It lasted barely 72 hours. Proudly unveiled by the founder of Nothing, Carl Pei, the Nothing Chats app aimed to repair an injustice that Apple had until now been reluctant to correct, by creating a link between Android users and those of Apple (application iMessage) for the sake of equality. A laudable intention, but one which quickly raised a number of questions.
Indeed, Nothing Chats offered the services of Sunbird, an application allowing access to iMessage on Android via a Mac remotely, which logically raises concerns regarding the security of personal data. And although Nothing and Sunbird assured that they carried out end-to-end encryption, they were quickly contradicted by the site 9to5Google and cybersecurity researchers on the texts.com platform who noted a total absence of encryption.
Faced with the torrent of criticism, Nothing indicated that it was working with Sunbird to “fix several bugs” and remove the beta of the application “until further notice”.