Sunbird relaunched its iMessage app for Android users after three years away

The company claims it has addressed the security flaws that shut down its operation in 2023.

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Sunbird Messaging is back on the Google Play Store , offering Android users blue bubble privileges in iMessage complete with reactions and high quality videos for $2.99 a month. Apple and Google have made cross platform messaging better in recent years with support for RCS, but Android users can still cause issues in iMessage group chats, like breaking reactions and replies.

Android Authority reports that after Sunbird shut down nearly three years ago due to security issues, the company says its new setup addresses those, and that “Any message moving through our infrastructure is protected in transit and released once it’s delivered,” while media you send or receive is deleted “typically within 48 hours and never longer than 72.”

Your messages are encrypted on your phone before they leave it, encrypted in transit over certificate-pinned connections, and encrypted at rest on your device, using strong AES-256 encryption. On the final leg to an iPhone, your message is protected by Apple’s iMessage end-to-end encryption, which Sunbird never modifies, intercepts, or weakens.

Sunbird’s CEO Danny Mizrahi told Android Authority that “an independent security auditing firm tested its rebuilt Sunbird app,” and reported “no critical vulnerabilities.” Mizrahi also added that, “When a user connects iMessage, their Apple ID password is used once to set up the session and then destroyed. We do not store the password, and we do not keep an authentication token that would let us sign in as them later.”

You can also access Google Messages and SMS from Sunbird, and support for integrating WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger is coming later this year, along with an AI assistant that can summarize chats and draft replies.