Translated from German (with DeepL):
The Swiss messenger service Threema is being acquired by the German investment company Comitis Capital. Both the company and Threema itself emphasize that the arrival of the new investor will not lead to any significant changes for the time being. The company headquarters and servers will remain in Switzerland, and the management team will stay unchanged.
A financial investor with a broad portfolio
Comitis Capital is a young private equity firm, not a technology company. It invests in various industries, including a UK-based supplier of vegan meat alternatives and a manufacturer of dog accessories.
Its business model consists of providing financial support to promising companies so that they can grow and establish themselves internationally. “Comitis now clearly sees this potential in Threema too,” says SRF digital editor Tanja Eder.
Data protection as a business model
The strong focus on data protection is considered a key strength of the messenger. Precisely because US tech companies are coming under increasing criticism and digital sovereignty is gaining in importance, Comitis sees this aspect as a clear unique selling point.
Whether this will remain the case in the long term is unclear, according to Eder. If Comitis were to conclude at some point that it would be more profitable to collect Threema customer data or sell the company, no one could prevent them from doing so.
Trust in the authorities remains an issue
In Switzerland, federal authorities and the military also use Threema for internal communication. Even though everyone involved is aware that there is no such thing as absolute security, Threema still has advantages over its competitors.
For example, Threema’s source code is openly accessible. Experts in the fields of data protection, IT security, and research regularly check whether the company is keeping its promises. Government agencies can also carry out their own checks.
Hardly any alternatives on the market
Good alternatives to Threema are rare. “Apart from WhatsApp, which dominates the market, there is simply not much room for other messenger services,” notes the digital editor.
Signal is considered another secure messenger alongside Threema. However, it is operated from the US, albeit by a non-profit foundation and financed by donations. In Switzerland, Proton offers encrypted emails, but does not have its own messenger service.
“Given this limited offering, we can only hope that privacy-friendly communication services will gain in importance in the future,” says Eder.
It’s high time we all agreed that Matrix is the official winner of this absurd struggle. That way developers and funders can know where to focus their efforts. The corporate giants are going nowhere and network effects are a massive barrier. There just aren’t enough users for lots of good FOSS encrypted messengers. We need to stop wasting time and pick a single protocol to become the official new open standard for IM, like POP and SMTP are for email. Matrix has been the obvious solution for a decade.
This does not mean that other messengers can’t exist too.
For family and friends chat, DeltaChat is better.
For chatrooms/Discord/IRC, Matrix works.
The way Matrix handles encryption is just too complex for average users. The Element X rewrite not supporting all OG Element feature do not help.
Example of issues I faced recently: https://piefed.zip/c/privacy/p/763572/looking-for-a-federated-alternative-to-signal-as-they-might-have-to-comply-with-chatcontro
My position remains that we should just pick the option which is closest to achieving IM open-standard status and is generally agreed to have a modern codebase (so not XMPP), that option is Matrix, and then get on with fixing all these problems that Matrix supposedly has. Instead of this interminable shopping around, as if somehow a perfect alternative is miraculously going be invented one day in a finished state.
A couple of comments. Signal is not going to cave to chat control, that just will not happen. DeltaChat is an interesting project but it’s a hack. I used it for a while years ago and it kept getting me locked out of my GMX mail account for spam violation. That was an edge case but hardly surprising given the hacky nature of its concept. At best it’s an intermediate solution.
Then use a provider that won’t ban you. With Chatmail it’s easy and cheap to host your own, or you can just use the free public instance that’s configured by default in the app.
I’ve been on it (with myncontacts) for ~4 months with most of my regular contacts, and it has been perfect.
To be clear for anyone who’s not clear about this, DeltaChat is a shoehorning of E2E encrypted IM into a protocol (IMAP) designed for something very different (email). The privacy argument is that the infrastructure (IMAP servers) is decentralized and already exists. Fair enough, but it’s still a hack and so it can only be at best an intermediate solution. Like Signal. There’s no reason IM can’t stand on its own at last, with its own protocol and competing software that uses it. Personally I don’t plan to tackle the massive task of moving my contacts until that definitive solution is ready.
“shoehorning” and “it’s a hack” are meaningless and pointlessly negative terms to describe it. Doing it this way isn’t any less reliable, secure, or functional than with a custom protocol.
Think about it like this: if the payload is encrypted, the “transport layer” doesn’t matter. Messages could be delivered over SMS, carrier pigeon, etc and it would still work. The only consideration is the cost of that layer.
Email servers are specifically designed to deliver messages, and many implementations are absolutely massive in scale. People already send encrypted emails using PGP, so it’s not even unprecedented. Delta just nicely wraps that into a Whatsapp-style interface.
Performance can be a concern, because email typically isn’t instant like IM. Chatmail solves this, by building a backend that is optimized specifically for the Delta Chat use case.
So in the end, you get what is effectively the best private/secure chat app you can download today. Ecen without the corporate backing Signal has, it is competitive on user experience and features.
Idk what Delta Chat did to piss you off so much, but you’re doing yourself a disservice holding a grudge against an inanimate bundle of bytes. Give it another try.
Matrix is just yet another nu-protocol. If there’s going to be investment it better be on something like XMPP. Maaaaaybe IRC.