“Any news when it may be safe to text iPhone to Android?” one Forbes reader emailed me this week. The FBI and other agencies warned users to stop texting between the two, as messages are not fully encrypted despite promises it’s coming with a new RCS.
It was last December that Salt Typhoon was outed marauding through U.S. networks, prompting the bureau’s warning to stop texting. That came just a couple of months after Apple finally relented and added RCS to iMessage. Its limited implementation was bad news for Google at the time, and iOS 26 may be more of the same.
RCS is not encrypted. Google has added its own security layer across its Messages platform, but RCS messages between iPhones and Androids were less secure than iMessages or Google Messages when iOS 18 launched, and that has not changed.
The iPhone-masker seemed ambivalent about when that might be fixed. It could have been an easy interface for Apple and Google to release, but instead Apple said it would wait for the protocol itself to be upgraded, industry-wide.
Back in March, GSMA, the mobile standards setter, announced a new RCS protocol with full end-to-end encryption. Apple and Google confirmed this would be added to their respective platforms. Problem solved? Maybe — but maybe not.
It was assumed that Apple would launch this with iOS 26 — what was still referred to as iOS 19 at the time. But three betas in, there’s no sign of this yet, even as Google openly experiments with the new RCS encryption on its own Messages platform.
Per MacRumors, “in March, Apple said that it planned to add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to the Messages app,” but “as of the third developer beta of iOS 26 released this week, the upgrade has yet to be implemented on iPhones.”
While wccftech says “Apple continues to delay end-to-end encryption for RCS messaging, leaving chats exposed to third parties, and undermining users’ privacy expectations, as iOS 26 Beta 3 fails to deliver the promised protection.”
Apple was late to the RCS party, with speculation that its eventual u-turn was triggered by U.S., European or even Chinese regulatory pressure. Even now, RCS is an add-on to iMessage which uses its own security architecture, not a full integration.
As such, the shift to full encryption matters less to Apple than to Google, which is all in on RCS and even took control of the global rollout across its Android ecosystem, rather than rely on the patchwork quilt of mobile networks to run a slower process.
RCS came late to iOS 18, with the public beta giving the first real updates and the same may be the case here as well. But even Google seems to have more work to do before a worldwide generally available rollout or the new RCS protocol is feasible.
iOS 26 was seen as a milestone for encrypted RCS, killing the texting security warnings once and for all. But thus far that is not looking likely, at least not on release. And that’s bad news for Google, which remains the primary driver of this new messaging standard.
And it’s bad news for users in a world where Malwarebytes warns of an “alarming 692% spike in SMS-based malware.” A surge “that we can’t just chalk up to coincidence,” coming as “widespread campaigns like toll fee scams” continue to surge.
