Apple Confirms RCS E2EE Will Ship with iOS 26.5

9to5mac spotted in the release notes of iOS 26.5 RC confirmation that the long-awaited RCS end-to-end encryption feature will ship with iOS 26.5.

For many years, if you wanted E2EE messaging between iOS and Android, you needed to install a separate secure messenger like Signal instead of your default messaging app.

That's because for a long time, cross-platform messaging between iOS and Android still used SMS and MMS, ancient unencrypted protocols from the 1990's.

iMessage has offered E2EE messaging between iOS users since 2011 when it launched, and Google had E2EE between users of Google Messages.

Notably, Google Messages uses the RCS standard, a next-generation texting protocol that was meant to replace SMS. However, the standard didn't support E2EE, so Google made their own in-house encryption based on the Signal protocol.

In September 2024, the GSMA released a post celebrating Apple's recent support for RCS messaging in iOS 18, and hinting at future "interoperable end-to-end encryption" for RCS.

In March 2025, they announced the release of Universal Profile 3.0 and with it the promised RCS E2EE based on the MLS standard.

Then, all we needed was to wait for Apple and Google to support the new standard.

Code was spotted later that year suggesting iOS 26 would bring the new upgrade, but when iOS 26 rolled around, no dice.

A user spotted more hints that Apple was testing out the new encryption in the iOS 26.3 beta, but no such luck when it released.

Then in the iOS 26.4 beta, the feature finally made an appearance, but in the final release, it wasn't there.

The iOS 26.5 beta also had it but we didn't know whether it would make it to the final version. Now we finally know for sure to expect it to stick around.

This isn't the end of the story unfortunately. Carriers still need to support the new encryption in order for it to work. Information about which carriers support E2EE is expected to show up on this page when the update finally ships, so check there to see if your carrier supports it.

What specific features will be supported isn't clear either. Most E2EE messengers, including iMessage, offer some way to verify your keys so that you can be sure you're messaging the right person.

There have also been several new versions of the Universal Profile since Apple has been working on E2EE. Universal Profile 4.0 has now released, so there's plenty of improvements to be made to the messages app after this. With so many parties involved, it might take a while before they all support it however.