This approach comes with some compromises, though. We had to disable a few features that are loved by many of our users. They will all come back, no worries. But it will take a little bit of time. We will keep you updated on this.

“Our new Android Release is a great achievement for the development team and will bring a lasting more stable user experience to all our Android users”, says Karl Schulmeisters, Interim CIO at Wire. “Instead of rewriting parts of the app incrementally, we decided last year to make a cut and redo Wire for Android on a completely new codebase. We are not yet at full feature parity, but we chose to release now because we want our users to benefit from the enhanced stability the new codebase provides.”

Changes under the hood

In the last few years, Wires Android app was based on Scala. While it has been a good and reliable framework for many years, we were not satisfied with the overall performance and reliability of the framework. Also, part of the framework did not receive the level of support that we are looking for, when picking the right technologies for our software. The new Android app is running on Kotlin, which has many advantages in terms of maintenance and performance.

At Wire, we are also looking into using Kotlin for other applications, including our Desktop app. This will allow us to discard the use of the Electron framework and consolidate the frameworks used in the development of our applications for the different platforms.

At Wire, we believe that secure communication is for everyone – therefore we worked on making Wire much more accessible for people with special visual needs. We designed the app with the requirements of WCAG 2.1 AA in mind and are aiming for full compliance in the future. We already updated the color palette used in the app, as well as the UI both in dark and light mode (which for now follows the settings for dark and light mode activated in the system settings). Furthermore, we implemented better scaling of UI elements and made interactive elements such as buttons, clickable lists and similar elements more distinguishable from the rest of the UI.

The current changes to the Android app are also done with regard to the upcoming IETF-standard Messaging Layer Security (MLS). Wire is a key contributor to MLS, together with companies such as Cisco and Meta. MLS will standardize the use of end-to-end encryption for Messaging, much as TLS has done for the encryption of connections to websites and other servers and applications.

“While the MLS standard is not technically finished yet, all our product decisions are taken with MLS in mind, as we are a key contributor in the working group”, says Sascha Haase, VP Product at Wire. “This will allow us to quickly implement it into Wire and be the first to deliver the benefits of MLS to customers.”

Further reading:

Our support article has an overview of all the changes and a roadmap for the release of missing features.

And our user guide will help you navigate through the new Android app and explain some of the changes in more detail [PDF].

One of our promises at Wire is to provide the most secure and user friendly communications platform. Today, we’re proud to announce the first phase in our latest efforts to bring data privacy to a broader group of people through accessibility improvements to our UI. We love user feedback, and these improvements were partially inspired by our users’ inputs and our commitment to following accessibility standards. These changes are currently available for Wire Web, macOS, Linux, and Windows desktop. But, like other great ventures, we will be releasing changes in phases as the year progresses – including changes for our mobile versions of Wire.

So let’s get into what this is, what it’s based on, and tease what’s on the way in future phases. We’re basing our accessibility improvements on two major standards: the German BITV and international WCAG guidelines. These guidelines aim to expand services to 5 main groups with disabilities: the visually impaired, blind, those with motor impairments, the hearing impaired, and the cognitively affected (e.g., those with dementia, attention difficulties, different ways of learning like ADHD). For the Wire platform that means improving users’ ability to find and participate in conversations through improved focus, easier navigation, and better message button interactions. It’s now easier to toggle between statuses, change your user info, and select setting changes.

For our visually impaired, blind, and on-the-go (because sometimes it’s nice to have someone read to you) users we’ve started screen reader improvements. We’ve made improvements to the alternative text that the screen reader uses, but there are still some more to go. We’re hard at work defining additional components, so stay tuned for more updates.

Wire is committed to expanding our user scope to as many groups of people as possible. While we’re both proud of our first step and eager to start sharing it with you, there is still a lot more work to do. We’ll keep you updated as Wire’s Accessibility Phase 2 is released. But for now, enjoy Phase 1.

Help us improve

This is just the start of many improvements we have planned to make calling on Wire smoother and easier for you. In order to ensure that we’re going in the right direction, we rely on your feedback to guide our roadmap and to build the security-focused features you need. Please take our most recent survey or share any suggestions you have.

Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

Wire is already a critical tool for government protection for key intelligence, sensitive communications, classified data, and a powerful shield against the constant threat of data breaches. Not only is it a prime insurer for governments, but Wire also acts as a major defense against cybercrime for SMBs.

