This is really all I want as well. There's tons of pretty messaging apps. Style isn't enough to sway me anymore - I want privacy. How hard is it to make a messaging app that makes encryption its #1 priority?
I've been following Tox with some interest. It's fairly new but fully open source, decentralized, end-to-end encryption, no account needed (people added via their unique bytestring).
Tox has interested me more since it's inception, mainly because it's open source and completely relies on peer to peer connections. I've seen some other open source alternatives that aren't as light weight and still centralized to some degree. Wire, if it really wants to be a "Skype killer" in my opinion, should go open source and be more reassuring about how they are protecting our privacy.
I wish this one would market itself as a really good chat application first and privacy second. Privacy etc is of course important but it all feels far too tinfoil hat for myself and too technical I'd imagine for anyone else I know to bother with
If they're based on WebRTC then I believe end-to-end encryption is baked into the standard. Whether they use the standard completely is another question.
Articles (http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/3/7325083/wire-chat-service-...) suggest "end to end encryption for voice calls" and encryption to and from their servers for text, but I haven't seen anything about it being WebRTC (unless I missed that on the product's web site).
I'm not sure that them having my messages unencrypted on their servers makes that feature any more desirable than Skype, WhatsApp and the like. Encrypted voice call is good, but in the case they don't say how they do that encryption, it'll remain less-than-trustworthy.
"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever.
It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. It seems like it's the default goto for anyone that can't think of something more interesting these days.
Everyone thinks we don't need another one until they see one that does something they like but hadn't realised would be useful. WhatsApp with its free messages, Twitter with its enforced terseness, Snapchat with its take on ephemerality - they were all adopted by millions of users who, before seeing the app, would probably have declared they didn't need a new messaging app. Yet they installed it, tried it, and continued to use it.
People will always want to try new ways to message one another. Consequently we'll always get new messaging apps.
I agree. But what's the feature here? I lament the audio quality of cell phone calls, but audio quality depends on bandwidth, and this requires an internet connection, which is going to be spotty depending on location and when transitioning from data to wifi. Every feature here seems a marginal improvement on what already exists (audio quality, UI, sync, security, battery use). No new concepts. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to use it, but I don't see an impetus for mass adoption.
My understanding is that it has inline content like Whatsapp and desktop support & sync features like Skype (Skype took a lot to make the sync at least tolerable - but I guess they already know what they're doing). The supposedly high quality of the calls and inline 3rd party content support (soundcloud and youtube for now, I suppose) are the bonus features.
Twitter's success wasn't due to "enforced terseness", it was due to the fact that it supported posting to it from SMS messages back when the majority of the population still had dumbphones. Once smartphones became ubiquitous, Twitter kept riding that wave due to network effects. In fact, the entire reason for the 140-character limit was so that it could interoperate with SMS cleanly.
I do somewhat agree with your overall point though. And it's worth noting that sometimes that "new feature" can be things like "my parents don't use it yet", in the case of teenagers and the like.
XMPP/Jingle worked, although the quality wasn't very good. You could make video calls between Google Talk (also on Android) and Empathy, the standard GNOME XMPP Client.
I usually dislike introducing yet another standard, but Tox has some features that XMPP won't provide. VoIP support out of the box, without the need for an extension that may not be supported by the client. Also, afaik it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication.
True, but do you think it's easier to deploy an extension that already exists and just lacks implementations, or to create a whole new protocol from scratch ?
If you look at other successful protocols, you'll also see that some features we rely on were bolted-on as extensions to protocols that were defined before, such as DNS, IMAP, HTTP... Not that it's an excuse to do the same, but it's expected.
> it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication
I don't think that's not something you actually want.
- How do you send a message to someone who's offline ? You don't, you have to wait for you and your contact to be online at the same time.
- How do you traverse NATs ? You have to craft all that messy code, and it's not even guaranteed that it works... you're going to need a "known anchor" for everyone to connect, just like what we see with WebRTC. If you're aiming for a one single protocol, there's no way around that. By the way XMPP can do signaling over XMPP and actual communications over direct, P2P links (such as SOCKS5: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0260.html)
The sad state today is that many clients still haven't implemented Jingle, but at least there's something to start from.
Your points are well taken, but this is unfortunately a sacrifice that needs to be made in the name of security. While partial centralization would solve a few problems, it would also introduce weak points in its security model that three letter agencies would be quick to exploit.
Tox actually does NAT traversal quite well I've found, and it does support SOCKS5 connections out of the box, albeit through TCP relay nodes rather than direct P2P.
Distributed as in peer to peer? No.
Distributed as in federated, everyone can run a server and talk/interact with people on other servers, transparently? Yes.
