Amazon Owned Secure Messaging App Wickr Me to Shut Down

Wickr Me, the free encrypted messaging app, is to shut down on 31 December 2023 and will stop accepting new user registrations on 31 December 2022, Wickr said in a blog post(Opens in a new window).

The platform was acquired(Opens in a new window) by Amazon Web Services in June 2021, and it offers secure end-to-end encrypted messaging, including text, photos, videos, and file attachments across Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows devices.

The company added that it would be moving its focus on securing “our business and public sector customers’ data and communications” with its non-consumer paid platforms AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise instead. 

Wickr’s high-strength encryption, which the company claims “would take trillions of years(Opens in a new window)” to break has made it popular with all Department of Defense(Opens in a new window) agencies, as well as journalists and whistleblowers. Before it was bought by Amazon last year, the firm benefited from a $1.6 million investment(Opens in a new window) from Q-Tel, a CIA funding arm, and according to VICE had signed a $900,000 contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

But the app has come under scrutiny for reportedly not doing enough to crack down on the exchange of child sex abuse images: in June NBC News reported(Opens in a new window) that Wickr Me had become a “go-to destination” for such content. Wickr has also been used as a tool by dark net drug dealers(Opens in a new window).

In its shutdown announcement post, the company said it was working on enabling business and public sector customers to communicate with individual users outside their network on AWS Wickr. Wickr added that it would provide more information in the coming months on actions current Wickr Me customers can take to preserve their data. 

WhatsApp remains the biggest free secure messaging app on the planet, but Signal and Telegram are other popular alternatives. Last month, Signal announced it would drop support(Opens in a new window) for unencrypted SMS in its Android app, and said it was testing an Instagram-esque stories feature.