Sunbirdwhich aims to bring iMessage to Android users, has halted development and pulled its app from the Play Store amid security issues raised this week.
Earlier this week, the company sent a notification to its users, it noted 9to5Google First, it said it had paused development of the app to investigate security concerns.
“We have temporarily shut down the Sunbird app while we conduct a detailed security analysis. We will return to the community once we are aware of the exact events and our plan to mitigate them in the future,” the company said in Discord on November 19.
several Users On the Sunbird subreddit they indicated that they received a notice from the company about the app being shut down.
![Sunbird sent a notice to users that it has temporarily halted development of its app](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/zJ0iYqf.png?w=587)
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“We’ve been working around the clock on the app to address concerns raised and improve the experience. Navigating between press and our partner commitments kept us from sending a message sooner. There’s still a lot more to come and we’re committed to Sunbird’s success,” the company said in its Discord update on Tuesday.
Sunbird Messaging was founded in 2021 and has received a total funding of $2.9 million according to Crunchbase data. The company released its application in a closed program last December.
The app entered the spotlight when Nothing — a company created by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei — announced earlier this month that it was using Sunbird’s technology to bring iMessage to Android through… Nothing chats.
However, following the announcement, several researchers pointed out security flaws within the app including sending messages in plain text, as described in Blog post From Noss.com.
Other security researchers, including researcher Dylan Russell, have pointed out that all messages and media sent through Nothing Chats and Sunbird are public.
In response to these allegations, Nothing pulled the beta version of Nothing Chats from the Play Store and said it would work with Sunbird to “fix several bugs.”
Due to the split between the blue bubble and the green bubble, many message aggregation applications have tried to solve this problem. The aforementioned Texts.com, which was acquired by WordPress.com owner Automattic last month for $50 million, offers iMessage on the Mac and SMS with iMessage. Beeper Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky also offers iMessage integration in some capacity. However, there were questions about Privacy and Security impact Of these solutions.
All of these developments come amid news from Apple last week that the company will adopt RCS (Rich Communications Standards) — a powerful alternative to SMS that allows multimedia messages to be sent with other features — next year. Although this may not solve the gap between the green and blue bubbles, Android users will be able to send high-resolution photos and videos to their friends and family using iPhones.