Apple Is Finally About to Make Texting Between iPhone and Android Secure

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Perhaps the best thing to happen to smartphones in the past five years was Apple's decision to start supporting RCS. Ever since, texting between iPhone and Android hasn't been a nightmare caused by SMS: Group chats function as they should, photos and videos can be sent in high quality, and you can even see when the other person is typing—though the messages are still green.

While the experience is miles better than it used to be, it isn't perfect. There are still some key functions missing from RCS on iPhone. For instance, you can't unsend messages, reply to a thread, or edit iPhone messages. The latter can only happen on the Android side, while only iPhones can react with emojis right now. The biggest omission, however, is support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE). This is arguably the most important advantage RCS has over SMS. E2EE "scrambles" your messages, and only you and the recipient(s) have the "keys" to unscramble them. If a hacker were to remotely access your messages from an untrusted device, they wouldn't be able to read them: The only way to see these messages in plain text is to have 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 advantage. You may see a small lock icon next to your messages as you send them, indicating that texts are sent with E2EE. iPhones have this advantage when texting other iPhones, as iMessage is E2EE as well. But when you text from an iPhone to an Android, whether or not you're using RCS or SMS, those messages are not protected by encryption, which leaves you vulnerable to hacking.

End-to-end encryption support for RCS will roll out with iOS 26.5

That's now changing. Apple has been beta testing E2EE support for RCS on iPhone since iOS 26.4, and confirmed the feature will ship with iOS 26.5. Not only that, anyone can try it out right now—assuming you're fine 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.

Once iOS 26.5 officially drops, you'll be able to take advantage of E2EE with RCS. But until then, you'll need to install the latest beta on your iPhone to give this encryption a try. Don't do that without thinking it through, though. Beta software is in testing, which means there may be bugs and other instabilities you aren't used to dealing with in iOS. If something goes wrong, and you need to uninstall the beta, you'll need to reset your iPhone entirely. Unless you have a full backup of iOS 26.4 on your computer, you could lose data. As such, I never recommend installing betas on your primary device. It's your choice, of course: Just understand the risks. All that said, Apple's latest beta update is the release candidate (RC), which, barring any major bugs or glitches, is the version of iOS 26.5 the company plans to release to the general public. It's by far the safest of the beta releases to try, but still comes with some risk.