Recently, we’ve seen a higher demand from SMBs and larger enterprises for Wire’s platform. Due to a recent rise in sensitive geopolitical crises, many SMBs are beginning to understand the urgency for reliable communications, especially where privacy and security are critical factors. As a German-based company, Wire is GDPR compliant, meaning the handling, storing, and transmission of data is regulated by European privacy laws. GDPR is not only applicable within the EU, but also can extend out into other areas like the US, AU, or even LATAM. This occurs when it comes to the use, movement, and storage of EU citizens’ data, also known as the one-leg out provision where one of the two parties exists within the EU and the other is outside it. Not only that, but Wire’s information security is based on ISO 27001 standards, with its source code available on GitHub.

Wire’s advanced tech which was developed on the Signal Protocol has encouraged SMBs to upgrade from our Basic service to the Wire for Enterprise package thanks to amazing added features like:

Messaging – Wire is end-to-end encrypted (a fully E2EE) communications and collaboration app. Messaging on Wire is also encrypted with Proteus which was developed on the Signal Protocol. At its core, Wire delivers users the most secure communication from one user’s device to another user’s device, with the ability to verify users and their devices.

Large Group Conferencing – Wire’s conferencing is one of the few fully end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) conferencing services available. Our large group conferencing provides audio calls of up to 100 participants and video calls of up to 50. All with the usual favorite capabilities like screen and file sharing for your important meetings.
Customer Support – Enterprise package users get dedicated support from Wire, in the case of technical issues, setup, etc.

Externals – Invite external participants via the team management console. Feel free to include them in a 1:1 conversation as well as group conversations, conferencing, audio, self-deleting messages, file-sharing, and more.

SSO – Simplifying the user experience through single-sign-on, allowing users to access their Wire account using credentials from a third-party software system. This means multiple authentications won’t be required, a single ID login is all that’s needed.

File-Sharing – Using the same technology that protects and transmits your messages, Wire encrypts all files including audio, video, and pictures.

Zero Trust Architecture – Wire has fully championed Zero-trust architecture. Assuming you trust your devices, Wire offers a way to prove/verify that only the respective device will see the chats, and that there are only those two devices in the chat. Not only that but also prove that only you and the intended device will see the respective messages.

By upgrading to Wire for Enterprise, SMBs using Wire have benefited by privacy-first. Which includes forward secrecy and end-to-end encryption, in addition to no trace of data or personal information on Wire servers. This means that all information and data exchanged within SMBs are retained by only the SMBs themselves. With the Proteus, end-to-end encryption, and Messaging layer security (MLS), Wire serves SMBs as a form of defense against surveillance and Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks. Wire helps SMBs save on the higher cost of maintaining secure comms and less need for layered security all while forwarding productivity with instant messaging. Eliminating the annoyance of a ‘difficult-to-use’ software, Wire has E2EE on by default making Wire a user-friendly software. That coupled with Wire for enterprise package includes committed support through our help center and easy-to-understand user guides. Removing the inconvenience of switching between different platforms and relearning new software for work.

SMBs are the biggest targets of cyber attacks, Wire serves as a solution and a relief to protect your communication with its advanced cryptographic primitives. We’re already seeing an increase in cybercrime and a continued growth of ransomware already with no real method to anticipate these attacks. Wire for enterprise is serving features like SSO, File-Sharing, Externals, Group Conferencing, and Messaging, SMBs have a counter to these threats allowing them to freely cooperate remotely with no security concerns and protected Zero trust and Zero-knowledge privacy.

Looking for a better and more technical explanation of our enterprise communication solution?  Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

Help us improve

This is just the start of many improvements we have planned to make calling on Wire smoother and easier for you. In order to ensure that we’re going in the right direction, we rely on your feedback to guide our roadmap and to build the security-focused features you need. Please take our most recent survey or share any suggestions you have.

Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

We’ve been working hard to bring you new and exciting enhancements to Wire Conferencing, like our UI improvements and adding landscape mode for mobile devices for the past nine months. Our most significant success has been the release of our large group conferencing capabilities; we are one of the only providers of end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) large group conferencing. Today, we are releasing another unique feature to improve your calling experience  – audio moderation!

For context, E2EE large group conferencing alone is a massive achievement because it’s complicated to balance group conferencing with encryption due to network limitations. While encryption is a good thing, it does include specific limitations. As our Senior Product Manager Eva Cigic says, “Encryption includes a lot of ‘heaviness’, in traditional E2EE communication, a conference is made in a mesh formation, which has high demands on network bandwidth, making it difficult to manage based on network limitations.  It’s like we’re bringing a knife to a gunfight since other tools don’t have this limitation. We are sending media, encryption keys, messages, and other technical data.” Conferencing requires several payloads sent at once. This exponential increase in data is why it’s so hard to enable E2EE in conferencing and is the main reason why so many apps and tools exist without E2EE.

