Sunbird Pauses iMessage App for Android
The latest information, Sunbird paused the iMessage application for Android. Sunbird itself is a provider of universal messaging platforms.
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| Sunbird powered Nothing Chats, which gave iMessage to Nothing Phone 2, but at a severe privacy cost. (Photo: Nothing) |
Several users of the service reported that Sunbird is shutting down the iMessage service for now, while they investigate reports of end-to-end encryption that were previously reported.
The iMessage application can be continued when the application is ready
So far Sunbird has not issued an official comment regarding the closure of this application. They only provide a message for their users, which reads "We will inform you when we are ready to proceed".
As previously reported, Google banned the presence of the Nothing Chats application on the Play Store. Nothing Chats uses Sunbird's proprietary platform, which it says does not use end-to-end encryption to protect messages sent on the platform.
Also, read: ChatGPT Releases New Features.
This problem was revealed by Dylan Roussel, who through his post on X revealed that the Sunbird system decrypts messages and sends messages via HTTP protocol to Firebase servers, and stored in plain text without encryption.
According to Roussel, even Sunbird can access the message because it is stored as an error when viewed using Sentry, as quoted from The Verge.
However, Sunbird claims that the HTTP protocol is only used as one part of the system to notify backend connections from iMessage connections.
Sunbird was released in 2022 as a messaging app that tried to solve the iMessage vs rich text format (RCS) problem. Then they teamed up with Nothing, the HP company made by Carl Pei -- ex-OnePlus --, to launch Nothing Chats.
Through Nothing Chats, Nothing promises Nothing Phone 2 users to disguise themselves as iPhone users to access iMessage. Users simply log into their iCloud account to Sunbird's servers, which consist of a line of Mac Mini devices, which bridge Nothing Chats to iMessage.