Ars Technica covered this much better
Basically, the company providing the service is shady and should not be trusted.
How would they e2ee this without intercepting the messages? Also the irony of fighting against an exclusionary service by making your access tool also exclusionary …
In the article it mentions that the service is run by sunbird. Just by reading their FAQ it doesn’t actually sound like they are MITM’ing messages via some mac server somewhere. It actually sounds more plausible to me that they are doing all the magic “on device”. They specifically mention that this won’t work on multiple phones at the same time, that’s what’s tipping me off.
What I suspect is happening is that the phone itself is spoofing an actual iPhone, and connecting to Apple servers as if it is one. Normally you wouldn’t be able to do this, Apple sells the phones, so they know all the serial numbers that should be able to access iMessage, and would be able to block anything that doesn’t report to be a real iPhone. What I think may be happening is that sunbird could be buying up pallets of dead, old, or otherwise unusable iPhones for pennies on the dollar, and using those serial numbers to pretend they were an iPhone from another device (like the nothing phone) directly.
This would make sense with their business model, according to their FAQ they have “no reason to charge money” for their product yet. Buying access to iMessage for a few bucks upfront with no ongoing cost would match up with what they are claiming, and it would be extremely hard for Apple to detect on their end, as they would appear to be all sorts of models, bought at different times, in different places, and signed in by real people.
I want to reiterate that this is pure speculation on my part, it’s just a theory. Which this would mean that (in theory) chats could (and would) be E2E encrypted from sender to receiver, ultimately it’s still Nothing/Sunbird’s app, so they could be doing anything with it on device.
You wrote a whole essay speculating when it literally says in the article:
Nothing Chats then leverages Sunbird’s undisclosed number of Mac mini computers across Europe and North America as a waypoint for sending and receiving iMessage-compatible texts and media.
They claim it in the article, and in a few other publications, but I haven’t seen anything that explicitly confirms, from sunbird, that this is the case, including on their website. They also make claims on their website that conflict with that architecture, as I don’t believe it would be possible to E2E encrypt messages like they claim they do. I kinda wonder if the Mac Mini claim is an assumption that everyone just ran with, without confirming that it’s true. I could be wrong though, I’ll gladly eat my words if anyone has a primary source to cite, but that architecture and business model just doesn’t appear to be compatible with their claims.
the coveted green bubble messaging
I guess some people just have different priorities than I do. :)
I don’t recommend buying a nothing phone because of iMessage integration. It’s unlikely to last long, and they obviously haven’t explained how they’re pulling it off while not breaking E2E encryption and account privacy.
They haven’t explained it because it’s a giant security issue. If it wasn’t, they would have included it in the announcement.
Just another company trying to ride the wave of free press.
According to some YouTubers that spoke to the CEO it runs through a Mac Mini on a server farm
How it probably works: you’re giving them your apple id login details and they setup iMessage on a Mac mini in their server farm. They proxy everything. End to end encryption is no more and they’re lying about it or intentionally vague. Like “end to end encryption until their server”
Because they would need to purchase and maintain a massive amount of Mac minis, and probably also playing cat and mouse with Apple, this is expensive and has an ongoing cost. What’s funding this? OEM wanting to have this on their phones? Chat contents for LLM training? Worse like bots using your apple id for posting fake app reviews?
Because I can’t imagine Nothing paying a recurring fee forever to them, with the small margin they have it should be a small one time fee
