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Sunbird, which goals to deliver iMessage to Android customers, has halted growth 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.
“Now we have quickly shut down the Sunbird app whereas we do an in depth safety evaluation. We’ll revert again to the group as quickly as we’re conscious of the precise occurrences and our plan to mitigate them going ahead,” the corporate stated on its Discord on November 19.
A number of customers on the Sunbird subreddit famous that they’d obtained a notification from the corporate in regards to the app’s shutdown.
“Now we have been working across the clock on the app to handle the considerations that had been raised and enhance the expertise. Navigating the press and our associate obligations stored us from sending a message sooner. Tons occurring nonetheless and we’re dedicated to Sunbird’s success,” the corporate stated on its Discord on Tuesday in an replace.
Sunbird messaging was based in 2021 and has obtained a complete of $2.9 million in funding in accordance with Crunchbase knowledge. 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 deliver iMessage to Android by means of Nothing Chats.
Nonetheless, after the announcement, a number of researchers identified safety flaws throughout the app together with messages being despatched in plain textual content, as identified in a weblog put up 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 stated it will work with Sunbird to “repair a number of bugs.”
Given the blue bubble/inexperienced bubble divide, many message aggregator apps have tried to resolve this downside. The aforementioned Texts.com, which was acquired by WordPress.com proprietor Automattic final month for $50 million affords iMessage on Mac and SMS with iMessage. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky’s Beeper additionally affords iMessage integration in some capability. Nonetheless, there have been questions in regards to the privateness and safety affect of those options.
All these developments come amid information from Apple final week, saying that the corporate will undertake RCS (Wealthy Communication Requirements) — a superpowered different to SMS that permits sending multimedia messages with different options — subsequent yr. Whereas this won’t resolve the inexperienced and blue bubble divide, customers on Android would be capable of ship high-res photographs and movies to their family and friends utilizing iPhones.
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