This app promises to bring iMessage to Android...again - Neowin
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Image via Sunbird (Play Store)
Oh boy, here we go again: Remember Sunbird? The company that partnered with Nothing back in 2023 to bring iMessage to Android through "Nothing Chats," an app that barely lasted 48 hours before it was shut down? Well, it's back, but this time, without Nothing to back it.
The app is up on the Play Store and promises that every message you send through the platform is encrypted on-device using AES-256 encryption before leaving over certificate-pinned connections.
As for how the app works, it's pretty vague. When the folks at Droid-Life installed it, the UI prompted users to connect a new or existing Apple ID, which Sunbird claims servers quickly destroy after establishing your session. They also claimed that nothing you send through the app is stored anywhere on company hardware, which is interesting when you consider the fact that the original Sunbird was found intercepting messages, storing them in plain text on Firebase servers, and sending credentials over unencrypted HTTP, which led to its shutdown about 24 hours later.
The new Sunbird app costs $2.99 per month or $24.99 annually following a mandatory 14-day free trial that demands payment details up front, and does not yet support Outbound reactions and still cannot map your phone number to iMessage.
Screenshot of the Sunbird interface | Image via Sunbird
It is a bit insane, to say the least, the lengths people will go to hide that they're on a "green bubble" device. People have gone as far as buying actual Macs to run dedicated home servers using platforms like AirMessage or BlueBubbles. Those who didn't want to buy (or could not afford) a dedicated machine turned to companies that run giant Mac Mini server farms in remote data centers to route personal chats, while Beeper Mini later reverse-engineered Apple's internal protocols directly so you didn't even need an Apple ID for some of these setups.
Sunbird and others like it first came out at a time when RCS support on iOS remained non-existent and mobile interoperability was quite poor. For the longest time, Apple ignored requests to support the standard, and CEO Tim Cook famously told a reporter in 2022 who complained about sending videos to his mother's Android: "Buy your mom an iPhone."
But over the last two years, the company's made efforts to improve support for the standard across the board, in part due to Google's massive #GetTheMessage PR campaign urging the iPhone maker to adopt RCS, and regulatory pressure from the EU.
In September 2024, iOS 18 officially shipped with RCS, bringing goodies like typing indicators, read receipts, and sending high-resolution photos and videos, but it wasn't until May this year that cross-platform End-to-End Encryption landed with iOS 26.5.
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