Newsletter
It turns out that the new Nothing Chat has some security concerns, as new reports have revealed. This service is prone to security compromises that can result in the reveal of users’ personal information. Despite being impressive and all, this new feature from Nothing doesn’t provide users with end-to-end encryption for their chats, and this isn’t the way to go.
A few days ago, Nothing took to their various platforms to announce the launch of their new Chat feature. This brought iMessage support to Nothing devices using a third-party service known as Sunbird. With the help of this service, nothing was able to eradicate the green bubble blue bubble identification while texting an iPhone.
This feature’s launch shook the Android tech community from various angles, with some wanting to know how exactly Nothing pulled this stunt off. The curiosity of netizens and fans led to them digging into this new feature to find out more about it, and their findings are quite surprising. Users of Nothing devices should not use this feature for the following reasons that this article points out.
Security flaws & shortcomings of the new Nothing Chat feature exposed
Over the past months, Google has been pushing Apple to adopt RCS messaging services. The aim of this is to make texting between an Android device and an iPhone more secure and feature-packed. Apple on their part have locked Android texts under the green bubble for quite a while, limiting them to only SMS texting capabilities.
In a bid to break the texting barrier that Apple creates between iPhone and Android devices, a ton of developers stepped into the scene. One such developer is the Sunbird app, and this is Nothing’s partner on this iMessage-supported Chat feature.
While their iMessage-supported product gets the job done, it also brings security threats to the end users. From recent findings, it becomes obvious that this service runs on HTTP and not HTTPS, hence the lack of a security defence. So users who upload their personal information on this service are at risk of bad actors stealing them.
In addition to this security flaw is the fact that messages exchanged using this feature are not end-to-end encrypted. So, after getting their personal information accessed, users of this service can also have their chats spied on. There is also the accusation that Sunbird uses the BlueBubble App service to remove the green bubbles on iMessage.
Due to these security concerns, Nothing has pulled the Chat app off the Google Play Store. The green bubble, blue bubble era is coming to an end with Apple preparing to launch a more secure messaging channel. Until then, users can avoid other features or services that claim to eradicate the messaging barrier between Android and iPhones.