Probably the best thing for smartphones in the last five years Apple’s decision to support RCS. Since then, texting between iPhone and Android hasn’t become the nightmare of SMS: group chats work as they should, photos and videos can be sent in high quality, and you can see when the other person is typing—though messages is Still green.
While the experience is miles better than before, it’s not perfect. There are still some key functions missing from RCS on the iPhone. For example, you can’t send messages, reply to threads, or edit iPhone messages. The latter can only be done on the Android side, while only iPhones can react with emojis right now. However, the biggest omission is support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE). This is the most important advantage of RCS over SMS. E2EE “scrambles” your messages, and only you and the recipient(s) have the “keys” to unscramble them. If a hacker remotely accesses your messages from an untrusted device, they won’t be able to read them: the only way to see these messages in plain text is with access to the trusted device associated with them.
If you have an Android device, and you text with other Android devices using Google Messages, you likely have this benefit. You may see a small lock icon next to your messages as they are sent, indicating that the texts have been sent with E2EE. iPhones have this advantage when texting other iPhones, because iMessage is also E2EE. But when you text from iPhone to Android, whether you’re using RCS or SMS or not, those messages aren’t protected by encryption, making you vulnerable to hacking.
End-to-end encryption support for RCS will roll out with iOS 26.5
That is changing now. Apple has been beta testing E2EE support for RCS on iPhone since iOS 26.4, and has confirmed that the feature will ship with iOS 26.5. Not only that, anyone can try it out right now—assuming you’re okay with enrolling your iPhone in Apple’s beta program. As long as your Android friends are running the latest version of Google Messages, and you’re running Apple’s iOS 26.5 beta, you can rest easy knowing your messages are protected by end-to-end encryption.
What do you think so far?
Once iOS 26.5 officially drops, you’ll be able to take advantage of E2EE with RCS. But until then, you will need to install the latest beta on your iPhone to try this encryption. However, don’t do it without thinking. Beta software is in testing, which means there may be bugs and other instabilities that you’re not used to dealing with in iOS. If something goes wrong, and you need to uninstall the beta, you’ll need to completely reset your iPhone. Unless you have A full backup of iOS 26.4 on your computerYou may lose data. As such, I never recommend installing a beta on your primary device. It’s your choice, of course: just understand the risks. That said, Apple’s latest beta update is a Release Candidate (RC), which is the version of iOS 26.5 that the company plans to release to the general public, barring any major bugs or glitches. It’s one of the safest beta releases to try out so far, but still comes with some risk.
