Tech Crunch reports: “Secure communications provider Wickr has announced that it will shutter its free encrypted messaging app, Wickr Me, next year. Wickr was founded in 2011 and became one of the first mainstream end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, until it was acquired by Amazon’s cloud services giant Amazon Web Services in 2021. In a post published Friday, Amazon said that Wickr Me will shut down for good on December 31, 2023. Amazon says the app will stop accepting new user registrations on December 31, 2022 before it’s discontinued completely the following year. The shutdown will only affect the consumer-facing version of Wickr, which has become popular among journalists and whistleblowers looking to send end-to-end encrypted and self-destructing messages.”