Carl Pei justifies the purpose of Nothing Chats after Apple's RCS mic-drop moment

A day after Nothing announced it’s bringing iMessage compatibility to the Nothing Phone 2 with Nothing Chats, Apple went ahead and dropped the RCS bomb. Essentially, iPhones will now support RCS messaging on iMessage. This means Android users and iPhone users will now be able to securely use modern messaging features like read receipts, typing indicators, and message reactions. Most importantly, users will also be able to share high-resolution photos and videos between Android phones and iPhones. This almost defeats the purpose of having a separate chat app like Nothing Chats for iMessage conversations between Android and iOS.

Commenting on Apple’s announcement, Nothing CEO Carl Pei posted on X (formerly Twitter), saying, “Great decision! Good for consumers, competition, and innovation. Hats off to the EU, telcos, Google, and most of all to Apple.”

The question on everyone’s mind is — what does this mean for Nothing’s newly announced endeavor? A user asked Pei on X if Nothing Chats is still in the pipeline, to which the executive replied, “Yeah, while this is great, it doesn’t solve the blue bubble vs. green bubble issue.”

What Pei is pointing to is the fact that iMessage will still color chats between iOS users as blue, while green bubbles will continue to show up for RCS messages sent by Android users.

Even so, Pei’s justification for the utility of Nothing Chats seems a bit weak if a coloring system is all that it’ll have going for it. Yes, it may serve as a stopgap for Nothing Phone 2 users until Apple formerly implements RCS in iMessage, but after that, it could just become a pointless solution to a non-existent problem. My colleague Dhruv Bhutani already pointed out how Nothing Chats is backed by an unsustainable business model, but Apple just grounded it even before it could take flight. Nothing Chats also didn’t exactly impress us when we tried it out for ourselves — hit the link for our full impressions.