 "Google pulls suspicious iMessage app from Play Store")
After the disaster that surrounded the failed launch of BlackBerry Messenger for Android, another app disaster waiting to happen was stopped by Google. An application called “iMessage Chat” that mimicked the IM messaging service of iOS was yanked off the Google Play store for violating its store policies.
What was most scary about this app that was available till Monday, was that it managed to hoodwink Apple into letting it piggyback on the Cupertino-based company’s services to send and receive messages. Jay Freeman, aka Saurik, developer of Cydia, dug into the app to reveal alarming details about the security risk the application raised, especially for users with Apple IDs.
Pulled off Google Play (Image credit: Computerworld)
The application boasted of using iMessage to connect users on iOS with those on Android. Since there isn’t an official iMessage app for any platform besides Apple, it served as a juicy prospect for Android users. It is also suspected that the application harvested Apple IDs in order to provide users an entry into it. Apple IDs are not just identification credentials for Apple users but also allows them to authorise purchases and this application could have turned into a real security mess for both Apple and Google.
Interestingly, it was noted that there was a bigger threat to user security than assumed since information sent and received first passed through the app maker’s servers in China before being sent on to Apple to forward it. “I believe that this application actually does connect to Apple’s servers from the phone, but it doesn’t then interpret the protocol on the device,” Freeman wrote on a thread on Hacker News. “Instead, it ferries the data to the third-party developer’s server, parses everything remotely, figures out what to do with the data, and sends everything back to the client decoded along with responses to send back to Apple.”
Thankfully, Google jumped in just before this matter exploded to pull the app off the store. Without elaborating much, the company said to ComputerWorld in a statement that iMessage Chat, the application, had violated its store policies. While Google may have saved itself in the nick of time, there is no denying that it is living dangerously with its Play Store.
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