Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
No not literally nothing. It wouldn’t be a day of the week if I wasn’t complaining about SOMETHING. No, I am instead here to complain about the company called Nothing. Hence why that above sentence was so confusing, just like every other sentence written about this infuriatingly named burr in the side of all logic and reason.
No, the real headline is “Nothing is bringing iMessage to its Android phone,” which, just- UGH. Nothing, for those not in the know, is a third party phone manufacturer. And the phone that they make is called Phone. Well, at the moment it’s called Phone 2. Which.. AARRRRRGH I HATE EVERYTHING I WROTE DOWN.
Anyway, their messaging app, which is called Chats, because of course it is, will now (allegedly) support iMessage. This is not new- there are any number of companies out there trying to unify the chat world, such as BlueBubbles, AirMessage, Beeper, and SunBird. That last one is the actual software that powers this new Nothing feature. - actually, ok that time I enjoyed the entendre.
All of these are backended by an open source project called Matrix, which, if you REALLY want iMessage on your Android, I highly encourage you to do that. In any world, in order to make this work, you need Mac hardware running somewhere, which means things like this Nothing Chat would require you to give your Apple ID credentials to a third party, which is an objectively terrible idea.
In any event, as you can imagine, Apple is not on board with any kind of iMessage porting whatsoever, so any “solution” to this problem is going to come with a hefty amount of air quotes. Time will tell if it also comes with a cease and desist on Nothing’s doorstep.
UPDATE: Hot off the presses, it seems Apple is dipping their toe into the open-standard RCS protocol, with availability “next year.” Surprising, even if this is just a way to throw off regulators. You’ll remember last year Tim Apple famously telling people to ‘buy your mom an iphone’ when questions about messaging compatibility came up. How the turn tables.