Just one day after it was released, Nothing pulled the beta for its brand-new messaging app Nothing Chats from the Play Store and announced that it would postpone the launch “until further notice.” With support for both RCS and iMessage, the company marketed its Sunbird-based Nothing Chats as the solution to the age-old” Android versus Apple” texting problems. However, since its announcement, more and more critics have expressed worry about the dangers that such workarounds pose, claiming that Nothing Chats is inherently less secure.
Nothing Chats lacks end-to-end encryption, and 9to5google discovered that attachments sent by other users could be easily accessed in plain text during a teardown of the app. Concerns that Sunbird uses HTTP instead of HTTPS were further supported by the findings. Texts .com’s founder, Kishan Bagaria, described it as “extremely insecure” and claimed further research by his team revealed that” all outgoing texts are being leaked to a sentry server in plaintext.”
Nothing on X stated that it was working with Sunbird to “fix several bugs” and” will do right by our users” despite not directly addressing the privacy issues. On November 14, nothing chats were announced, and on Friday, the beta was available on the Play Store.