Nothing Phone 2 owners get blue bubbles now. The company shared it has added iMessage to its newest phone through a new “Nothing Chats” app powered by the messaging platform Sunbird. From a report: The feature will be available to users in North America, the EU, and other European countries starting this Friday, November 17th. Nothing writes on its page that it’s doing this because “messaging services are dividing phone users,” and it wants “to break those barriers down.” But doing so here requires you to trust Sunbird. Nothing’s FAQ says Sunbird’s “architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey,” and that messages aren’t stored on its servers.
Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “…it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.” Nothing’s US head of PR, Jane Nho, told The Verge in an email that Sunbird stores user iCloud credentials as a token “in an encrypted database” and associated with one of its Mac Minis in the US or Europe, depending on the user’s location, that then act as a relay for iMessages sent via the app. She added that, after two weeks of inactivity, Sunbird deletes the account information.
