Last week, simply earlier than Apple surprised the tech world by saying that it could enable iPhone to help RCS beginning subsequent yr, Nothing CEO Carl Pei had introduced the Nothing Chats app. Created in partnership with the Sunbird common messaging platform that was planning to deliver iMessage to Android customers, the Nothing Chats app would enable Nothing Phone (2) customers to use iMessage on their Android powered Nothing (2) cellphone.
The Verge studies that Nothing pulled the Nothing Chats beta app from the Google Play Store and is “delaying the launch till additional discover” whereas looking for to exterminate a number of bugs. The app would have allowed Nothing Phone (2) customers to textual content with iMessage however provided that Sunbird may log into customers’ iCloud accounts. Texts.weblog, the weblog of messaging consumer Texts.com, referred to the Nothing Chats app as a reskinned model of the Sunbird app and stated that the app was not safe.
Texts.weblog wrote, that each “Sunbird” and the “Nothing Chats” app require that customers ship their Apple ID information to their servers, the place they’re authenticated utilizing a digital machine operating MacOS.
The Texts.com staff found that messages despatched utilizing Sunbird’s platform should not encrypted (Sunbird has entry to each message despatched and obtained via the app).
A tweet from Android app developer Dylan Roussel says that Sunbird does this by “abusing @getsentry, which is used to monitor errors. But Sunbird logs messages, pretending they’re errors.” This contradicts an FAQ straight taken from the Nothing web site on 11/17/2023 and later.
The query in the FAQ requested, “Are my messages safe?” The reply acknowledged, “Yes, Nothing Chats is constructed on Sunbird’s platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, which means neither we nor Sunbird can entry the messages you’re sending and receiving.” But that doesn’t match what Texts.com found. And if there is no such thing as a encryption and your texts are compromised, you’ve gotten despatched your Apple ID to a third-party service and will enable attackers to view your images, movies, contacts, notes, and extra.
None of this may have any influence on Apple’s choice to help RCS which was more than likely an try by Apple to get forward of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) which may have compelled Apple to add RCS help to the iPhone in the 27 EU member international locations if the EU determined to name iMessage a “gatekeeper.”
