Well, here's a little unexpected news: "we made iMessage for Android" exclaims Nothing's YouTube video (below) from Carl Pei, the company CEO. And while that's not precisely the deal, the new Nothing Chats app is a major free upgrade that I think Nothing Phone (2) users' iPhone-touting friends will love.
From 17 November the new app, Nothing Chats, will become available. It will allow some degree of cross-platform iMessage-like features when communicating between Nothing Chats and iMessage. That includes single messages, group messages, live typing indicators, media sharing, and voice notes.
So how is this possible? The "little bit naughty" (Pei's words) app's technology is handled by Sunbird, while Nothing has designed the app. It will feature those all-important features above when sending between Nothing Phone and iPhone (or other able Apple device), although at launch read receipts, message actions and replies won't be part of the package – but are planned in a future update.
This is the first time this unofficial iMessage crossover between Android and iOS has surfaced, as the two platforms use different systems – it's RCS (Rich Communications Service) for Google/Android, whereas iMessage uses Apple's own solution – but both are end-to-end encrypted for security. Pei ensures that "there's no data saved on the platform, it's all local on your device," doubling down on Nothing Chats' security aspect.
It's interesting that this feature has launched so soon after the Nothing Phone (2) was put on sale in the USA, as this was the company's first handset foray into that market. Users in the United States don't utilise WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram to the same proportion as users in the UK and across Europe, hence the instigator for Nothing Chats being created.
I do enjoy Nothing's generally playful nature and have found the Nothing Phone (2) to be one of the best Android phones to come to market in 2023 – especially at its sub-flagship price point, where it competes with the likes of the Google Pixel 7a. While I've personally never really found myself pining for iMessage-like features on Android, clearly many people do have that want and, in theory, the solution is now here...
