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iOS and Android are two great systems. They have reached great maturity and we see that with each new release Apple includes Android elements and vice versa. Since
iOS and Android are two great systems. They have reached great maturity and we see that with each new release Apple includes Android elements and vice versa. Since the main apps are available on both systems, it would be easy to switch between one and the other if it weren’t for the ecosystem. And within this ecosystem is iMessage.
iMessage upsets Google so much that it occasionally encourages Apple to open its iMessage system to Android RCS. Nothing comes into play anymore and just announced that its Nothing Phone (2) will support iMessage. And that’s a pretty important thing.
“I assume Tim Cook will watch this video”. Carl Pei himself decided to launch the video we left below, where almost all the details about this new feature are explained. Before we talk about this, let’s give some background on the situation.
SMS has been with us for decades and is a legacy technology. That’s why Google has been distributing RCS messages for several years. It is a protocol that allows you to send larger messages (so multimedia files are of better quality), have more emojis, reactions to messages, read confirmation, and other benefits.
This is something Apple introduced years ago with iMessage across its devices, but the problem is iPhone and Android users cannot benefit from these benefits of rich messages: Only works between Apple devices and Android phones. Actually, apart from the functions, there is a much more visual difference: The messages you send between Apple and Android are green, and the messages you send between Apple devices are blue.
This is actually a problem in the United States. There are iPhone users who won’t switch to Android because they’ll lose iMessage. And yes, in the United States, SMS is still the most popular system, although they know and use applications such as Telegram or WhatsApp.
However, Nothing has yet announced its iMessage for Android. If Apple didn’t unlock the system… how did they do it? In the video above, Pei explains all the details. They basically use a version of the Sunbird app technology (developed by the same team) and an aesthetic and functional part developed by Nothing.
Sunbird is an app that is compatible with a variety of messaging apps, including RCS messages, SMS, MMS and iMessage. With Nothing Chats we don’t just have blue bubbles, we also have rich features among users. We leave these below:
Other features, such as message reactions and replies and reading notifications, are in development and will be available soon.
Given this, it’s time to ask what will happen to our data. According to Pei, everything is saved on your device and you don’t have to worry about privacy. Moreover, as we see on the Nothing website, messages are encrypted end-to-end.
Nothing Chats is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird’s architecture provides a system that allows the message to be sent from one user to another without being stored at any point. Messages are not stored on Sunbird servers; These are only on your device. Once the message is delivered it can only be retrieved locally from your personal device.
The other big question is… why? As Pei explains in the video, They noticed that people were buying their headphones but not the Nothing Phone. They actually use Nothing Ear with the iPhone, and one of the reasons they stick with the iPhone might be the difficulty of escaping iMessage.
For this reason, Nothing Chat can’t be downloaded from Play Store on a Nothing Phone (2) (later we’ll see if it launches on other Android phones or the first Nothing Phone) and we’ll only have to log in with our Apple ID to continue talking to our iPhone contacts.
For now, the app will be available soon in beta for Phone (2) users in Europe, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Cover image | Xataka Android
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John Wilkes is a seasoned journalist and author at Div Bracket. He specializes in covering trending news across a wide range of topics, from politics to entertainment and everything in between.
