Things are not off to a good start for Nothing with its iMessage workaround: Just right after it launched Chats on Play Store, Nothing had to pull it out due to bugs that were found. Following that announcement, it seems that there are more problems with Chats, particularly with how partner Sunbird handles messages. In short, Nothing Chats is not safe, contrary to their claims a few days ago. 

Despite Sunbird’s claims on its website that it uses end-to-end encryption, further findings made by developers reveal that Sunbird is not telling the truth: in fact, there’s no encryption involved, and all user data can be accessed with plain text. Further findings reveal that Nothing Chats sends all media attachments to Sentry with links to said attachments being visible. These are all stored through Firebase, which is also unencrypted.

Based on current findings, over 630,000 media files are stored through Firebase, and these include images, videos, PDFs, audio, and more. 

Considering that Nothing was confident that its Chats app is its answer to make iMessage accessible to Android devices like its Phone (2), it puzzles us why they did not check Sunbird’s claims of end-to-end encryption. It’s also unfortunate for Nothing to be called out for Chats being not safe, especially with Apple recently announcing that it will bring RCS to its devices in 2024. 

Nothing has yet to give an updated response following the findings on its iMessage clone, and it remains to be seen how they will properly address all the issues especially with the privacy and security concerns.