Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
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Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#2I like what they are trying to do, but unfortunately it breaks the E2EE (end-to-end-encryption) and their website isn't clear about that.
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#3I like what they are trying to do, but unfortunately it breaks the E2EE (end-to-end-encryption) and their website isn't clear about that.
This is extremely unethical to offer as a service. Apple account credentials have to be stored as plain text to continuously reauthenticate with apple's servers and the broken e2e means they can store whatever they want from your messages (as well as all other parts of your apple account, like photos and icloud backups).
If they wanted to do this properly the answer is to reverse engineer whatever protocol imessage uses under the hood and make their own client - this is most likely just a simple rebrand of the few FOSS tools that already do the same imessage relay thing.
And of course, when apple inevitable does fight this, the average person will chimp out thinking it's apple doing apple things when in reality no other company would allow a third party to harvest their user's credentials and data in this manner.
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#4The nothing website claims:
> Nothing Chats is built on Sunbird's platform and all Chats messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning neither we nor Sunbird can access the messages you're sending and receiving.
> Nothing is powered by Sunbird, and Sunbird's architecture provides a system to deliver a message from one user to another without ever storing it at any point in its journey. Messages are not stored on Sunbird's servers and are only live on your device – once a message is delivered, it can only be recovered locally from your personal device.
From: https://us.nothing.tech/pages/nothing-chats
The Verge claims:
> Marques Brownlee has also had a preview of Nothing Chats. He confirmed with Nothing that, similar to how other iMessage-to-Android bridge services have worked before, “...it’s literally signing in on some Mac Mini in a server farm somewhere, and that Mac Mini will then do all of the routing for you to make this happen.”
From: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/14/23960516/nothing-chats-i...
It seems to me like if they are doing the typical thing of using a bridge like https://github.com/mautrix/imessage then that isn't really E2EE, the messages are being stored, and could be accessed by Sunbird. I don't really see how their claims could be true. Does anyone know? Am I missing something?
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#5Trivial for Apple to shut them out, unfortunately. It would be great to have an easy to use, low friction messaging platform that wasn't controlled by FB or the Telcos.
I like Signal but haven't been able to get my family members on board.
Edit: Alternative ongoing discussion I noticed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38268184 (3 comments)
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#6Seems irrelevant. Who cares about the bubble color?
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#7Seems irrelevant. Who cares about the bubble color?
iMessage has people without an associated phone number, so you need the so-called "blue bubble" in order to talk to them that way, for example if they only use it from macOS.
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#8Seems irrelevant. Who cares about the bubble color?
Just Google. The only thing I care about is that nobody can manage to send decent quality photos, regardless of brand
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#9Seems irrelevant. Who cares about the bubble color?
apparently, a lot of american teenagers do.
But I think it's because when a message uses iMessage, then there are reactions and other features available, where messages from Android are regular SMS and will lack those
Re: Nothing Phone says it will hack into iMessage, bring blue bubbles to Android
#10Seems irrelevant. Who cares about the bubble color?
apparently, a lot of american teenagers do. But I think it's because when a message uses iMessage, then there are reactions and other features available, where messages from Android are regular SMS and will lack those
I asked a bunch of teen to 30+ year old friends and family, and every one would say that for the purposes of dating, they would require iOS usage due to the perceived probability of an Android user being an incompatible match being too high.