If you want to beat the iPhone, be the iPhone. It’s that simple. This is the concept that Nothing is bringing to its Android phone. Nothing Chats app is the company’s new offering that brings iMessage to Android. This will be an exclusive app for the Nothing phone 2 using a 3rd party app called Sunbird. The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries starting this Friday, November 17th. It is clear that Apple locks in its users in these areas using apps like iMessage.
Nothing writes on its page that it’s doing this because “messaging services are dividing phone users,” and it wants “to break those barriers down.” But doing so here requires you to trust Sunbird to use Nothing Chats Nothing’s FAQ says Sunbird’s “architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey,” and that messages aren’t stored on its servers.
However, there are some security concerns if you decide to use Nothing Chats. It’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”
So that means you’re essentially giving them access to your iCloud account to make this work, and as we’ve all learned over the years, companies don’t always do what they say they will. It’s at least worth reviewing Sunbird’s privacy policy and keeping a very skeptical mind about it.
The Washington Post got to try out the feature and writes that Nothing Chats work “for the most part,” but you’ll miss out on some of the fancier features of iMessage, like the ability to edit messages, and Tapback reactions “don’t fully work yet.” Group chats are apparently also out if someone in the group isn’t on iMessage, and the Post says sometimes, messages have to be sent multiple times before they actually go through.
Over to you Apple!
