delivered and message read indication. This is a big shortcoming for a chat application. Without an indication, it's almost like sending SMS and not knowing if the message reached.
2. The time taken for message delivery seems a lot longer than Telegram's. This in turn affects conversation speed negatively.
3. Finding other users, even those in one's address book (uploaded to Wire), needs a lot of improvement, and is currently buggy. Since Wire also allows signup using email address, it's important to allow users to be associated with multiple email addresses and using any of them for discovery and addition.
Additionally, it'd be nice for Wire to add the following:
1. Groups, super groups and channels for different use cases (all these terms are taken from Telegram).
2. Usernames to add people without exchanging phone numbers or email addresses. Along with this, @mentions to draw attention would be great.
3. If message editing is available, that'd be super cool, although I don't know about the complexity and limitations of such a feature in an E2E encrypted chat application. Telegram now allows editing messages for a limited time, and I no longer have to feel bad about typos, autocorrect, etc., and add more (annoying) messages in the conversation with corrections.
4. Easily mute conversations, for a short duration or permanently, from conversations or notifications.
5. Ephemeral (self-destructing) messages. I use this in Telegram's secret chats to exchange sensitive information that I don't want lingering around anywhere (of course, I trust the other party I'm talking to; so screenshots and related concerns don't arise).
I can't wait to move completely from Telegram to an E2E encrypted chat/call platform that's rich in features and works well. Wire is the only one I know of that fits the bill at this point in time, though it needs improvement. Having the code open source and independently audited by security experts would really help boost the confidence of users who value privacy.
Not sure about the Switzerland thing. My firewall sees connections from U.S. servers when installing and using it.
They may not have the HQ in the U.S., but if they still have servers in the U.S., we've seen with Megaupload, and now KAT, that the U.S. thinks its entitled to jurisdiction over the company.
So at the very least, the company should have its lawyers already work on a strong jurisdiction defense, if they want to be prepared and maintain their credibility once the U.S. gov comes after them.
All servers in the EU, the US connections you see are to proxies we use for better performance. Nothing stored there and chat contents E2EE, of course.
It does look good. I wonder how good its group video chat is.
I've been looking for something a little better than GoToMeeting (which is nice but clunky), which we migrated to from Google Hangouts (which generally terrible and also clunky).
My hope was that Slack would launch this quickly, since they acquired Screenhero, but nothing has happened.
For organizational purposes, group chat does need smooth screen sharing, something GTM is quite decent at (but again, not great: For example, only one person share their screen; the "presenter" has to give their presenter role to someone else). Doesn't look like Wire has this yet.
One to one and group chats, group video and audio calls, GIF search built-in, doodles, the best implementation of photos in the message stream that I've seen, poking and playable Spotify and Soundcloud music by just sharing links? All with end-to-end encryption?
I have that "too good to be true" feeling but, still impressed. Just waiting for possible audits and more feedback from the security community.
Edit: It's also Switzerland based, already supports Win10, MacOS, Web, Android and iOS, and to complete has the cleanest design I've seen in a messaging app.