But Layer will host it for you: you give them your data. That's more what the open standard http://matrix.org is trying to do: basically learn on what is missing from XMPP to be a better fit to today's communication: no single point of control, synced history, groupd chat as first class citizen... It aims to be pragmatic, with a distributed architecture and end to end encryption. Anyone can build a client or server (and host it) or use the open APIs to connect to the Matrix ecosystem. SAme disclaimer as ara4n: I work with MAtrix, but we're non-profit and just trying to fix this mess...
Thanks, we've started with XMPP, like many others, but it was not fitting our purpose, like for others, so instead of building our proprietary protocol (like others did) we tried to build on what we learnt and provide something others would like to use. The beta is almost feature complete now and we need enlighten feedbacks to make it fit most purposes and something everyone would find useful!
I really disagree. There's simply no good secure cross-platform messaging app available.
Telegram has fantastic clients on all the platforms, but isn't secure. TextSecure is secure, but has only a mediocre app on a single platform (Android). The other alternatives are even worse.
Also, messages are not encrypted by default, and there is afaik no way to encrypt group chats. You have to create a special "secret" chat for the messages to be encrypted.
True, but Tox requires a password for that. Telegram tries to be an alternative to WhatsApp so forcing people to sign up with an account isn't an option.
One doesn't demonstrate security by releasing the source.
One needs to have source released, audited and verified to match prebuilt binaries that are actually used by the unwashed gray masses. Without all three checked for each public build you have zero assurance that you are running a binary built from the released source and that the source doesn't have anything fishy in it.
The only app that checks all three, somewhat ironically, is TrueCrypt. PGPfone checked #1 and #3. TextSecure checks just #1 unless I am missing something, so objectively its "demonstrated security" is exactly the same as that of any another app that simply describes what it does in plain English and has a traffic to prove it.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "cross-platform app". Sounds like a contradiction in terms, to me.
We have XMPP and OTR, and with chatsecure on Android or various clients on Linux it's pretty pleasant. I believe there are a few OS X clients as well, not sure about iOS.
* Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone.
* Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly)
* Viber, with a single contact.
* LINE, with a single contact.
I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps.
3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.
I don't think users really want the wheel to be reinvented. More like companies try to lock you in on their tech and make money with you. Fragmentation? CEO gives a shit.
Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.
The answer is just to say no when people ask you install $appoftheday to contact them. No hangouts, no skype, no whatsapp, no facebook polluting my phone with their intrusiveness and always-on-in-background tendencies. One person occasionally asks me to install Whatsapp, but each time I say no.
Hangouts is a pain to remove if it came in your ROM, but you can still freeze it with Titanium Backup.
Which is fine as long as you're happy to be "that guy". If I need to install RandomNewChatApp to talk to a client that's paying me $$$, I'm going to install it. Similarly, if a close friend or relative uses a new service, stubbornly saying "no, that's too awkward for me" is not the kind of person I want to be.
But I would prefer if I could just add them as an account to an app that I already have. And ideally an open-source, usable, attractive app.
I'm curious how many people in the real world actually use IRC. Find 10 people on the streets of New York and statistically zero use IRC and maybe, maybe 1 has even heard of it. Ask those same 10 people if they've heard of WhatsApp and likely 3 or 4 would have heard of it and probably 2 would have it on their device. If they're from outside the US, that number would go up to likely 7 would have it installed. Ask those same 10 people if they've ever heard of Skype and all 10 would say yes and likely 8 of them have used it.
Obviously this isn't scientific, but the point is that most people don't use IRC. I'm a software dev and I don't use IRC and I've never had a real-world non-dev even mention it. But Skype? I'm forced to use that every day. Text messages? With iMessage, it's great, but you also need to have the person's phone number -- or, you're like me and you're moving around a lot and change numbers fairly frequently, but Skype/iMessage/etc stays pretty consistent year after year.
Just my 2 cents. In terms of "always on intrusiveness" isn't SMS always on? Unless you're using a burner phone, you're being tracked, SMS is always logged, there's no illusion of security.
Besides, who the heck buys a phone is Hangouts imbedded in ROM? If you're interested in security, then I'd suggest getting something other than Android.
Sure, SMS is always on, but it doesn't have access to my camera or mic. I have Skype on my desktops (although I haven't used it in over a year) where I can tell when it's running and where it doesn't bind itself to autostart whenever someone breathes. The main problem with apps is what they request access to and, barring modding your phone with XPrivacy (I've done it, but not an option for the average user), there's no way to deny those permissions.
As for IRC, it isn't how many people use it, but who uses it; namely a huge proportion of technical communities and people I want to communicate with.
As for Hangouts, it's in the default OEM ROMs, obviously, but also in the gapps packaged for CyanogenMod unless you remove it before flashing (as I did).
I'm mostly with you, but I actually quite like whatsapp.
Don't need to pay extra to send an image
Messages don't get lost in transit and if it did, it'd let you know.
It's fast, simple and usable.
I find most everything faddish, but occasionaly things win out because they suck less than what we already have. Of course, those specific problems above might be UK specific.
