Consumer tech company Nothing announced on Tuesday that it has developed iMessage compatibility for its Phone (2) users through a new app called Nothing Chats.
The app, according to the company, has been developed in collaboration with Sunbird, an Android and web app that unifies your messaging apps into one inbox, including iMessage.
“We believe in windows, not walls. If messaging services are dividing phone users, then we want to break those barriers down,” Nothing said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
CEO Carl Pei, in a video, explains that the company’s motive behind the new product was to “level the playing field”. He added that according to the company’s internal data, a lot of Nothing (Ear) users are iPhone users but the Nothing Phone users are overwhelmingly previous Android users. Pei also found out, he said, that a lot of iPhone users are reluctant to switch to Android because of the Apple ecosystem of which iMessage is a huge part.
“We believe in windows, not walls. If messaging services are dividing phone users, then we want to break those barriers down,” Nothing says on its support page about the app.
It is no secret that Apple has tried to build a wall around its ecosystem to keep as many users inside it as possible, and the pressure of a blue bubble is what keeps luring more users into that wall. It is one of the ways to attract more Android users and convert them to Apple sheep.
“In the absence of a strategy to become the primary messaging service for
Three years later, then-marketing chief Phil Schiller made a similar point to CEO Tim Cook in an email: "Moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us," he stated. Another warning that year came from a former Apple executive, who cautioned his old colleagues in an email that "iMessage amounts to serious lock-in."
While Nothing Chats is a good solution to break these “walls”, tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee—who had early access to the service—expressed his concerns about “signing into a Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere”.
That is, essentially, how the service will work. You log in using your Apple ID on Nothing Chats which will route the messages for you from this said Mac Mini.
Nothing on its FAQ page says that all messages are end-to-end encrypted, “meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you’re sending and receiving”. Nothing also assures users that Sunbird does not store any of their messages.
“Messages are not stored on Sunbird’s servers and are only live on your device; once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device,” it added. However, it is still recommended that users read Sunbird’s privacy policy before signing up for the app.
Nothing’s US head of PR, Jane Nho, told The Verge that after two weeks of inactivity, Sunbird deleted the account information.
Nothing Chats operate "for the most part," according to the Washington Post, but you'll miss out on some of iMessage's nicer features, like the ability to edit messages, while Tapback replies "don't fully work yet."
The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries on November 17.
Google also launched a very aggressive campaign against Apple’s iMessage called #GetTheMessgae in August 2023 to pressure Apple to switch to RCS and not rely on old technology like SMS and MMS for text and multimedia transfers between an Android and an
iPhone. This means no iMessage features like read receipts, typing indicator, reactions, high-quality media, and most importantly, no encryption.
RCS (Rich Communication Services), on the other hand, works exactly like iMessage on Android phones, with messages being sent over the internet, and has become an industry standard.
