In collaboration with the GSM Association, Apple today announced it will add support for end-to-end encryption for RCS messages. This brings RCS much closer to iMessage in terms of security standards.
The new RCS Universal Profile 3.0 including end-to-encryption was only just released today, so it’s not clear exactly when this support will ship to customers. Apple said it helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-encryption to the RCS Universal Profile …
Apple first added RCS support to the iPhone with iOS 18.1 last fall. RCS enables more rich communication experiences with Android users who aren’t using iMessage, through an industry standard which supplants traditional SMS.
RCS includes features like typing indicators, emoji reactions, read receipts and support for higher-resolution photo and video attachments.
However, until today, the RCS Universal Profile standard did not support end-to-encryption for messages sent over the protocol. But now that this capability has been incorporated into the standard, Apple has committed to integrating it.
In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple said:
End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA. We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.
It is great to see Apple immediately commit to support such a significant advancement in the RCS standard, helping improve the security of communications for all of its users.
As a reminder, end-to-end encryption means the decryption keys for your conversations are only available on your own device, and thus no backend intermediary is able to intercept and read them. iMessage has offered end-to-end encryption since its inception.
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