The closure is only expected to affect the consumer version of the app, which has attracted controversy this year, with other products in the Wickr family that are intended for government agencies and businesses, to be unaffected. Wickr was founded in 2012, and the Wickr Me messaging app is regarded as one of the first mainstream encrypted solutions of its kind. Since then, many competitors to Wickr Me have added their own end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp, which introduced the feature in 2014. However, the solutions that are currently being used by government and enterprise clients, AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise, will remain a core focus for the company. The government is actually a heavy user of the Wickr platform, with the CIA investing over $1 million dollars in the company in the past. Wickr Me customers have been told that details will follow soon on how they will be able to preserve their existing data.
Wickr Me’s Controversies
Wickr has found itself in the headlines more than it would like of late, with the revelation earlier in the year that the app hosted a thriving community of criminals, which used the messaging service to communicate undetected. One of the reasons that Wickr Me is deemed the criminals messaging app of choice, is that it unlike WhatsApp or Apple Messages, it requires no personal details to sign up for an account. Despite it’s legacy of over a decade, Wickr Me is still a relatively small player in the world of messaging apps, when put up against its competitors, and it’s main selling point, end-to-end-encryption, has been adopted by most mainstream platforms since.
