In around 2009/2010 the Deutsche Post AG decided to create a messenger (or so the story goes). They then got together a few developers, product manager and some other people and created a messenger called SIMSme.
SIMSme was somewhat a small success (or not, the opinions diverge here), but it had already quite early on the feature of having a private-version and a business-version. And it was clearly dedicated to having a secure and (later) GDPR-compliant messaging solution that protects user data and communication contents by means of full encryption and meta data avoidance.
The business-version includes a Cockpit, i.e. a dashboard and control center where the company-administrators can manage a lot of things. The business version also had multi-device capabilities and some additional features.
In 2019, Deutsche Post AG sold SIMSme (the product) to Brabbler AG, a startup in Munich that went bankrupt a few months later. Karsten Schramm, one of the founders of Brabbler AG, started a new company named ginlo.net GmbH which bought the SIMSme-Assets (now called ginlo) out of the insolvency process and decided to get a group of dedicated people together to continue development.
Additionally the new owner also decided that the source code should be made open source, so that everybody can see what is being done and that anyone who wants, can contribute to the further development.
Since the beginning of 2020 ginlo Private and ginlo Business have returned to the appstores and are now continually developed further. Some of the major changes since taking over in 2020 were:
- Lots and lots of code cleanup, bug-fixes, crash fixes
- Introduction of PC-clients for ginlo Business (to be released in the future for ginlo Private, too) for Windows, macOS and Linux (.deb/.rpm)
- Introduction of audio-/video-calls and -conferences using JitsiMeet
- Introduction of a fully compatible iPad-Version
- Adaptation to latest mobile operation systems as of iOS 14 (which was quite a task) and Android 10/11
- Introduction of Darkmode
- Introduction of Announcement Groups
- Multi-device capability for ginlo Private
- ...