Good tip. I tried this for several apps. Too bad it seems this doesn't work for the Play apps: Books, Films, Kiosk. But several apps are gone (Hangouts, search, Plus etc) and I hope they stay where they are.
What's poor about it? I'm genuinely interested - not to convince you that you're wrong but to check if I missed a gotcha in my setup here. So far .. I don't see an issue. I could complain about missing features/XEPs that I'd love to have and cannot right now, but .. chatting should work just fine.
I know this will probably cause dissent, but I think the time of Google (now Apache) Wave may have arrived :-) XMPP based (but hideously complicated) and can still do more than any other "chat" system out there that I've seen.
I immediately thought "oh, this looks like wave". The problem is that still don't think that this (or Apache Wave) is a whole quanta better than the good enough solutions that are out there.
It's a shame that XMPP didn't save us from this situation. My hunch is that the baseline featureset over federation was too low: no federated medsage history; MUCs are single point of failures.
We're trying to fix this with Matrix.org - folks frustrated with yet another communication silo might want to check it out and help us tear down the walls between these gardens. (obvious disclaimer: i help run matrix.org)
The capability to get conversation history over several servers. In Matrix the conversation history is stored by all servers involved in the discussion, and thus it can be retrieved if your own server temporarily goes down. It will also be accessible from all your Matrix-compliant clients, whether they are web or mobile clients.
(edit: disclaimer: I'm also involved with matrix.org)
Hey. Thanks for the explanation.
I ignore the 'will be accessible from all your clients' part - that should be the case for XMPP as well, or will be with MAM [1].
Storing the history on multiple servers? Not sure I understand the use case here (okay 'server goes down' I understand, but spreading my message history to multiple servers for that seems .. unexpected).
OK let me try to explain it better: let's say we have a conversation between 3 friends who are all running their own homeservers to connect to matrix. All three servers will keep a copy of the conversation, and if one server goes down and reconnects, the two other servers can update it with the messages that went on while it was down.
If friend 1 and 2 have a separate conversation in a different room, only their two servers will keep a copy of the conversation history. If friend 3 joins this room, his server will receive the current history from the other servers (there's a limit for efficiency but you can explicitly get all the history via pagination).
Slack does support IRC and XMPP transports, though? So even if $management wants Slack, I can use a single client across several networks. AFAIK Slack doesn't do federation, but one out of two, is better than none out of two.
I disagree. The current situation with voice and text is insane; telephone companies still try to own that space and charge for things like SMS/receiving calls, even though it's becoming increasingly obvious that it makes far more sense to send messaging over the internet rather than via custom infrastructure. No-one wants cell phone/telephone operators to be anything more than a dumb pipe apart from them.
Apps like this are the future, but nobody has quite hit the perfect spot yet in terms of features and adoption (adoption probably being most important, or some method of piggy-backing on existing services like email/SMS/mobile nos). I had a look at this and it looks pretty good but the first-run experience just isn't there yet. I don't trust some random company with my address book, certainly not on first-run, so I'm not in an empty app wondering what to do. That's far from ideal and will probably be their biggest problem.
There is no properly working cross platform mobile video chat yet, because it's a hard problem. All innovation in this space is welcome. Wire started without video, but I'm pretty sure that it is in their long-term plans.
>"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever.
The usual negative HN top post.
I have to disagree. We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now), so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one.
>It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging.
Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
And we're ways before coming up with the "be all end all" messaging app, so there's plenty of room for innovation in the area.
In general this comment reminds me of the "640K should be enough for everybody" quote...
I've been in Brazil for the past five weeks. EVERYONE uses whatsapp, because SMS is expensive. And this all happened in the past couple of years or so, because that's when smartphones became widespread.
I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". Make a good enough messaging app, and you can win an entire country. Or the world.
Exactly, people don't associate the number with phones. And in my case, my "whatsapp" is a Canadian phone number. I don't even know the number on my Brazilian phone.
Not necessarily. My phone number when I go back home (if anyone wants to call me) is a different number from my whatsapp number (which is my UK number, where I live). When people want my Whatsapp number, I generally give them my UK number, but I don't expect an SMS or a phone call from them because I don't even use that SIM card back home. I have another local SIM card that I use, and I also give that out as my "phone number" in case, you know, somebody wants to call.
For example, they store the message database on the shared mass storage partition (a.k.a. SD card), where it can be read by all installed applications.
Wasn't it also true that the password for every account was a simple function of the phone number? Then they changed it, only to base in the IMEI instead.
I didn't look at it again so I don't know if they fixed it for real in the end.
Apparently they partnered with the TextSecure people https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ to provide end-to-end encryption(Android non-group chat only for now). Apart from the fact that the client is still closed source and untrustable, they now seem to be in a better security situation than the other popular messaging apps.
