Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ozmbie 4348 days ago
Why is it so hard to find cross-platform, encrypted group chat? Surely there's a market for it.
4 comments

The market exists, but it's in its infancy. The Snowden revelations blew a hole wide open in the privacy market, and that's why you're starting to see more and more privacy companies opening. I suspect it won't be long before one of them (whisper?) offers a cross platform, encrypted group chat like you speak of. But these things take a while to build.
if mobile/tablet-only is OK, try wickr (wickr.com).

It works fairly well for me. They have a $100.000 bounty for someone who manages to break their code/get communication contents and they're sponsored by the EFF.

The downsides are that it's closed-source and that there's no desktop client (yet).

Threema also has group chat functionality
Wickr is not sponsored by the EFF
These guys have been trying for as long as I think http://silcnet.org/

I would assume that the problems are more difficult compared to simple P2P.

The announcement here says that Signal will support text messaging compatible with TextSecure later in the summer.

I've been using TextSecure on android for some time, group chat is part of it.