The GSM Association, the umbrella organization overseeing development of the Rich Communications Services (RCS) protocol, announced Tuesday that it is working on implementing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to protect messages sent between the Android and iOS ecosystems.
“The next major milestone for the RCS Universal Profile is adding important user protection features, including interoperable end-to-end encryption,” said Tom Van Pelt, technical director at the GSMA.
“This will be the first to introduce standardized, interoperable messaging encryption across different computing platforms, and will address important technical challenges such as key federation and encrypted group membership.”
The development comes a day after Apple officially released iOS 18 with support for RCS in the Messages app, which comes with advanced features like message reactions, typing indication, read receipts, high-quality media sharing, and more.
RCS, an improvement over the current SMS standard, is not currently end-to-end encrypted out of the box, so Google has implemented the Signal protocol to secure RCS conversations on Android.
Earlier this year, Apple announced it would be working with GSMA members to integrate encryption, and it’s worth noting that the company’s own iMessage service is E2EE-enabled.
“We look forward to continuing to work together across the mobile ecosystem to advance RCS standards with interoperable end-to-end encryption, keeping all RCS messages private and secure,” Van Pelt said.
Last July, Google also revealed plans to incorporate the Message Layer Security (MLS) protocol into its Messages app for Android to promote interoperability between messaging services and platforms.
Just this month, Meta announced details of its approach to enabling interoperability with third-party messaging services on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger as part of its efforts to maintain E2EE guarantees “wherever possible” while complying with the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA).
“Building third-party chat is technically challenging, and protecting privacy and security is a shared responsibility,” the social media company said. “We’ve made great progress already, but there’s much more to build.”