I'm from Brazil. You see small local businesses, with hand painted signs, where the phone number is followed by the whatsapp logo. Not even the name "whatsapp", just the logo.
It's scary how they took over communications over here.
Yes. You are totally right. And the funny thing is that for many Brazilians who can't speak english WhatsApp became "ZapZap" (much easier for Portuguese speakers to say) or just "Zap".
> so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one.
Very disingenuous. In terms of ICQ, they were just early to market, had a competent client and... a deeply flawed method of identification. Messenger? Rolled out with Windows, just like certain other software that caused a bit of a stink in courtrooms at one point. Leverage. AOL did the same thing, pretty much.
As for Skype... it did voice competently, and more importantly did so easily and at a crucial point in time. Just like ICQ once did.
> Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
Absolutely. But Skype, according to most people I speak to and voice my concerns (ie. people to whom I whine) regarding the latest problem with Skype definitely echo my sentiment. Skype isn't good... it's merely acceptable. But there is no realistic option.
For my little niche there's definitely an opening for a new voice comm package, but "they" will have to raise the bar a lot if they want wide adoption.
In my memory, ICQ had a terrible client. But the protocol could be used with better, less bloated clients (like trillian). And it had features at the time, like offline messages, that came surprisingly late or were missing in other, later clients.
By the same standards, I would of course say Skype has a terrible client now.
ICQ went down the same path most clients seem to go, ie. it got very bloated. At first it was very bare-bones, with some really pleasant file transfer capabilities.
Skype really is history repeating itself. The client is becoming less usable by the day, and for some reason I was selected for a beta test that introduced the "new" flat style, at a huge cost to layout efficiency. It's truly terrible.
I totally agree with you. I don't want to disdain Skype, which is a great tool for its intended audience (the noobs, the moms and paps, the grandmas, etc). Also, Skype technology was almost incredible when they first appeared, so .. lots of respect for their history and accomplishments.
But I also think there is a lot of room for "Skype Killers" in different niches. I think Skype UI is getting worse for the experienced/heavy user. What is your niche? Would love to hear more.
> We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now)
You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire. Its only negative from my personal viewpoint is no Windows Phone support, but that OS is the punchline of many jokes these days.
There's also Slack for businesses, non-profits, and private groups (my local Ingress group uses it), and it offers a ton of extensions.
I don't see where Wire offers anything that we don't have now, though it's nice to see that there is at least an attempt at innovation in this space.
>You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire.
So that would be the "what's hot now".
I didn't mention it because few people I know use it. And I wouldn't touch it a Google + Google+ affilicated messaging solution with a 10-feet pole anyway...
I wouldn't say that it's "hot". It's recently become more popular since Google started forcing it on Android 4.4+ users as the only SMS option on their phones. Personally, I wouldn't use it at all if not for easy group communication with my Ingress mates (most Ingress communities use Hangouts, Slack, or both; ours uses both but mostly Hangouts).
I just felt that it was a glaring omission, especially considering its more popular and more reliable precursor, Google Talk.
>You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire. Its only negative from my personal viewpoint is no Windows Phone support, but that OS is the punchline of many jokes these days.
Have you ever tried to start a Hangout with a non-technical user? It's a nightmare.
I do remote tutoring. Skype is easy. Everyone has it, you add the username, and call.
Here's what happens when I try to do a hangout:
1. Log in to gmail. Student often takes a while to find gmail on computer and login, as they've been doing everything by phone.
2. Find the chat. Student often takes 2-3 minutes to look for chat.
3. Invite to chat. Your @domain address? No, my personal gmail.
4. Show in chat list.
5. "Send me a message". This takes them another 2-3 minutes to figure out.
6. Start a call. Another delay.
7. Often some kind of technical trouble where the call doesn't start, mic doesn't work, they must by mistake.
This is exacerbated because I'm giving instructions by text. Starting a hangout with a new user on a computer often takes 5-15 minutes. Every step has potential for failure.
If there's a better way than what I'm doing, the fact that I don't know about it is itself is a UI failure on Google's part.
Bingo. My 80-year-old grandmother who is terrified of computers and doesn't speak english recently started having video skype sessions with me. As far as I'm concerned, that's a design and ease-of-use litmus test.
> Have you ever tried to start a Hangout with a non-technical user?
Yes, my technophobe sister in law. She got a new Android phone and was texting me via plain old SMS, which are metered on her account. I texted her back "Look for an icon that is a green circle with a double quote mark in it. Open it, follow the prompts, and send me a message". Within a minute I had a Hangout message from her, and she's been using it since.
Purely anecdotal, but then so was your example. I'll agree it's not so simple doing it on a computer, but they still make it fairly simple; do a Google search for "hangouts", the top link takes you to a page that has a button that says "Available for your computer".
Hangouts is getting worse as far as I'm concerned.
