Your iPhone finally got support for RCS messaging as of iOS 18, finally unbreaking green bubble texts for a lot of people. They’re still green bubbles, but they now work like something made in the last decade. Now, it’s also getting end-to-end encryption.
The GSMA (GSM Association) has announced a significant upgrade to Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging: the integration of end-to-end encryption in the latest version, Universal Profile 3.0. RCS through Google Messages has had end-to-end encryption for a long while now, but that was more of a Google thing than a GSMA thing. Apple, on the other hand, really only commits to the bare minimum that the RCS spec requires.
As end-to-end encryption wasn’t mandatory, messages between iPhones and Android phones were just sent in plaintext, similar to how SMS messages were being sent. Sure, you were having more modern features such as the ability to send high-quality photos and videos as well as read indicators and typing indicators, but security-wise, it wasn’t much of an upgrade from SMS. With an updated RCS spec, Apple will finally be adding end-to-end encryption to its implementation of RCS—iMessage already has end-to-end encryption, but RCS messages were being handled the exact same way as SMS messages were.
Related
Why RCS Texting Is a Big Deal for Both iPhone and Android
RCS texting has arrived on the iPhone. Now iPhone and Android users can both stare at a typing bubble wondering when the next text will come.
The new RCS Universal Profile 3.0 incorporates end-to-end encryption using the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol. The GSMA specifications detail how MLS will be applied within the RCS framework, but this basically means that we have interoperable encryption. The current encryption implementation was dependent on the Google Messages app, while this one is at a platform level.
That means that not only iPhones will get end-to-end encryption, but also all devices that use RCS—while we don’t have anything big on the market that’s not Android or iPhone, some companies might use their own messaging apps rather than Google Messages on the Android side. It doesn’t look like Samsung has decided if it wants to be one of those companies or not, but a lot of Chinese-made phones don’t have Google apps in their home market (China), and they therefore can’t use Google Messages. This could also be good for feature phones, which still mostly use SMS—probably fine for simple texts, but still insecure.
And in case you were wondering, yes, Apple has indeed committed to rolling out the update. In a statement, the company said it was “pleased to have helped lead” the effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile. Apple plans to integrate support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS through future software updates. This hopefully means that this won’t end up becoming a malicious compliance thing where Apple will take until the last humanly possible moment to add the feature. The hard part was getting Apple to adopt RCS, but getting it to adopt RCS features might not be as hard.
We’re not sure when we might end up getting end-to-end encryption on iPhones, but we might see this roll out as part of iOS 19 when it does come out later this year, or as part of a minor update to iOS 18—the latter is still possible, but Apple might start reducing work on iOS 18 as we near WWDC and the first iOS 19 betas start popping up.
Source: 9to5Google
