Apple was slow to adopt RCS, to put it politely, but the iPhone maker is onboard for the next generation RCS specification, which the GSMA announced this morning.
“I am pleased to announce the availability of new GSMA specifications for RCS that include end-to-end encryption (E2EE) based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol,” GSMA technical director Tom Van Pelt writes in the announcement post. “These procedures ensure that messages and other content such as files remain confidential and secure as they travel between clients. That means that RCS will be the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable E2EE between client implementations from different providers.”
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RCS, or Rich Communications Services (RCS), is an international open standard for messaging and the presumed successor to the SMS and MMS technologies used by messaging apps on cellular networks today. It was adopted broadly by Google and` Android device makers, but Apple was late to the game because it wanted to differentiate the iPhone with iMessage. The result was an annoying world of green and blue bubbles, with non-iPhone-using friends and family members treated like second-class citizens.
In late 2022, Apple CEO Tim Cook finally responded to the complaints by claiming that iPhone users were not asking for RCS compatibility. But a year later, Apple said it would support RCS on iPhone, and in late 2024, it delivered that support via iOS 18.4. This, the GSMA claims, was “a significant milestone.”
RCS is a big deal, but it’s not perfect, and one of its remaining criticisms is its lack of end-to-end encryption. Google supports this technology in its Google Messages app, but it’s not part of the standard. And so in September 2024, the GSMA called on the industry to adopt E2EE as well. And it’s been working with its carrier and other mobile ecosystem partners, including Apple, to come up with an interoperable specification that works everywhere. And that’s what today’s announcement is about.
Naturally, Apple is taking credit for this achievement.
“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,” an Apple spokesperson said. “We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.”
“We’ve always been committed to providing a secure messaging experience, and Google Messages users have had end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messaging for years,” a Google spokesperson countered. “We’re excited to have this updated specification from GSMA and work as quickly as possible with the mobile ecosystem to implement and extend this important user protection to cross-platform RCS messaging.”