Wire has found a creative solution to provide E2EE conferencing without crippling users’ networks. Conferencing facilitates large amounts of data needed for audio and video calling and sends the necessary encryption and keys. This is why previously we were restricted to 12 participants for audio and 4 for video, we can now enable up to 100 participants for voice and 50 participants for video conferencing. Keep in mind that this exponential increase in encrypted data would normally overload a network. Meaning organizations can now conduct large conferencing in a safer environment without overburdening their networks. 

But, with progress comes new challenges, such as what happens with 100 people in a virtual conference. Anyone who has attended (or seen virtual meetings on tv) can attest to the issue of background noise – either someone’s microphone is giving feedback, the unusually loud Berlin ambulance is driving by, or a dog starts to bark – and how it can be hard to recognize (and embarrassing) when it’s coming from you. Hence why we are very proud to announce our basic audio moderation feature for large group conferencing. Group admins are conferencing moderators and can mute individual participants or mute all participants at once. A participant gets notified when muted by a moderator and can unmute themselves when they deem suitable. Participants see their status on the mute icon. This feature is currently only available for desktops, but we will be releasing additional features and upgrades in the future. 

All of this is part of our mission to make remote collaboration more secure and productive. Besides crystal clear audio quality, excellent video conference with just one click, and the security of Wire’s end-to-end encryption we are hard at work to bring you more moderation features in the upcoming months – get started today with the option to mute call participants.

Help us improve

This is just the start of many improvements we have planned to make calling on Wire smoother and easier for you. In order to ensure that we’re going in the right direction, we rely on your feedback to guide our roadmap and to build the security-focused features you need. Please take our most recent survey or share any suggestions you have.

Try our internal communications software for free today. Simply create a team and start communicating and collaborating securely in minutes. Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

New Wire Subscription Packages!

Wire continues to provide teams with the most secure and user-friendly collaboration platform, including how teams can access our products and features. We’ve streamlined our subscription model to a simple tier system: Wire for Free, Wire for Enterprise, and Wire for Governments based on our users’ feedback. Wire will be retiring the old Wire Pro, Enterprise, and Red bundles.

By shifting to a simplified subscription model, we simplify user experience and access to the most secure collaboration. Especially in an environment where zero trust is becoming the new norm, we aim to expand access to our best-in-class security and privacy messaging platform. Teams can get to know Wire and its solutions at their own pace; as your business grows, so do your security needs. We’re here to help keep you secure every step of the way.

Securely share information with other people that aren’t in the same location 

Teams interested in using Wire for collaborative work will no longer be subject to a limited-time trial version. Instead, when they sign up to join Wire, they are automatically registered to Wire for Free and enjoy unlimited access to our core features like messaging, file sharing, team management, and 1:1 video and audio calling. Wire for Free users can still join calls with more than one other participant.

Wire for Enterprise lets an unlimited number of users enjoy large group conferencing, integration support, customer support, own-cloud or on-premises deployment. Wire for Free users can upgrade to Enterprise at any time.

Teams using Wire for Enterprise can downgrade to a free plan by contacting customer support. We are currently working on enabling free personal users that are not currently part of a team to upgrade to Enterprise. This possibility will be available in the coming months, so stay tuned!

Existing users

Existing customers on Wire Pro and Wire Enterprise contracts will be grandfathered into this new subscription model, meaning that the only thing that is changing is their subscription name, from now on Wire for Enterprise. Previously negotiated contracts will be kept as-is, both regarding negotiated payment and continued access to all features. Existing users will be affected as follows:

• Customers on monthly, non-custom paying plans: keep their current price plans for the following 3 months. Migration to the new pricing begins on January 3, 2022; first invoice after this date will reflect new pricing.
• Customers on yearly, non-customer paying plans: keep their current pricing until after January 3, 2022. For example, users that are invoiced on August 1 of each year will be charged the new price on August 1, 2022.
• Trial users: once trial period ends, users will be presented with an invoice with new pricing and can choose to keep their rights as Wire for Enterprise users. If not, they are registered as Wire for free and can choose to upgrade at their leisure.

Pricing

Our new pricing model is available in Euro, US dollar, or Swiss Franc.

