Sunbird, the app promising blue bubbles and full iMessage group chat participation on Android, is now open to everyone on the Google Play Store. More than 181,000 people signed up during its early access window, and the app is launching alongside a new priority inbox that splits your messages into Primary and Secondary tabs.
What's New
The pitch is the same one Sunbird has been chasing for years. One app, iMessage, Google Messages RCS, and regular SMS all live in a single inbox, and Android users show up as full blue bubble participants in iPhone group chats instead of the broken green bubble experience everyone already knows. Reactions, replies, and group management are supposed to actually work this time.
The priority inbox is live starting today. Conversations that matter most stay in Primary, while verification codes and messages from unknown numbers get filed into Secondary, and you can move anything between the two whenever you want.
Why It Matters
Apple's 2024 RCS support was supposed to fix the Android and iPhone messaging divide, and it helped with things like photo quality and typing indicators. It never solved the deeper problem, which is that an Android user in an iMessage group chat still breaks reactions and replies for everyone else in that thread.
The social cost of that is bigger than most non-teenagers realize. A survey from All About Cookies found that 38 percent of Android users had missed or misread messages because of the greenbubble mess, and 30 percent had actually considered buying an iPhone just to make the pressure stop. Among teens specifically, where 88 percent already own an iPhone according to Piper Sandler's 2025 numbers, the bubble color still functions as a social signal that has nothing to do with the technology itself.
The Trust Problem Sunbird Still Has to Answer For
Here's the part worth remembering before you hand this app your group chats. Sunbird shut down completely in November 2023 after security researchers discovered the app was sending Apple ID credentials over unencrypted HTTP and storing message contents, attachments, and contact data in plaintext, despite marketing that promised full end to end encryption. 9to5Google found more than 630,000 exposed media files during that investigation.
The company relaunched in beta in April 2024, this time describing a setup where messages are encrypted at the application layer with AES and a key that only lives on the client side. That's a real architectural change from what existed in 2023, but it's also the kind of claim that deserves scrutiny rather than a straight repeat of the company's own language, especially from a company that insisted its 2023 setup was already secure right up until it wasn't.
What's Coming Next
Sunbird Intelligence is due later this year, starting with a feature called Catch Me Up that summarizes everything you missed across your conversations, plus a built-in assistant that can draft replies or move chats between tabs on request. Sunbird says these features process entirely on your device rather than sending anything to a server. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are also in late stage development for the same inbox, both targeting a Q3 2026 rollout.
Pricing sits at $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year, with a 14 day free trial for new users. Sunbird says roughly a third of installs start a trial and about 8 percent convert to paying, a conversion rate the company claims runs six to eight times the industry average based on 2025 benchmarks.
Bottom Line
The feature list is genuinely appealing if you're tired of being the reason a group chat stops working. Just go in with your eyes open about who's building it. Sunbird earned its skepticism the hard way, and one relaunch with better marketing language doesn't automatically undo that.
