Sunbird gives Android users a full iMessage experience without giving up your privacy. The most important thing to know up front: Sunbird doesn't store your messages. Everything below is how we keep it that way.
We don't keep copies of your conversations on our servers. Your message history lives on your device and your recipient's device, not ours. Any message moving through our infrastructure is protected in transit and released once it's delivered. Photos and videos come with a hard expiration: any media you send or receive is automatically deleted from our systems, typically within 48 hours and never longer than 72.
When you connect iMessage, your Apple ID password is used once to set up your session, then destroyed. We don't store your password, and we don't keep an authentication token that would let us sign in as you later. Your ongoing iMessage session is managed by Apple's own Messages software, the same way it works on a personal Mac.
Each user's iMessage connection runs in its own private space that's never shared with anyone else. When you disconnect or delete your account, that space is torn down completely, and nothing of yours carries over to anyone else.
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.
Questions about how Sunbird handles your data? Reach us at hello@sunbirdapp.com.
