Nothing's ambitious chat app, developed in collaboration to bridge the gap between Android and iMessage has been pulled out of Google Play Store due to privacy concerns. The company has officially confirmed that the beta version of Nothing Chat has been "removed from the Play Store until further notice to fix several bugs." However, several reports, who tested the earlier version of Nothing Chat on the Phone (2) have reported that the app lacks basic security features such as end-to-end encryption and it was also based on the dated HTTP connection type instead of latest HTTPS, which offers content encryption by default. According to Kishan Bagaria's post on X, who is the founder of text.com, Nothing Chats has several security compromises, which sends credentials in plain text (using HTTP), and all the incoming and outgoing texts are said to be stored without any encryption, where, the service provider Sunbird can read and access text chats. During the initial announcement, Nothing Chat finally seemed like a legit option, that would let Android phone users (limited to Phone (2)) experience "blue bubble" on an Android and access most iMessage features. However, just a few days ago, Apple did confirm that iMessage will soon incorporate RCS (Rich Communication Services) protocol, to enable iPhone users to seamlessly text and share multimedia files with Android users, which almost makes third-party services like Nothing Chat redundant. Earlier reports also highlighted the fact that Nothing or Sunbird does not store these messages on the server, and the message routing will be done via a Mac mini, located on a server farm. The company also highlighted that the iCloud credentials will be stored in an encrypted format, and if there is no activity for two weeks, the account will be deleted.
