An app designed to allow Android users to seamlessly message iPhone owners has been withdrawn by its developer.
Sunbird pulled its eponymous software from the Google Play Store after privacy issues were raised this week. The company has been notifying users that it is pausing usage of the app while it investigates “security concerns”, as spotted by tech news site 9to5Google.
“We have temporarily shut down the Sunbird app while we do a detailed security analysis. We will revert back to the community as soon as we are aware of the exact occurrences and our plan to mitigate them going forward,” the company wrote on the Discord chat platform on November 19.
Sunbird leapt into the limelight earlier this week when it was embroiled in a privacy fiasco around Nothing Chats, another newly launched messaging app that was a collaboration between Sunbird and Nothing. It also promised to bring iMessages to Android so that users of the rival phone systems could message each other with ease.
While that sounded like good news for everyone who wanted their green message bubbles to turn blue, it turned out to be too good to be true. App developer Dylan Roussel claimed that Nothing Chats made user data vulnerable to access by strangers online. It also didn’t use end-to-end encryption despite its claims to the contrary.
Now the Nothing Chats app has also been withdrawn.
If all this had happened any earlier, it would have been hailed as a setback for Android-to-iPhone messaging. But, coincidentally, Apple just announced that it plans to adopt a burgeoning messaging standard used by Google that should ease some of the major pain points for users.
Although iPhone owners can still use iMessage to chat to each other, when they message Android users, both parties will be able to take advantage of new features and design changes. Things like read receipts, typing indicators, end-to-end encryption, and the ability to send and view high-quality media - the absence of which has hampered the iPhone-to-Android messaging experience for years. The changes will come into effect at some point next year.
Apple’s move may have been the death knell for apps like Nothing Chats, but Sunbird is promising more than just iMessage for Android. The app essentially billed itself as an all-in-one messaging solution, which would also bring together SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Sunbird said the app, which was only available to testers, would ultimately be free to use for the public.