Google Talk had only chat, but I could trust it to work as intended and deliver my messages. With Hangouts:
- synchronization between devices is not as good. I will often not see everything I typed on my mobile when I open it on my desktop.
- Messages do not arrive in order !!! Sorry for the triple exclamation marks, but this is implemented in the most stupid way I have ever seen in an IM application. Say we are using Hangouts on my mobile. You send the messages
A
B
C
Occasionally, I will receive C first, then A, then B. Fine. I receive C and read it.
C
<--- I've read until this point and will ignore anything above
Then I receive A and B. And this happens :
A
B
C
<--- I've read until this point and will ignore anything above
Messages A and B, having been sent before, will appear above the last message I have read and I will probably miss them.
I preferred Google Talk as well, especially since it was built upon an open platform and was easily implemented on unsupported OSes (Windows Phone via IM+ for example). Personally I haven't seen the out-of-order issue in one on one conversations, but it's prevalent in the group chats I'm in. When it happens to my messages, it's almost always when I'm being handed off between towers on the go; it hasn't happened to me on WLAN yet. Since there are no message size limitations like SMS has, I rarely send multi part messages anyway.
I feel that sentiment. It's not that I mind people doing new apps in already crowded market segments - it's that messaging apps, like social networking sites, work on network effect. I don't want a new messaging app for the same reason I don't want a new Facebook - the existing one is awesome enough, new ones don't offer anything interesting, and I definitely don't feel like rebuilding my contact lists every other year.
In this way, a new app is a danger not only to the maker of an old app, it's a danger to the client as well.
It's gone from a messaging app that I couldn't believe worked so well on a low-speed connection, to a messaging app that that I can't believe works so shitty on a high-speed connection. I literally tried for 20 minutes just to get a call to connect last Saturday before giving up and using FaceTime instead.
I was going to say, I was expecting an app with a significantly better video chat experience, since that's what most people associate the word "Skype" with, not instant messaging.
I'm most surprised to see a new application launch without a Windows client. Is this a conscious marketing decision to not target the Windows user market? Is the market share of iOS, Android and OSx enough for these guys to succeed without a Windows client? The website notes that a browser client is coming soon, but nothing for native Windows.
Not many people seem to use Lion these days though. An app that I work on has less than 6% (of the 13,000 users who have opted in to providing system stats) on Lion.
>> Not many people seem to use Lion these days though. An app that I work on has less than 6% (of the 13,000 users who have opted in to providing system stats) on Lion.
Locking an app to a version of OS is still a bad practice, particularly for an app aiming to network effect. I have Viber and it works on my Lion! Btw, I think that Viber blows away the competition by having everything: VoIP, Pic,Video, Message all for free!
Skype has video chat. So far Wire only has audio. Skype can call a regular phone or receive calls from a regular phone. It seems like Wire can't, yet. Skype has all my contacts, Wire has none, yet.
Let's call it a Skype killer if it kills Skype. Not yet.
Of course this is early. OTOH, when Skype launched, it had a sub-standard feature set, and even kept it's shitty UI around. Messenger was dominating, supported video/audio/etc. (As did NetMeeting). Yet MS fucked that one up and just let Skype and FB takeover. So it's not inconceivable that MS could repeat the same thing again.
While I welcome more competition since Skype really gone down hill after being bought by Microsoft, however this applications website doesn't give any useful information on the encryption used - it would be good to see if it supports OTR style encryption.
I doubt it. The problems with apps in Sailfish is that their appstore doesn't seem to support any payment for apps, so all the apps need to be free. I think this is maybe not giving incentive for people to actively develop on that platform unfortunately.
But perhaps someone comes up with a free app, you never know...
I don't get why they decided an OS X app was more important to release than a browser app... A browser app reaches a way bigger market share than an OS X one.
If they put "win client coming soon, sign up for updates" to get how many people even want it, that would be at least something. But this "only ios and android" philosophy, i just don't get it. What kind of smart business decision has to be to rule out 80-90% of users!?
I recently discovered SIP-based softphone software (ex. Ekiga). I works great, is easy to use and completely free of charge and registration is minimal (you just need a SIP account).
I really don't get why people would pay for Skype when there are better alternatives around.
Yeah and this implies that people by and large still aren't tech savvy (enough). This is very unfortunate as we have to use the software most people are wiling to tolerate. Ironically, in most of my use cases e-mail is the best solution for communication. It is based on widely accepted protocols [there is an abundance of e-mail clients you can choose from without fearing compatibility issues], delivery is (most of the time) almost instant and it is up to you which provider you use (or you can even host an e-mail server yourself). It's also good concerning encryption in that you can agree with each of your contacts whether or not you want to use some form of it.
In contrast, messenger like Facebook don't give you a choice and OTR is not something everyone is willing to learn about.
While I agree that "Skype killer" is a hyperbole, I guess the idea is that the "Windows PC" people will switch to using their smart phone instead. Also, there is a "Browser - coming soon" button, indicating that they do target larger computers in a portable way.
