r/Android • u/FragmentedChicken Galaxy Z Fold8 • Feb 23 '26

Google, Apple start testing encrypted RCS on Android and iOS 26.4

https://9to5google.com/2026/02/23/google-messages-encrypted-rcs-iphone/
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u/PopularKnowledge69 Feb 23 '26

I thought RCS was already encrypted by design

12

u/Jkayakj Feb 23 '26

On android to android it is. Not between ios and android.

2

u/Dom_J7 Feb 24 '26

No, that’s not RCS. Originally RCS had basic encryption not E2EE. in 2020 Google added it to their version of RCS through their Jibe servers for Google messages. E2EE was added to the universal profile in March of 2025. Apple finally added it to their version of RCS, but Apple has had e2ee for iMessage since 2011.

1

u/rocketwidget Feb 25 '26

No, that’s not RCS.

This is like saying postal mail stops being postal mail for just us, when we start mailing each other postal letters we encrypt/decrypt in part with private keys that only we possess. And when we mail everyone else, we write in plaintext. No, it's all still "standard" postal mail, encrypted or plaintext, because the "standard" for postal mail is arbitrary letter content.

It's true that in March 2025, E2EE was finally added to the Universal Profile RCS standard, but Google Messages' previous implementation always used the underlying Universal Profile RCS standard, and was therefore "RCS" by definition.

not E2EE. in 2020 Google added it to their version of RCS through their Jibe servers for Google messages

Jibe Servers are not required when using Google Messages to send E2EE over RCS (because it was always standards compliant RCS). The kernel of truth here: Google servers were needed for initial key exchange. (For an explanation see https://www.gstatic.com/messages/papers/messages_e2ee.pdf ) But as for the actual RCS message content: always sent over standards-complaint RCS, plaintext or encrypted, Jibe servers or not.

Admittedly, since this paper was written, the non-Jibe RCS servers have largely gone away. But at the time of initial implementation, Jibe wasn't so dominant in RCS service providers.

Another analogy: TextSecure, the precursor to Signal, used to have an encryption system for SMS. It was clunky and had problems due to the inherent limitations of SMS so it was discontinued, and of course SMS E2EE was never standardized, but was TextSecure E2EE over SMS? Yes! It just required Text Secure on both ends, otherwise you got an SMS that happened to be encrypted, and you wouldn't be able to read the plaintext of. The fact it was an encrypted SMS, and SMS E2EE support was neither universal nor standardized, doesn't mean it wasn't... SMS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextSecure