Given Nothing and Sunbird’s small marketshare, I assumed Apple was probably going to let Sunbird slide. Now I hope they bring the hammer down.

E2EE is one of the main points of iMessage. Security minded iMessage users are not going to feel comfortable if a Sunbird user is on the other end.

Sunbird / Nothing needed to play this very carefully. Users are giving them their iCloud credentials and are technically giving them the ability to view encrypted comms, documents, photos, password wallets, health records, etc.

Shit like this is unacceptable.

SMS is also plain text, what's the big deal?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Nothing has pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store, saying it is “delaying the launch until further notice” while it fixes “several bugs.” The app promised to let Nothing Phone 2 users text with iMessage, but it required allowing Sunbird, who provides the platform, log into users’ iCloud accounts on its own Mac Mini servers, which... isn’t great?

The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it.

The app launched in beta yesterday after being announced earlier this week.

9to5Google pointed to a thread from site author Dylan Roussel, who found that part of Sunbird’s solution involves decrypting and transmitting messages using HTTP to a Firebase cloud-syncing server and storing them there in unencrypted plain text.

Roussel posted that the company itself has access to messages because it logs them as errors using Sentry, a debugging service.

Sunbird claimed yesterday that HTTP is “only used as part of the one-off initial request from the app notifying back-end of the upcoming iMessage connection.”

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