This was probably a big effort from the people who developed Wire.
I'm sure lots of development time has gone in to the product with many difficult problems to solve, so to all the developers of Wire: Good work!
It probably feels a bit defeating to spend all that time developing something only to have people slating it.
That said: I do not think this app is for me. I wish it had a more compact interface (like old Skype for OSX), before Skype became this large take-over-the-screen app, and reading that it might not have video chat kind of kills it for me.
The UI is beautiful. However, differentiating on UI for an app that's about communication can only take you so far. I think some users will be initially wowed by all the nice colors etc. but the app is about chatting, sending images, text and taking, and no amount of beautiful color is going to impact that.
I know how long it takes to make things pretty, I'm wondering if this was a right decision vs. investing their time on something else that is more core to their value (communication).
I think there is a lot of room to innovate around ease of communication, texting, chatting, etc. on the mobile space and we'll see more apps and probably another $Billon exit.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadhttps://tox.im/
I'm not sure that them having my messages unencrypted on their servers makes that feature any more desirable than Skype, WhatsApp and the like. Encrypted voice call is good, but in the case they don't say how they do that encryption, it'll remain less-than-trustworthy.
It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. It seems like it's the default goto for anyone that can't think of something more interesting these days.
People will always want to try new ways to message one another. Consequently we'll always get new messaging apps.
I do somewhat agree with your overall point though. And it's worth noting that sometimes that "new feature" can be things like "my parents don't use it yet", in the case of teenagers and the like.
What we need is a protocol people can make clients for. With end to end encryption and PFS, of course.
http://tox.im/
Edit: yes.
https://xkcd.com/927/ is the kind of situation we need to avoid.
True, but do you think it's easier to deploy an extension that already exists and just lacks implementations, or to create a whole new protocol from scratch ?
If you look at other successful protocols, you'll also see that some features we rely on were bolted-on as extensions to protocols that were defined before, such as DNS, IMAP, HTTP... Not that it's an excuse to do the same, but it's expected.
> it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication
I don't think that's not something you actually want.
- How do you send a message to someone who's offline ? You don't, you have to wait for you and your contact to be online at the same time.
- How do you traverse NATs ? You have to craft all that messy code, and it's not even guaranteed that it works... you're going to need a "known anchor" for everyone to connect, just like what we see with WebRTC. If you're aiming for a one single protocol, there's no way around that. By the way XMPP can do signaling over XMPP and actual communications over direct, P2P links (such as SOCKS5: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0260.html)
The sad state today is that many clients still haven't implemented Jingle, but at least there's something to start from.
Tox actually does NAT traversal quite well I've found, and it does support SOCKS5 connections out of the box, albeit through TCP relay nodes rather than direct P2P.
"Yet another messaging protocol is what we need said nobody ever" will be the top comment.
Telegram has fantastic clients on all the platforms, but isn't secure. TextSecure is secure, but has only a mediocre app on a single platform (Android). The other alternatives are even worse.
Tox is looking really promising though: https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ
Also, messages are not encrypted by default, and there is afaik no way to encrypt group chats. You have to create a special "secret" chat for the messages to be encrypted.
So far only TextSecure does this.
One needs to have source released, audited and verified to match prebuilt binaries that are actually used by the unwashed gray masses. Without all three checked for each public build you have zero assurance that you are running a binary built from the released source and that the source doesn't have anything fishy in it.
The only app that checks all three, somewhat ironically, is TrueCrypt. PGPfone checked #1 and #3. TextSecure checks just #1 unless I am missing something, so objectively its "demonstrated security" is exactly the same as that of any another app that simply describes what it does in plain English and has a traffic to prove it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30114346
And the article you linked points out several times that the encryption is only going to be enabled for WhatsApp's Android client for the time being.
Threema is closed sourced and thus I don't know which/how encryption are they actually using.
We have XMPP and OTR, and with chatsecure on Android or various clients on Linux it's pretty pleasant. I believe there are a few OS X clients as well, not sure about iOS.
* Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone.
* Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly)
* Viber, with a single contact.
* LINE, with a single contact.
I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps.
3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.
Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.
Standard text messaging
ConnectBot (to an irssi session for IRC)
The answer is just to say no when people ask you install $appoftheday to contact them. No hangouts, no skype, no whatsapp, no facebook polluting my phone with their intrusiveness and always-on-in-background tendencies. One person occasionally asks me to install Whatsapp, but each time I say no.
Hangouts is a pain to remove if it came in your ROM, but you can still freeze it with Titanium Backup.
But I would prefer if I could just add them as an account to an app that I already have. And ideally an open-source, usable, attractive app.
