Victory! End-to-End Encrypted RCS Comes to Apple and Android Chats

This week, Apple released iOS 26.5, an update that supports end-to-end encryption for Rich Communication Services (RCS), meaning conversations between Android and iPhone will soon be encrypted in the default chat apps. This has been a long time coming, and is a welcome delivery on a promise both Google and Apple made.

With this update, conversations that take place between Apple’s Messages app and Google Messages on Android will be end-to-end encrypted by default, as long as the carrier supports both RCS and encrypted messages (you can find a list of carriers here). RCS messages are a replacement for SMS, and in 2024 Apple started supporting it, making for a marked improvement in the quality of images and other media shared between Android and iPhones. 

Now, those conversations can also benefit from the increased privacy and security that end-to-end encryption offers, making it so neither Google, Apple, nor the cellular carriers have access to the contents of messages. This feature comes courtesy of both Apple and Google supporting the GSMA RCS Universal Profile 3.0, which implements the Messaging Layer Security protocol for encryption. Metadata will likely still be collected and stored for these conversations, making alternatives like Signal still a better option for many conversations. Likewise, if you back up those conversations to the cloud, they may be stored unencrypted unless you enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS (Google Messages end-to-end encrypts the text of messages in backups, but not the media, so we’d like to see a similar offering as ADP on Android). Still, this is a significant step forward for the privacy of millions of conversations worldwide.

End-to-end encrypted RCS messaging is still marked as beta on Apple devices, likely because the rollout is dependent on carriers as well as the Android phone running the most recent version of Google Messages.  It might take some time before you get this feature in your chats and until you do, remember that the conversations are not protected with end-to-end encryption. But once everyone in the conversation is on the right software version and the carrier support is implemented, you will see a lock icon and the text, “Encrypted” at the top of the conversation for any chats you have over RCS, as seen here:

We applaud Apple and Google for getting this across the finish line and Encrypting It Already! More companies should take these sorts of difficult but necessary steps to protect the privacy of our conversations and our data.