Wickr is the world’s most secure messaging app! Wickr – leave no trace!
This is exactly how this US messaging app positions itself. Well, this is obviously true, because in the recent Who Has Your Back 2015 report on government data requests Wickr has gloriously left behind the market’s largest player WhatsApp and got 4 stars out of 5. Also, similarly to the Russian messenger Telegram, Wickr offers $100,000 to those who manage to find bugs in the powerful apps’ “armour”.
This app for exchanging instant text messages was developed by five San Francisco programmers: Nico Sell, Robert Statica, Chris Howell, and Kara Coppa.
The IM app release took place in 2012. At the moment it is available in 23 languages. For three billion users from 196+ countries this should be more than enough. Let us look inside and see why this messenger can be trusted.
Wickr review. Technical capabilities:
- The app is available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
- When beginning to use the messenger, you must find your friends via an ID. If your friends do not have Wickr installed, you may send them an invite via SMS or e-mail.
- Wickr allows sending text and voice messages but it does not let one make video calls. This IM app does not support calls or sending text/voice messages to mobile numbers either.
- The specific features of corresponding through Wickr is that messages will self-destruct on the sender’s device in a while and so will on the recipient’s device too. A user can independently set a timer for erasing messages. An expiration period that you set can be from one second to several days.
- The app uses the AES 256, ECDH521, and RSA 4096 encryption protocols. The company that developed the messenger sticks to a policy, which prescribes that user data are not stored on Wickr servers.
- The messaging app supports group chats, whose number of members does not exceed 10 people.
- A user’s favourite contacts can be marked as Favourites.
- Through Wickr, users can share photo and video files. You can take a photo or a video without exiting the messenger, by tapping the camera icon in the chat window, share it or download one from the phone or cloud for sharing. The messenger allows attaching several media files simultaneously.
You can edit photos right in the app. This is, by far, not Photoshop, but the app allows changing the size of an image, cropping it, change the colours or adding something of your own to it.- One more element of security in Wickr is that you can’t make a screenshot of correspondences.
- In the Wickr version for iOS .pdf files can be transmitted. Since the messenger’s main idea is providing a secure correspondence, the developers decided not to implement elements of entertainment or stickers. There is something positive about it, though: the app does not have advertising content.
- One more significant feature of the app is the Wickr Timed Feed. People can use it for sharing photos with their contacts, thus turning it into a certain feed. This time feed can be shared in Facebook but there it will be visible only to Wickr users. All the content in the time feed will be destructed within 24 hours unless you upload a new image during that time.
Events around the messaging app:
In the first round of investment the messaging app raised only $9 M, and in the second one – $30 M.
January 2014 was a landmark for Wickr, since its user base soared 50% within a short period then. At that moment Snapchat accounts of 4.6 M users were hacked. The disappointed Snapchat users chose a more secure messenger app instead.
Until recently, Nico Sell remained the company CEO, but in early May she left the position to become the Wickr Foundation CEO. Now Wickr messenger is run by Mark Fields. Along with the changes in the structure, the business policies of running the messenger were adjusted too. In an interview, Nico Sell and Mark Fields said that they had set the course towards monetizing the messaging app. However, unlike their competitors, they will be focusing on B2B sales.
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