Wire transmits your plaintext GIF search terms to the Wire server. Their privacy policy even allows those searches to be logged. Combined with Wire's already bad e2e encryption and metadata story, I don't see how you could consider this "catching up."
Now if they would just resolve real bugs (like many people not being able to register to Signal), that would be maybe cool (but as they implemented Signal Protocol to WhatsApp and others (if we can trust code we can't see) I can't say I see any point in it).
Maybe I am wrong, but it lost that appeal it had some time in past.