Nothing Chats arrived last week promising to bring Apple messages to Android. Logically, without authorization from Apple, using the technology of a third-party app, and forcing users who wanted to use it to give their Apple IDa very dangerous topic.
In fact, the Nothing app was a privacy nightmare. Not only was the app not end-to-end encrypted as promised, it was also quite easy to access other users’ image files because the app stored them as plain text.
And not just images. Sunbird currently stocks 630,000+ media files via Firebase, including images, videos, PDFs, audio and more from users. Not so much on Sunbird servers, but on third-party servers.
Privacy issues can with Nothing Chats
Logically, this has ruined the company’s plans, after a huge campaign in which even the CEO of Nothing published a video with a “Sorry Tim” in allusions to the CEO of Apple. And given the privacy problems, Nothing Chats has been removed from the Play Store by the company itself:
We have removed the Nothing Chats beta from the Play Store and are delaying the release until further notice to work with Sunbird to fix several bugs. We apologize for the delay and will do the right thing for our users.
Spokesperson for Nothing a 9to5google
Given this move, it is not very clear that Nothing Chats will return to the Play Store anytime soon, especially if, given this situation, it can correct the privacy problems before Apple puts an end to the possibility of using its technology in third party messages.
Especially since Apple has announced that it will embrace the RCS protocol in messages, which would de facto mean interoperability between Apple Messages, Android messages, and third-party applications that accept this technology.
Only time will tell if Nothing is able to solve all the problems with Nothing Chats, and if it is able to convince users again to download an app that had to be withdrawn by the company itself due to privacy problems.