this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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You're still using Google's servers even if you're on iPhone, though now Google shouldn't be able to read your messages.
It's just that Apple didn't want to support Google's proprietary encryption protocol. So they worked to make end to end encryption part of the RCS standard, and now that it is, Apple is willing to support it.
Edit: Small correction. It seem's like RCS on iPhone does not always use Google servers. It's just that US carriers have partnered with Google to provide their RCS support.
Not sure if I’d call this “partnered”. AFAIK every carrier can provide their own RCS infrastructure via some data on the SIM. However, as Google wanted to push RCS, they’ve added a fallback to their own servers into the Android Messaging app. And I guess this then became somewhat of a “standard”.
And carriers are busy enough counting all that money we pay them, so they were happy to not having to do anything.
The US carriers announced in 2019 their CCMI (Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative) to bring RCS. But that went nowhere and they killed it. That's when they started using Google's Jibe instead.
See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/verizon-att-and-t-mobile-kill-their-cross-carrier-rcs-messaging-plans/. Interesting read in 2025. Since then a lot changed. Carriers switched to Jibe rather than rolling their own RCS, Apple started supporting RCS (China mandated they add support, but I'm surprised that they brought it to other countries too), and now RCS has an official end to end encryption protocol.
Can't believe it's been 6 years since that announcement.
I’ve been there in the early days, when it was still called “Joyn” in Europe. That was around 2008/2009.
China’s mandate pushed GSMA to adopt the RCS Universal Profile as part of the 5G standard. Thus, Apple and every other phone maker needs to support RCS everywhere to be 5G compliant.
As far as I know, carriers do explicitly have to point to some RCS endpoint to make it work on iOS though, because that doesn't assume the Google fallback. Maybe that's what they meant.
So is RCS with E2E encryption illegal in the UK and Australia now?
The UK didn't make end to end encryption illegal. They just asked Apple to make them a backdoor, so it would technically not be end to end encryption anymore.
Well, it still is end-to-end encrypted. Just from your end to Apple’s end. 😂
Funny enough I had activated the Advanced Protection (which deletes the iCloud encryption key from Apple’s servers) like a week before that UK thing went into effect. And since Apple isn’t allowed to talk about this, there’s no pressure to deactivate it again so far.