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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

E2EE messenger Wire comes from the people who created Skype and contributed to the royalty-free audio codec Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) which now enables WebRTC (used by modern conferencing apps including Zoom, Jitsi, GoToMeeting). They contributed to the IETF encrypted group-messaging protocol MLS (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/), which will live alongside TLS.

IETF MLS is one step on a long path to messenger interoperability, e.g. Matrix plans to implement MLS. Contributors to MLS include Apple, Cisco and Facebook.

Wire does not mandate disclosure of phone number or address book contacts. Their free client has been relatively stagnant for a few years as they focused on business customers, but it was so far ahead of others on usability that it's still relatively current.

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I was an early cheerleader of Wire but it almost sunk my "tech goodwill" among friends because its reliability of notifications on mobile was poor for years. I still don't know if they've fixed it. [1]

[1] https://github.com/wireapp/wire-android/issues/777

They must not be using FCM. It's a shame that Google and Apple essentially mandate FCM / APNS to have reliable notifications. Though, I understand the need for battery saving, etc.

Raw Android does not mandate centralized notifications. That's additional "battery optimization" settings deployed by Android vendors, but AOSP/Lineage/e certainly work fine with decentralized notifications. iOS, on the other hand...

Yep it works fine on more or less "vanilla" android but still makes it inconvenient to get there like having to flip the right "battery optimization" toggle. How to do it changes with every 2nd release of course.

Wait, it's now hidden behind a "battery optimization" flag on *vanilla Android*?

Yes I think so, because the way these apps typically do notifications is with an Android service that polls or keeps a long running socket. If you don't turn off battery optimization specifically for that app then the OS will kill your service.

Element on android (the most well known app implementing the matrix.org protocol) has problems with notifications as well. Both on android phones with google services & on google-free android with battery optimizations and such disabled.

I suspect notifications are a more difficult matter than it appears to be.

I am an Element user and haven't noticed this on an Xperia 1 ii.

One note from this: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-specia...

> DMLS - with the first MLS messages flowing over Matrix, we want to at least provide MLS as an option alongside Megolm for encryption. It should be radically more performant in larger rooms (logarithmic rather than linear complexity), but lacks deniability (the assurance that you cannot prove a user said something in retrospect, in order to blackmail them or similar), and is still unproven technology. We’ll aim to prove it in 2021.

Last I checked federated MLS hasn't really gone anywhere since 2019. The IETF Draft is more of a wish list than anything else. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mls-federation/ Example:

> Section 4.1.1 OPEN QUESTION: How ordering could be enforced in this mode?

for the sake of completeness, we did get DMLS working for Matrix last year, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s.... It’s not landed yet outside of test jigs though, as we’re focusing on fixing UX instead.

Why would facebook contribute? How does it help their business model?

MLS makes encryption more scalable

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