Sunbird and Nothing Chats Apps Pulled Due to Major Security Concerns

Overview

• Sunbird, the 'iMessage for Android' app, has been temporarily shut down due to serious security concerns.
• Security researchers discovered that contrary to its claims, Sunbird could access every message, photo, video, document, and other data sent through the app.
• Nothing Chats, a new messaging service based on Sunbird, was also pulled from the Google Play store after the same security failures were discovered.
• Sunbird and Nothing had claimed that their messaging services were end-to-end encrypted, but researchers found that messages were decrypted and transmitted using HTTP to a Firebase server in plain text.
• Both companies have yet to make a public statement on the matter.