NHN It’s clear that Nothing was excited for the hype of what this app could be / could have been, but I personally don’t believe Nothing truly knew the extent of how buggy and how bad the security was. Carl in the video announcement even states it’s end to end encrypted. Multiple people from the Nothing team continued to post on X (Twitter) in regards to the security noting the encryption/security. I think Carl/Nothing were under the impression Sunbird was more secure than it actually was just based on the rollout, language from Nothing, and the details on the Sunbird site. I can’t speak for Nothing or what actually occurred specifically though. Possibly Nothing will explain more in a detailed post or video but seeing how this played out, majority of this falls on Sunbird and I wouldn’t go as far to say the overall Nothing brands trust has been tarnished. It certainly is tarnished for Sunbird.
Hopefully Sunbird can resolve all of this but ultimately I just don’t see the point now with the latest news from Apple. RCS will be supported with iMessage, though the ‘green bubble’ RCS messages won’t be encrypted similarly to iMessage ‘blue bubbles’ and it doesn’t fully resolve the actual root of the blue bubble issue(s) here in the US at least especially. However, I’m not sure what motivates these apps like Sunbird or Beeper to stick around, or even how they financially support any further app development. Having a separate Nothing chat app is cool and all but most users will continue using WhatsApp, Google Messages, Signal/Telegram, etc. on their Nothing Phones. With very few adopting a new app that doesn’t necessarily provide anything net new other messaging apps don’t already provide. The net new here for the initial chats app was RCS and iMessage integration. Now that Apple will support RCS and the app unfortunately wasn’t a success, I don’t really see why Nothing would even try to resurrect this after everything that happened.