Obviously this isn't scientific, but the point is that most people don't use IRC. I'm a software dev and I don't use IRC and I've never had a real-world non-dev even mention it. But Skype? I'm forced to use that every day. Text messages? With iMessage, it's great, but you also need to have the person's phone number -- or, you're like me and you're moving around a lot and change numbers fairly frequently, but Skype/iMessage/etc stays pretty consistent year after year.
Just my 2 cents. In terms of "always on intrusiveness" isn't SMS always on? Unless you're using a burner phone, you're being tracked, SMS is always logged, there's no illusion of security.
Besides, who the heck buys a phone is Hangouts imbedded in ROM? If you're interested in security, then I'd suggest getting something other than Android.
As for IRC, it isn't how many people use it, but who uses it; namely a huge proportion of technical communities and people I want to communicate with.
As for Hangouts, it's in the default OEM ROMs, obviously, but also in the gapps packaged for CyanogenMod unless you remove it before flashing (as I did).
Don't need to pay extra to send an image Messages don't get lost in transit and if it did, it'd let you know. It's fast, simple and usable.
I find most everything faddish, but occasionaly things win out because they suck less than what we already have. Of course, those specific problems above might be UK specific.
* Telegram, with all my contacts (including several rather large group chats) * SMS, for telling new contacts to get Telegram
I don't mourn XMPP, it wasn't very nice and especially not very mobile friendly.
The limitations I know of are 'fixed' with decent/recent clients (Stream Management comes to mind). Care to elaborate?
What's poor about it? I'm genuinely interested - not to convince you that you're wrong but to check if I missed a gotcha in my setup here. So far .. I don't see an issue. I could complain about missing features/XEPs that I'd love to have and cannot right now, but .. chatting should work just fine.
That said, you DO want Stream Management.
Besides, I don't trust the Telegram guys with their faux security claims.
http://incubator.apache.org/wave/
https://github.com/apache/incubator-wave
We're trying to fix this with Matrix.org - folks frustrated with yet another communication silo might want to check it out and help us tear down the walls between these gardens. (obvious disclaimer: i help run matrix.org)
Nicely played.
(edit: disclaimer: I'm also involved with matrix.org)
Storing the history on multiple servers? Not sure I understand the use case here (okay 'server goes down' I understand, but spreading my message history to multiple servers for that seems .. unexpected).
1: http://www.zash.se/mam.html
If friend 1 and 2 have a separate conversation in a different room, only their two servers will keep a copy of the conversation history. If friend 3 joins this room, his server will receive the current history from the other servers (there's a limit for efficiency but you can explicitly get all the history via pagination).
The core value prop of the internet is easy communication. Don't be surprised when people continue to iterate on it.
Then I tried to share a Pages document...
Apps like this are the future, but nobody has quite hit the perfect spot yet in terms of features and adoption (adoption probably being most important, or some method of piggy-backing on existing services like email/SMS/mobile nos). I had a look at this and it looks pretty good but the first-run experience just isn't there yet. I don't trust some random company with my address book, certainly not on first-run, so I'm not in an empty app wondering what to do. That's far from ideal and will probably be their biggest problem.
The usual negative HN top post.
I have to disagree. We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now), so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one.
>It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging.
Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
And we're ways before coming up with the "be all end all" messaging app, so there's plenty of room for innovation in the area.
In general this comment reminds me of the "640K should be enough for everybody" quote...
I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". Make a good enough messaging app, and you can win an entire country. Or the world.
But your "whatsapp" is your phone number.
I didn't look at it again so I don't know if they fixed it for real in the end.
It's scary how they took over communications over here.
It is amazing how Whatsapp rose everywhere but in the US.
Very disingenuous. In terms of ICQ, they were just early to market, had a competent client and... a deeply flawed method of identification. Messenger? Rolled out with Windows, just like certain other software that caused a bit of a stink in courtrooms at one point. Leverage. AOL did the same thing, pretty much.
As for Skype... it did voice competently, and more importantly did so easily and at a crucial point in time. Just like ICQ once did.
> Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
Absolutely. But Skype, according to most people I speak to and voice my concerns (ie. people to whom I whine) regarding the latest problem with Skype definitely echo my sentiment. Skype isn't good... it's merely acceptable. But there is no realistic option.
For my little niche there's definitely an opening for a new voice comm package, but "they" will have to raise the bar a lot if they want wide adoption.
By the same standards, I would of course say Skype has a terrible client now.
Skype really is history repeating itself. The client is becoming less usable by the day, and for some reason I was selected for a beta test that introduced the "new" flat style, at a huge cost to layout efficiency. It's truly terrible.
But I also think there is a lot of room for "Skype Killers" in different niches. I think Skype UI is getting worse for the experienced/heavy user. What is your niche? Would love to hear more.
You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire. Its only negative from my personal viewpoint is no Windows Phone support, but that OS is the punchline of many jokes these days.
There's also Slack for businesses, non-profits, and private groups (my local Ingress group uses it), and it offers a ton of extensions.