Wire, we constantly strive to provide the most advanced security and superior user experience. We understand how important it is to be efficient and productive, and how an intuitive design contributes to that. We are happy to introduce significant improvements to the buttons you see in Wire calls — making it easier for you to toggle mute, video and screen sharing during calls. In this article, you’ll read all about what changed and why we made these decisions. We heard your feedback that in-call buttons were confusing, specifically how difficult it was to know whether someone’s microphone was muted during a call. After some research, it surfaced that the active ‘on’ and inactive ‘off’ states were not clear enough, hence causing confusion about the current button state and what they will switch to. We tried on different designs and eventually made improvements to three main areas — iconography, labels and colors.

Old	New

Iconography

Consistent use of crossed-out icons now indicates ‘off’ and an uncrossed icon indicates ‘on’. In all cases, the icon accurately indicates the current system state.

Colors

In addition to the icon, a white highlight color is also used to signify that the button is in it’s active ‘on’ state. This makes it easy to tell at a glance the state of your microphone, video or speaker.

Labels

With the iconography and colors clearly indicating button state, text labels further serve to add clarity to the function of each button.

Help us improve

This is just the start of many improvements we have planned to make calling on Wire smoother and easier for you. In order to ensure that we’re going in the right direction, we rely on your feedback to guide our roadmap and to build the security-focused features you need. Please take our most recent survey or share any suggestions you have.

Try our internal communications software for free today. Simply create a team and start communicating and collaborating securely in minutes. Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

Instead of adding group participant names one by one, you can now add people by sharing the link to a group conversation. You can use the group link in the following ways:

1. Group link added to the invitation for a meeting

Using the link, existing teammates can join the group without the need of getting added to the group conversation.

2. Conversation participants can use the link to refer to the conversation

Group links shared in any 1:1 or group chats will point to the specific group in question.

How does it work?

To access this feature, you’ll need to be an Admin of the group and search for the option in the group’s settings. Once you enable Guest and Services access, you will have the opportunity to create a link. You can copy this link and paste it into an app of your choice, or you can choose one of the sharing options instead.

Once the invited person taps/clicks a link on mobile or desktop, they get directed to the Wire web page where they can choose whether to join the conversation or not. After confirmation to join, they will find themselves in the Wire conversation, as easy as that.

As long as the share link remains active, they can use it to access the group. If you want to disable the link or make the group private with no access to guests, make sure to revoke the link or switch off the option to allow guests.

You can always enable guest access and create a new link once again.

About Wire

Wire is the most secure collaboration platform, transforming the way businesses communicate at the same speed and with the same impact that our founders disrupted telephony with Skype. Headquartered in Berlin with offices in Switzerland and San Francisco, Wire’s award-winning collaboration and communications platform counts over 1,800 government and enterprise customers worldwide, including EY, Fortum, the German government and four other G7 governments. Recognized for its secure collaboration platform as a leader and high performer by G2 Crowd, IDC, Forrester and Gartner, Wire offers messaging, audio/video conferencing, file-sharing, and external collaboration – all protected by the most advanced end-to-end encryption.

Try our internal communications software for free today. Simply create a team and start communicating and collaborating securely in minutes. Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

With Fortune 500 companies and governmental institutions using Wire, we redesigned the Team management console to help Wire admins and owners manage their team to enterprise standards. We’ve been working with our customers to design features that give them the insight and tools their businesses need while keeping the simplicity that makes Wire so easy to use.

We keep a clean and clear user interface, which is one of the reasons our customers love our product. With this redesign, admins can look forward to a streamlined user management process.

Manage Team Members

Onboard all your team members with email registration or enable SSO to sign up for all your team members. Change roles and permissions of your team members, as team members join or leave your organization. Wire supports internal and external users (who have limited permissions) and gives you the ability to add or remove temporary guests from your team with the click of a button. Removed guests will no longer have access to team conversations, but still be able to communicate via a Wire personal account.

Manage Wire Services & Custom Settings

Easily enable and configure various Wire services & custom settings to fit your organization’s communication needs. For example, with custom settings, you can control some of the features that are enabled or disabled. You can also turn on App lock and other authentication settings to improve the privacy and security of your team members.

Billing & Invoicing

Wire supports adding and changing your credit card, and downloading all your relevant invoices on a monthly or annual basis (depending on your enrolled plan). Choose or upgrade your wire plan with various services/products enabled in those plans.

With greater control over bulk actions in the app and user management, the new and improved Team Management is a step towards our commitment to empowering admins as teams scale.

Try our internal communications software for free today. Simply create a team and start communicating and collaborating securely in minutes. Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.

