Nothing, a global consumer electronics brand has recently removed its ‘Nothing Chats’ beta app. The new Apple iMessage-compatible app which got removed from the Play Store was powered by the Sunbird messaging platform and the main reason was said to be privacy concerns.
In an official post on X (Saturday- 18 November), the company stated that the delay has been caused because of the launch until further notice.
Nothing stated, "We've removed the Nothing Chats beta from the Play Store and will be delaying the launch until further notice to work with Sunbird to fix several bugs. We apologise for the delay and will do right by our users.”
As per The Verge report, the removal of the app surfaced after users shared a blog from Texts.com stating that Sunbird's message was not end-to-end encrypted and it is easy to compromise.
As per the report of 9to5Google, Dylan Roussel further discovered that Sunbird's solution has involved decrypting and transmitting messages by using HTTP to a Firebase cloud-syncing server and storing them in an unencrypted plain text.
In his post, Roussel further stated that Sentry, a debugging service, records messages as errors for the company.
He wrote, "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," he wrote.
However, Sunbird claimed that HTTP is "only used as part of the one-off initial request from the app notifying back-end of the upcoming iMessage connection".
Nothing Chats was publicly announced on November 14, and the beta version was released on November 17.
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Inputs from IANS
