“I’m working under the assumption that Tim Cook will watch this video“. This is the phrase with which Carl PeiCEO of Nothing, opens the presentation video of Nothing Chats, the app developed to bring iMessage to smartphones Nothing.
The app will be available from November 17th, but the first questions regarding the app are starting to arise app securitybecause it is not an official Apple service, but it is an app designed by Nothing on theSunbird architecturea company that had already created this bridge between Android and iOS.
Faced with the first doubts, a spokesperson for Nothing said: “Once you sign in to the app using an Apple ID, your credentials are tokenized in an encrypted database and are associated with one of Sunbird’s Mac Minis. Once the link is created, no one can access the data: the only possible action is for Sunbird to delete the link”.
Therefore, it seems that Nothing has done things right, because, according to what the company itself reported, it chose to collaborate with Sunbird because it provides the end-to-end encryption without storing user messages and because the only information it keeps are email addresses, which are deleted in the event of two weeks of inactivity.
However, all that glitters is not gold: Sunbird has never been particularly transparent with the public. When it launched this service in December 2022, the company had refused to answer questions about how it would work, how it would handle users’ Apple IDs and the like, but most importantly whether their app violated Apple’s terms of service with the risk of a consequent ban of the account.
In fact, on the Sunbird website both in the FAQ section and in the “Privacy and Security Standards“The security of Apple’s credentials is never mentioned, in fact it is circumvented because the focus is on the fact that the company does not collect data regarding messages, contacts or contents.
So, Sunbird’s behavior should be a bit of a concern worry and it becomes right to ask whether to use a similar service, without considering the fact that Apple could decide to close the project citing a security issue.
