Days after announcing the RCS-powered Nothing Chats beta and rolling it out yesterday, the company has pulled the app from the Google Play Store saying the app is delaying launch until further notice. Nothing has been exterminating several bugs discovered in the beta, however, it had to be pulled out of the Play Store after a major privacy snarl was reported.
For the unversed, Nothing Phone 2 users can use iMessage-like RCS to communicate with other users. RCS is a type of communication protocol that allows sending text, videos, photos, stickers, and more, unlike SMS. With Nothing Chats Beta, the RCS-powered app uses a platform provided by Sunbird which in turn requires users to log in to their iCloud accounts.
A blog from Texts.com went viral prompting Nothing to remove the app from Play Store. Turns out the beta app doesn’t support end-to-end encryption as mentioned in its FAQs.
To explain it better, you have to sign in to your iCloud account on Sunbird to use Nothing Chats Beta. Sunbird doesn’t natively support encryption which means intruders can exploit its servers to read all your sent and received text as they are plain text. Having encrypted text makes it difficult for intruders to assess the content of such messages making them much more secure.
When it comes to Sunbird, it is abusing a feature called Gentry that monitors errors. Turns out the platform logs all the sent and received messages disguising them as errors. To simplify, all the messages you exchange on Sunbird (and Nothing Chats Beta) stay on their servers unencrypted which is a major privacy issue. Moreover, your iCloud ID is associated with messages as well that can be used to attack and access your contacts, notes, photos, videos, and beyond.
It goes on to show just how much of a privacy issue Nothing Chats Beta could’ve been if it had stayed on Play Store available for users to download.
Apple announced native support for RCS when communicating with Android phones and the feature will arrive in 2024. Turns out the current privacy snarl won’t cause issues in Apple’s decisions given the fact that it is trying to outrun EU DMA’s potential decision to make RCS default across all 27 EU member countries if iMessage is declared as a ‘gatekeeper’ app.
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