Nothing Chats app pulled from Play Store due to privacy concerns

Nothing, a relative newcomer in the Android smartphone space, recently launched a new app called Nothing Chats that acted as a bridge between the two platforms. This meant that texts from its phones would show up as blue bubbles in iMessage. However, merely days after the app was announced, it has been pulled from the Google Play store due to concerns about privacy.

Nothing Chats grounded not too long after it took flight

The Nothing Chats app has been developed in collaboration with Sunbird. It was released in beta form for Nothing Phone 2 users in a handful of markets. It was a stop-gap solution, as it required Sunbird to pass the text messages along to iMessage from the Nothing Phone 2. This also meant that users would need to give the app access to their iCloud accounts, something not a lot of users would be comfortable with.

Nothing has now confirmed that the Nothing Chats app has now been pulled from the Play Store and that the full launch has been delayed until further notice. The company says it's going to take this time to fix “several bugs,” with providing additional information about those bugs.

It emerged recently that messages that were being sent via Sunbird weren't end-to-end encrypted. They were being sent in plain text instead, meaning that could be compromised fairly easily. Reports also suggested that it may be possible to Sunbird to look at users' messages as well, something that they wouldn't obviously be thrilled about.

Whether these issues can be fixed so that Nothing Chats returns to the Play Store remains to be seen. If they can't be fixed due to technical limitations, Android users would have to live with their blue bubble status for a bit longer.