Since late January, I’ve been trying to fool faraway friends into thinking that I’m a fellow iPhone user.
The key has been a free Android app called Sunbird, which replaces your default text messaging app with one that supports iMessage. When it works, iPhone users see their messages in blue, just as if they’re conversing through iMessage, and it supports features like full-resolution images and large group chats.
But engaging in this act of trickery has trade-offs. Sunbird’s app, which is in private alpha, still has a lot of rough edges and missing features. Working around Apple’s iMessage restrictions also has some inherent problems, ones that could leave Android fans trapped against their will in Apple’s messaging ecosystem.
How Sunbird works
Sunbird isn’t the first attempt to bring iMessage to Android, but other solutions such as AirMessage and BlueBubbles require a Mac to relay iMessages to your phone. Even if you have a Mac at home, you must make sure it’s always online or you won’t receive any messages.
Sunbird takes that concept and moves it to the cloud, where it’s using its own cluster of Macs to sign in users and relay their messages. The app’s authentication process is identical to the one that appears when you’re setting up a new Apple device—right down to the two-factor authentication prompt. And after signing in, a Mac Mini becomes associated with your account on Apple’s Devices website.
Danny Mizrahi, founder and CEO of Sunbird Messaging, is a bit cagey about how this works, but implies that the company is not simply assigning one Mac desktop to each user.
“It’s a scalable solution where we’ve got the cost down in the cloud to 60 cents per user, which is how we knew we had a business,” Mizrahi says, adding that Sunbird is continuing to bring the cost down as it scales up.
Mizrahi also claims that Sunbird preserves iMessage’s end-to-end encryption. Aside from Sunbird’s own login credentials, he says that no user data is stored on the company’s servers (though again, the company is unwilling to discuss exactly how this works). In that sense, the service is adding a level of security that otherwise wouldn’t exist with SMS.
“The big thing we’re fixing is adding encryption between Androids and iPhones,” Mizrahi says.
iMessage antics
For the fundamental task of delivering text and images over iMessage, Sunbird works. Friends and family members have confirmed that our conversations are happening over iMessage, blue bubbles and all. I’m able to participate in group chats with lots of people, and when they send videos, they’re a big improvement over the choppy, grainy quality of MMS.
But over the past couple of months, I’ve run into a range of issues that wouldn’t normally happen with iMessage:
- Certain iMessage features don’t work, including read receipts and sending tapback responses.
- Videos sent to my contacts from Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra came through only as audio files.
- When I send a message from another device, such as my iPad, it doesn’t show up in Sunbird.
- Message history doesn’t sync at all with Sunbird on other devices.
- Only messages to my AppleID email appear as iMessages. Texts to my phone number come through via SMS—green bubbles and all. As a result, I have separate SMS and iMessage threads for several contacts.
- With one group chat, I didn’t receive the initial message, but still saw the follow-ups.
- In another group chat, I didn’t receive any messages at all. To fix this, I had to rebuild the group on my end and inform everyone to use the new thread.
The first several issues stem from Sunbird’s alpha status. The company says it’s working on more iMessage features, fixing various technical issues, and developing an option to sync message histories via Google Drive.
But the last few problems are inherent to how iMessage works and don’t have easy solutions.
To avoid getting messages over SMS, Sunbird lets you send a vCard contact file that directs your contacts to use your AppleID email instead of your phone number. That’s a clunky solution, though, and it introduces another problem: Once you’ve moved everyone over to iMessage, there’s no easy way to move them back to SMS. You’re basically stuck with iMessage—and, by extension, either Sunbird or an iPhone.
Long-term, Sunbird has another plan: It’ll offer eSIM phone numbers that always deliver texts via iMessage. Users will then be able to hand out the eSIM number or port their existing number over to it.
The company says this will solve the SMS issue while giving users the option to walk away from iMessage entirely. But it also sounds like an ordeal to set up, and tying your phone number to an unproven startup entails its own risks.
Beyond iMessage
As for how Sunbird plans to become a viable business, it has raised $3 million in a seed round and is aiming for a Series A in late April or May. Its business model involves expanding beyond iMessage and selling subscriptions for additional services.
Already, Sunbird supports WhatsApp alongside iMessage and regular SMS. It plans to support Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Signal, and Line in the future, along with direct messages for Twitter, Instagram, and Discord.
Sunbird will charge users who want to connect more than a few of these services, and it’s been testing other features that might also go behind a paywall, such as Android-to-Android FaceTime calls. The hope is that by starting with iMessage, the company can build an audience for these additional features.
“The whole point of this is getting as many users as possible and using the massive pent-up demand on iMessage on Android to get those users,” Mizrahi says.
But first, Sunbird needs to get out of private alpha. The app currently has just a few thousand users; thousands more will be invited over the next week ahead of a public beta launch in July. (The company says roughly 100,000 users are on its waitlist.) Mizrahi hopes that by year-end, the service will have 5 million to 10 million users.
All of which raises the question of how Apple might respond. Sunbird has wisely stopped using the term “iMessage” in its marketing (it now advertises “blue bubbles” instead) and Mizrahi says the company has done an IP analysis to make sure it’s not infringing on any patents. He also doesn’t believe it would be easy for Apple to block Sunbird from a technical standpoint as it’s using iMessage’s native login screens and authentication protocols.
Ultimately, though, Mizrahi says he’d welcome that kind of attention. The founder of IT solutions firm Contango, he cofounded Sunbird with longtime friend Garin Toren—cofounder-CTO of speech-to-text platform Ping—after commiserating over the frustrations of being an Android user in an iMessage world. Sunbird, he says, is bigger than anything he’s taken on before, and getting on Apple’s radar would be an honor.
“We had one investor say, ‘What if Meta and Google and Apple all team up against you to shut you down?’ And I was like, ‘Oh man, would that be great,’” Mizrahi says. “That would be a great scenario if these two Joe Schmos in New York got these three behemoths to team up against us. That would be a great place to be in.”
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