Security Bite: Apple could announce cross-platform E2EE for RCS messaging at WWDC

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We’re officially just over a week away from WWDC 2025. While we expect big design enhancements and much-needed Apple Intelligence improvements to iOS, Apple has the opportunity to do something it’s quite good at: flexing its privacy prowess.

Earlier this year, Apple announced that it was leading the charge on a cross-industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to the RCS Universal Profile, which is published by the GSMA. The company said that it would come to iPhone in a future software update. Google soon after jumped in, stating it too was ‘committed to providing a secure messaging experience.’

With this capability incorporated into the standard, all Rich Communication Standard (RCS) messaging between iPhone and Android users would be completely unreadable to backend intermediaries—its contents encrypted, scrambled into gibberish, and only unlockable by the decryption key stored on the user devices. This would be a huge move for user privacy.

Since the release of iOS 18 beta 2 in June, Apple has added RCS support, allowing iPhone users to finally send rich messages with audio and larger media files to Android users who aren’t using iMessage. It was a welcoming move for people with parents who refuse to get an iPhone. Unlike the industry standard SMS, RCS offers familiar features such as read receipts and the classic typing indication animation, but it also adds the ability to vastly improve privacy and security.

The keyword is “ability.”

There’s a bit of a misconception that RCS already has end-to-end encryption baked in; this is not true. Google, which is widely known for using RCS in its Messages app, only offers E2EE as an extra layer of security exclusively between Android-to-Android devices. This is similar to iMessage, where Apple offers AES encryption only between iPhone users using the service. However, if an iPhone reaches out to a non-Apple device, texts are sent in the clear, unencrypted, and in plaintext. Carriers might offer some level of encryption once a text is received and stored on their servers, but the toast is burnt at that point. Plaintext transit also opens users up to an unnecessary attack surface, where malicious third parties could try to intercept packets for text over a network.

In a statement to 9to5Mac in March, Apple said:

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. We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.

What better place to demonstrate Apple’s device privacy and security lead than at the World Wide Developers Conference? This will be a heavily coveted event since the slow, deleterious release of Apple Intelligence features on Apple’s reputation. I can’t think of a better way for the company to reaffirm its position as an industry leader than having GMSA, who will likely be at the event, “on stage” during the prerecorded keynote, bolstering Apple’s commitment to privacy by bringing E2EE to the RCS Universal Profile.

I understand it’s only been a year since RCS hit iPhone, but this feature already feels like a long time coming. Apple also hasn’t given RCS much airtime. Apart from press releases, the company mentioned “RCS support” only once in closing during the iOS 18 announcement part of the WWDC24 keynote.

With Apple’s initial announcement in March that encrypted RCS was coming to iPhone, the timing feels right. I hope the company makes a baller move here and announces the feature at WWDC 2025. Worst case, we get a press release sometime down the road.

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