Sunbird, which goals to carry iMessage to Android customers, has halted improvement and pulled its app from the Play Retailer amid safety points raised this week.
Earlier this week, the corporate despatched a notification to its customers, as famous by 9to5Google first, saying that it’s pausing the event of the app to analyze safety considerations.
“We have temporarily shut down the Sunbird app while we do a detailed security analysis. We will revert back to the community as soon as we are aware of the exact occurrences and our plan to mitigate them going forward,” the corporate mentioned on its Discord on November 19.
Multiple users on the Sunbird subreddit famous that that they had acquired a notification from the corporate concerning the app’s shutdown.
Picture Credit: Imgur/Reddit (opens in a new window)
“We have been working around the clock on the app to address the concerns that were raised and improve the experience. Navigating the press and our partner obligations kept us from sending a message sooner. Lots going on still and we’re committed to Sunbird’s success,” the corporate mentioned on its Discord on Tuesday in an replace.
Sunbird messaging was based in 2021 and has acquired a complete of $2.9 million in funding in response to Crunchbase information. The corporate launched its app in a closed program final December.
The app got here into the limelight when Nothing — an organization began by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei — introduced earlier this month that it’s utilizing Sunbird’s know-how to carry iMessage to Android by means of Nothing Chats.
Nevertheless, after the announcement, a number of researchers identified safety flaws inside the app together with messages being despatched in plain textual content, as identified in a blog post from Texts.com.
Different safety researchers together with researcher Dylan Roussel additionally identified that each one messages and media despatched by means of Nothing Chats and Sunbird are public.
In response to those claims, Nothing pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Play Retailer and mentioned it could work with Sunbird to “fix several bugs.”
Given the blue bubble/inexperienced bubble divide, many message aggregator apps have tried to unravel this downside. The aforementioned Texts.com, which was acquired by WordPress.com owner Automattic last month for $50 million provides iMessage on Mac and SMS with iMessage. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky’s Beeper additionally provides iMessage integration in some capability. Nevertheless, there have been questions on the privacy and security impact of those options.
All these developments come amid information from Apple final week, saying that the company will adopt RCS (Rich Communication Standards) — a superpowered different to SMS that permits sending multimedia messages with different options — subsequent yr. Whereas this may not resolve the inexperienced and blue bubble divide, customers on Android would have the ability to ship high-res pictures and movies to their family and friends utilizing iPhones.
