Few products have a stranger job description than Sunbird. It exists to do one thing Apple has spent two decades declining to do: put iMessage — blue bubbles and all — on Android. As of this week the app is open to everyone on Google Play, no waitlist, with a new priority inbox that keeps your most important conversations up front and an on-device AI, "Sunbird Intelligence", promised for later this year.
The demand is entirely rational, and mostly American. In group chats across the US, the green bubble remains a small social exile — conversations degrade, photos arrive compressed, and teenagers, in particular, know exactly who is on which side of the line. Apple has offered RCS improvements and kept the blue bubble to itself, because the blue bubble sells iPhones. Into that gap, repeatedly, have stepped the middlemen.
And middleman is the word to hold on to, because it is the entire question. iMessage is end-to-end encrypted between Apple devices. It does not speak Android. Any service that delivers it there must, in some fashion, stand in the middle — which historically has meant entrusting the service with your Apple account credentials and letting your messages transit, or terminate on, hardware you do not control. Readers with long memories will recall how Sunbird's first outing ended in 2023: abruptly, within days of its highest-profile launch, after security researchers found user messages exposed. The company has spent the years since rebuilding, and its return in an open, no-waitlist form suggests some confidence. Confidence is not evidence.
So the questions to ask before signing in are the ones this column would ask of any messaging intermediary, and none of them is answered by a press release. Where do your Apple credentials go, and in what form? Do messages touch Sunbird's servers decrypted, even briefly? What happens to the promised end-to-end guarantee when one end is a relay? And — the 2023 question — who has verified any of it, other than the company itself? The promised on-phone AI, whatever its merits, only raises the stakes: an assistant that reads your messages to prioritise them is one more party in a conversation that was sold as private.
None of this is to say Sunbird is doing it wrong this time. It is to say that "trust us, it's fixed" is a claim with a specific recent history here, and the sensible posture is the one security people reserve for password managers and VPNs: wait for independent verification, and until then, keep anything genuinely sensitive in a channel that does not require a middleman — Signal and WhatsApp remain cross-platform and end-to-end without acrobatics.
The blue bubble is a real social object and wanting it is not vanity. But it is a colour. Weigh carefully what you hand over to change one.
