Sunbird is shutting down its iMessage app for Android after Nothing fiasco

We know that the smartphone company named Nothing which was launched by Carl Pei after he left OnePlus few years ago loves to be in the controversy and we have seen many instances of them stirring a pot and then doing nothing out of it. Similar is the case with Nothing and Sunbird’s partnership which also turned out to be a complete failure but Nothing did get the benefits out of this announcement which are its publicity and brand recognition because the only one that looks bad in this situation is Sunbird. That is because the company has to shut down its iMessage app following Nothing’s partnership as it got the limelight and people started to find flaws in the app’s implementation.

Basically, Nothing announced that Android users will be able to use its iMessage app and no longer have to send messages with green bubbles as the Sunbird app will allow them to run iMessage natively which means they will be able to send messages with blue bubbles and people on iPhone won’t be able to figure out if it was sent by an Android. However, it was revealed that Sunbird is literally sending these messages via an iMac and also there are security concerns with its implementation as all the messages are unencrypted and can be intercepted very easily.

Following this, The Verge reports that “Nothing said it had to fix “several bugs” within the app. However, its removal from the Play Store came around the same time a post from Texts.blog revealed that messages sent via Sunbird may not be end-to-end encrypted. Android developer Dylan Roussel came to similar conclusions and also found Sunbird stores thousands of media files on the cloud service Firebase. That means Sunbird’s claims that it doesn’t store data on its own servers are only partially true, as the company appears to be just shipping the information off externally”. All of this obviously meant that the company was exposed and it has to be removed from the Play Store otherwise it could have been in a bigger trouble which is exactly what they did. As of right now, Sunbird’s iMessage app is not available on the Play Store which only means one thing.