Final week, simply earlier than
Apple surprised the tech world by
saying that it might permit iPhone to assist 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 convey iMessage to Android customers, the Nothing Chats app would permit Nothing Telephone (2) customers to make use of iMessage on their Android powered Nothing (2) cellphone.
The Verge reviews that Nothing pulled the Nothing Chats beta app from the Google Play Retailer and is “delaying the launch till additional discover” whereas searching for to exterminate a number of bugs. The app would have allowed Nothing Telephone (2) customers to textual content with iMessage however provided that Sunbird might 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 mentioned that the app was not safe.
Texts.weblog wrote, that each “Sunbird” and the “Nothing Chats” app require that customers ship their Apple ID data to their servers, the place they’re authenticated utilizing a digital machine working MacOS.
The Texts.com workforce found that messages despatched utilizing Sunbird’s platform usually are not encrypted (Sunbird has entry to each message despatched and acquired by way of the app).
A tweet from Android app developer Dylan Roussel says that Sunbird does this by “abusing @getsentry, which is used to observe errors. However Sunbird logs messages, pretending they’re errors.” This contradicts an FAQ immediately taken from the Nothing web site on 11/17/2023 and later.
The query within the FAQ requested, “Are my messages safe?” The reply said, “Sure, 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.” However that doesn’t match what Texts.com found. And if there is no such thing as a encryption and your texts are compromised, you could have despatched your Apple ID to a third-party service and will permit attackers to view your images, movies, contacts, notes, and extra.
None of this can have any affect on Apple’s resolution to assist RCS which was most definitely an try by Apple to get forward of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) which might have compelled Apple so as to add RCS assist to the iPhone within the 27 EU member international locations if the EU determined to name iMessage a “gatekeeper.”
