To be honest, anyone who uses an iPhone has silently judged the green bubble of the Messages app: the full functionality of iMessage is restricted to Apple phones only, and the company is refusing to allow Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging on its While it is certainly a made-up decision based on the company's refusal to make Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging available on its platform, there is no doubt that this walled garden tactic is working

This has forced Android app developers to get creative, and Nothing got on board with Nothing Chat As the headline suggests, this brings iMessage to Android, but there's one big catch we have to talk about

If Apple is not willing to cooperate with the RCS standard, Nothing Phone (2) users can take advantage of Nothing Chats, a feature launching on November 17 based on the Sunbird platform that will bring RCS and iMessage into a single interface, allowing owners to "camouflage" themselves as iPhone users, in the words of Carl Pei (founder of Nothing) himself

The feature set will be expanded over time; for example, tapback response and read receipt are not supported now However, this is a really solid start in terms of what iMessage supports, as everything else, including high-resolution media sharing, will be available at launch

Also, the blue and green bubble issue, while not as much of a problem in the UK and Europe, will prove to be a social disaster in the US As MKBHD pointed out, 87% of teens own an iPhone, with the major motivation being iMessage feature

This is one of Apple's key technologies for locking people into its own ecosystem, and while Google has taken its RCS fight to the EU to mandate compatibility between competing devices, the Cupertino crew is not going to give it up for a long time to come

This makes the Nothing Chat workaround very attractive and reinforces what I said in my review of Laptop Mag's Nothing Phone (2)

So how does the app actually work, as MKBHD confirmed in a video featuring the app, which basically involves logging into iMessage on a Mac mini in a server farm, which will do the blue bubble It does all the messaging for you

Don't get me wrong There is no confirmation from Inverse that your messages are encrypted, and it immediately said, "At no point does Sunbird have access to your messages or Apple ID" But to make this happen, you would be giving your email address and iCloud account password to another company

No matter how you feign it, this is a risk There is the possibility of someone abusing your login to an account that holds a lot of sensitive data, from passwords to payment information

Whether you can tolerate this potential risk is up to you If you want reassurance, take a look at Songbird's privacy policy But I see this going hand in hand with Nothing's distinguished design language to change some people's minds and really start a conversation about RCS adoption Watch for Apple's response Is it a major legal action or something more subtle?