I don't see where Wire offers anything that we don't have now, though it's nice to see that there is at least an attempt at innovation in this space.
So that would be the "what's hot now".
I didn't mention it because few people I know use it. And I wouldn't touch it a Google + Google+ affilicated messaging solution with a 10-feet pole anyway...
I just felt that it was a glaring omission, especially considering its more popular and more reliable precursor, Google Talk.
Have you ever tried to start a Hangout with a non-technical user? It's a nightmare.
I do remote tutoring. Skype is easy. Everyone has it, you add the username, and call.
Here's what happens when I try to do a hangout:
1. Log in to gmail. Student often takes a while to find gmail on computer and login, as they've been doing everything by phone. 2. Find the chat. Student often takes 2-3 minutes to look for chat. 3. Invite to chat. Your @domain address? No, my personal gmail. 4. Show in chat list. 5. "Send me a message". This takes them another 2-3 minutes to figure out. 6. Start a call. Another delay. 7. Often some kind of technical trouble where the call doesn't start, mic doesn't work, they must by mistake.
This is exacerbated because I'm giving instructions by text. Starting a hangout with a new user on a computer often takes 5-15 minutes. Every step has potential for failure.
If there's a better way than what I'm doing, the fact that I don't know about it is itself is a UI failure on Google's part.
1. Open https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_ to create a new Hangout
2. Copy the permanent link that is shown in the dialog, or enter mail addresses to invite.
3. Students open the link. A login is required to join the Hangout, this could be improved...
Yes, my technophobe sister in law. She got a new Android phone and was texting me via plain old SMS, which are metered on her account. I texted her back "Look for an icon that is a green circle with a double quote mark in it. Open it, follow the prompts, and send me a message". Within a minute I had a Hangout message from her, and she's been using it since.
Purely anecdotal, but then so was your example. I'll agree it's not so simple doing it on a computer, but they still make it fairly simple; do a Google search for "hangouts", the top link takes you to a page that has a button that says "Available for your computer".
I agree the phone is easier.
Google Talk had only chat, but I could trust it to work as intended and deliver my messages. With Hangouts:
- synchronization between devices is not as good. I will often not see everything I typed on my mobile when I open it on my desktop.
- Messages do not arrive in order !!! Sorry for the triple exclamation marks, but this is implemented in the most stupid way I have ever seen in an IM application. Say we are using Hangouts on my mobile. You send the messages
Occasionally, I will receive C first, then A, then B. Fine. I receive C and read it. Then I receive A and B. And this happens : Messages A and B, having been sent before, will appear above the last message I have read and I will probably miss them.There's a truth to it. This one, like so many others, brings nothing new to the field. So why do we want it?
> Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
What's wrong with XMPP/Jabber?
We have a weekly post on new IM platforms, but all of seem to have features which are a subset of XMPP's. Including Skype.
Nothing, except it is a protocol, not an app. Go build an app based on it that's functionally equivalent to Skype and then we can talk.
In this way, a new app is a danger not only to the maker of an old app, it's a danger to the client as well.
It's gone from a messaging app that I couldn't believe worked so well on a low-speed connection, to a messaging app that that I can't believe works so shitty on a high-speed connection. I literally tried for 20 minutes just to get a call to connect last Saturday before giving up and using FaceTime instead.
No thanks. I already use iMessage, Hangouts, Line, and Skype at work. There's too many messengers and they all do the same thing.
Wire is not a 10x improvement. Maybe like a 0.0015 improvement which won't even convince me to download it.
The call quality with Skype and other services is decent, making it slightly better with a cleaner UI won't do much.
Also "everwhere" not means "ios, osx, android". where is windows and linux desktop clients, even skype supports linux desktops today.
How did you overclock it?
Locking an app to a version of OS is still a bad practice, particularly for an app aiming to network effect. I have Viber and it works on my Lion! Btw, I think that Viber blows away the competition by having everything: VoIP, Pic,Video, Message all for free!
Let's call it a Skype killer if it kills Skype. Not yet.
- No windows phone client :P
iOS, OS X and Android is far from everywhere.
But perhaps someone comes up with a free app, you never know...
I really don't get why people would pay for Skype when there are better alternatives around.
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2014/11/13/0830#the-insta...
I'm sure lots of development time has gone in to the product with many difficult problems to solve, so to all the developers of Wire: Good work!
It probably feels a bit defeating to spend all that time developing something only to have people slating it.
That said: I do not think this app is for me. I wish it had a more compact interface (like old Skype for OSX), before Skype became this large take-over-the-screen app, and reading that it might not have video chat kind of kills it for me.
I know how long it takes to make things pretty, I'm wondering if this was a right decision vs. investing their time on something else that is more core to their value (communication).
I think there is a lot of room to innovate around ease of communication, texting, chatting, etc. on the mobile space and we'll see more apps and probably another $Billon exit.
edit: typo