Sunbird shuts down its iMessage-compatible chat app ‘for now’

Sunbird's mission was to unify messaging on Android and iOS devices.

Sunbird was supposed to end blue bubble, green bubble trend (Image credit: Sunbird)

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

Sunbird, the company behind Nothing’s iMessage-compatible chat app has decided to temporarily shut it down. According to a report by 9to5Google, the company has informed its users about the app being on hold and has paused the usage of the app to investigate various security concerns.

Just hours before the official shutdown, the same report highlights that Sunbird also sent another notification to its users, that it is disabling media sharing over the platform to protect confidential data. With this, the company has also taken down the universal Sunbird: iMessage for Android is also no longer listed on the Google Play Store.

Also read | Nothing’s Chat app pulled from Google Play Store owing to privacy concerns

Sunbird launched back in 2022 with a mission to end the green bubble and to offer compatibility with iMessage for Android smartphone users. Just a few days ago, the company announced a new collaboration with Nothing, a London-based consumer tech company and the launch of a new Nothing Chat app, available exclusively on Nothing Phone (2).

Story continues below this ad

As soon as the beta version of Nothing Chats went live, several users reported various concerns related to the safety and privacy issues on the app, which included non-encrypted message transfer, usage of dated HTTP standards, and Sunbird being able to access all the messages.

Sunbird has access to every message sent and received through the app. They do this by abusing @getsentry, which is used to monitor errors.

But Sunbird logs messages, pretending they are errors.

Here are part of the requests (img 1, 3) and their entire "message" (img 2, 4) pic.twitter.com/pzwwQVWfOb

— Dylan Roussel (@evowizz) November 18, 2023

As soon as these reports went viral, Nothing delisted the Chat app from the Google Play Store and stated that the app had been taken down to fix several bugs. Just a few days after that update, Sunbird has officially shut down its project.

Officially, it is not a complete shutdown yet, and the company could reinstate the app if it can fix several security issues. On top of that, with Apple officially confirmed to incorporate RCS standards into its messages app, platforms like Sunbird do not have much scope to succeed.