Especially when following a presentation or similar content on a smartphone or device with a small screen, it can be very challenging to identify the details in the screen share or video stream. With our latest Wire releases for iOS and Android, it is now possible to zoom in and out of received screen share and video calls for both conference and 1:1 calls. This makes your portable device a true replacement for your desktop or laptop screen.

To start zooming into any received screen share or video, the tile of the participant first has to be maximized with a double-tap. Then you can zoom in or out of the picture with a two-finger pinch. At the same time, the picture also can be moved around with 2 fingers to maximize the most important content. This way, you decide what to look at and with what level of detail. Another double-tap will reset the whole view and you can start from scratch or look at another participant’s shared screen or video.

We hope you will enjoy the new feature as much as we do. What else you think is missing to make Wire Conferencing even more productive?

About Wire

Wire is the most secure collaboration platform, transforming the way businesses communicate at the same speed and with the same impact that our founders disrupted telephony with Skype. Headquartered in Berlin with offices in Switzerland and San Francisco, Wire’s award-winning collaboration and communications platform counts over 1,800 government and enterprise customers worldwide, including EY, Fortum, the German government and four other G7 governments. Recognized for its secure collaboration platform as a leader and high performer by G2 Crowd, IDC, Forrester and Gartner, Wire offers messaging, audio/video conferencing, file-sharing, and external collaboration – all protected by the most advanced end-to-end encryption.

In October 2020, we launched our brand new conferencing capabilities, expanding our video limits to 12 and audio limits to 25 participants. We received resoundingly positive feedback on how vital this increased capacity was for collaboration and communication in the COVID era.

Since that initial launch, we have received tons of valuable feedback from our customers about the conferencing experience. As we continue our journey to becoming the best secure conferencing solution in the market, we want to announce a set of five recent improvements. We hope you will enjoy them as much as we enjoyed building them!

Active Speaker View

With many speakers in an audio and video conference, it often was unclear who is speaking unless you recognize the speaker’s voice. To make it simpler to identify who is speaking, we now pulse the active speakers’ microphone icon in your favorite accent color. Active participants that have their video-enabled also will have a colored frame around their video tile. Further, we introduced a new view that shows up to 4 of the most active speakers with their video-enabled. All of this, of course, is visible in full screen or a minimized view, while you can also keep an eye on your chat activity. This way, you can entirely focus on the conversation, no more confusion or feel anxiety about speaking.

Maximize Screen View

It was tough to read and understand what got presented if multiple participants had video-enabled during presentations or screen shares. The conference call viewer can maximize the screen to one participant (i.e., the participant sharing a presentation screen, primary speaker) by double-tapping/clicking on the tile. And with another double-tap/click, you can exit the maximized screen view.

Automatic Gain Control

It’s often unclear what volume you should set your speaker/audio output during conferences when everyone is too loud or too low. Wouldn’t it be nice if everybody was at a similar volume? Do not worry about adjusting your microphone volume on your Wire web application; turn on automatic gain control and sit back ‘n relax. For consistent audio in conference calls, we are excited to announce the automatic gain control setting. The feature enables your microphone volume to be adjusted automatically to ensure that all conference participants have similar loudness. Just go to your settings > audio/video settings, and toggle this feature. We hope your ears thank us shortly. After a test phase, we plan to enable this by default.

Join Muted

Many conferences start with participants joining the call, either late or when the conversation is already ongoing. Without already being on mute, it’s often hard for existing conference participants to continue their discussion. All conference participants joining muted by default ensures no disturbances or distraction in your important meetings.

Remove Join/Leave sounds in Conferences

One significant disturbance in ongoing conference calls was participants joining or leaving the session. With this new release, you will no longer hear system sounds when participants enter or leave the conference call. We have developed momentum amongst security-focused organizations and users. We are super excited to better serve our customer’s conferencing needs, especially during COVID times. We have a few more exciting features forthcoming that will further enhance conferencing, so stay tuned or contact us for more information.

Thanks, Wire Product Team

About Wire

Wire is the most secure collaboration platform, transforming the way businesses communicate at the same speed that our founders disrupted telephony with Skype. Headquartered in Berlin with offices in Switzerland and San Francisco, Wire’s award-winning collaboration and communications platform counts over 1,800 enterprise customers worldwide. Recognized by IDC, Forrester, and Gartner as one of the most secure collaboration platforms, Wire offers messaging, audio/video conferencing, file-sharing, and external collaboration – all protected by the strongest end-to-end encryption.

Try our internal communications software for free today. Simply create a team and start communicating and collaborating securely in minutes.

Looking for a walkthrough of our enterprise communication solution? Contact us today to learn how Wire fits into your organization.