After many years of foot-dragging, Apple is reluctantly making end-to-end encryption available for RCS messaging.
End-to-end encryption is important. When a message is end-to-end encrypted, this means that it is very unlikely that anyone could eavesdrop successfully on the message as it passes from one person to another. (It is important to appreciate that an unwary smart phone user could allow his or her phone to be infected by some threat that would permit eavesdropping within the telephone itself.)
The chief trusted end-to-end messaging app is Signal. For email, the chief trusted ways to accomplish end-to-end encryption are SMIME and OpenPGP.
End-to-end encryption is also available to users of Meshtastic and Meshcore. See blog article.
But there are many who, due to inertia if nothing else, fall into a habit of using ordinary smart phone messaging (SMS text messaging) instead of better-protected approaches such as Signal. For such users, the happy situation has been that Android phones have for many years now provided end-to-end encryption through the RCS protocol (Wikipedia article). But for iPhone users, the messaging is old-school SMS messaging that is easily eavesdropped upon by many actors including governments and Salt Typhoon.
(The way you know that your RCS message has been encrypted from end to end is by paying attention to the “padlock” icon shown above. )
For many years, users of Android phones have been able to message each other using end-to-end encryption. Those users have, for many years, seen the “padlock” icon shown above.
Which brings us to Apple and iPhones. Apple has foot-dragged this for many years. But now, in 2026, Apple is reluctantly providing end-to-end encryption for RCS communication with Android users.
This is, of course, a good thing, even if it took many years to happen.
The big news is that starting May 11, 2026, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging has begun rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers.
Are you an iPhone user? Do you have iOS version 26.5? Please send an RCS text message to an Android user. Please see the “padlock” icon. Please post a comment below.