I like the signal mobile app better, but wire has a proper desktop client along with video calls, so wire is what I ended up with. Of course that's only with those close friends I can convince to join me on wire.

I did read that facebook messenger now has end to end encryption, but as far as I can tell this is only for "secret" conversations - which are only available from the device you initiate the conversation from. Whatsapp would probably be a good choice if you (OP) have a lot of friends already using it.

Wire was in the middle of a shitstorm a while back iirc because it falsly advertised that it encrypted everything end-to-end, when in actual fact only text was so.

I think you might be mistaking this with Telegram

http://gizmodo.com/why-you-should-stop-using-telegram-right-...

Here's a source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2855745/new-communications-ap...

My mistake. Text isn't end-to-end, only calls are.

The current Privacy page[1] seems to indicate that, at least now, text, image and voice is end-to-end encrypted.

[1]: https://wire.com/privacy/

That was indeed the case in December, 2014 (before I joined the team). Legal docs were quickly fixed. Tech was fixed in March 2016 when everything (text, assets, calls) were moved to E2EE and open sourced.

Doesn't wire use Webrtc? I thought it was encrypted end to end by default. Do you have a source to this?

Would you mind backing that up with a link?