The year in review: What we worked on in 2023

In 2023 many things happened at Wire: We added much expertise to our management team, delivered federated and highly secure messaging to our customers and completely rebuilt our Android app for better performance and security. Let’s take a closer look!

In April we were happy to welcome Juan Perea Rodriguez as our new General Manager and Chief Commercial Officer. Juan came from Fujitsu, where he had a long and successful career managing the company's business in Germany, building relationships with key stakeholders in public administration, and realizing many digitization projects. Happy to have you on board!

Also in spring, we released our new Android app. We completely rebuilt it on a new codebase, as the underlying Scala framework of the old app wasn't maintained the way we needed it. So the old app felt sluggish and produced too many errors. The new app is much more performant and has additional security features. You can read about the details in our interview with our Android Product Manager Leen Rehawi.

Messaging Layer Security comes to life

This summer was marked by the release of Messaging Layer Security (MLS) as a standard of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF has developed groundbreaking standards for the global Internet, such as those for E-Mail, the Hypertext-Protocol for websites as well as the global Domain Name System (DNS).

The much-anticipated publication after roughly six years of deliberation and standard building was a great event to celebrate. With the standard being finished, we are now working towards implementing MLS into our product to make it available to our customers in the first half of 2024. It will bring more performance in large groups and many more advantages. You can read more about it in our blog post about the publication of the standard and an article summarizing the impact of MLS.

Federated secure messaging

At the end of September, we had another big day: It marked the delivery of Federation to our customers. Federation allows for the interlinkage of different Wire backends, to enable seamless and secure communication combined with the highest level of data sovereignty. Currently, we are supporting the linkage of on-premises backends, and will add Federation from on-premises to our public cloud early next year. Read more about our implementation in an interview with our VP Product, Sascha Haase.

October is a big month in cybersecurity, as it became known as European Cyber Security Month. It is also when IT-SA takes place, Europe's largest trade fair for cybersecurity solutions. Our colleagues Ulrike Eder and Manuel Lessmann went there to speak with partners and potential customers and to spot the latest trends. October is also when the eGovernment Monitor for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland was published. For the first time, Wire was a partner of the report and we provided expertise on the topic of “trust in technology”. You can download an English version of the report here [PDF].

You can see: that 2023 has been an inspiring and active year at Wire. We achieved a lot and laid the groundwork to come out even stronger in 2024. We are looking forward to sharing this journey with you!