Newest first. Each entry says what changed and — the part that usually gets left out — what it meant
for the messages you actually send.
A warning about the dates below. Version boundaries are the highest-risk facts on this site: get one
wrong and every answer our checker gives shifts in the same direction. So anything we have not
confirmed against Apple's, Google's or the GSMA's own documentation carries an
unverified marker, and we would rather show you a gap than fill it in
with something plausible.
iOS · iOS 26.5 · 2026-05
End-to-end encryption for RCS chats between an iPhone and an Android phone began rolling out, switched on by default on lines whose carrier supports it.
This is the first time a plain text conversation between an iPhone and an Android phone could be private from the carrier without either person installing anything. It is a staged rollout, so having a new enough iPhone is necessary but not sufficient — the carrier has to have shipped it too. That is exactly why our checker answers "depends on your carrier" instead of "yes".
US carriers began enabling the encrypted variant of RCS on their own timetables rather than all at once.
Two people can both be on brand-new phones and still get different answers, because the switch that matters last is on the network, not the handset. If you want certainty rather than a probability, the padlock on the device is the only reliable check.
No primary source attached to this entry yet. It is here because it matters, flagged because we have not checked it.
GSMA · Universal Profile 3.0 · 2025-03
The industry profile that defines RCS added end-to-end encryption to the specification itself, using Messaging Layer Security (MLS).
Before this, encrypted RCS only existed inside one company's app, which is why it stopped at the edge of Android. Putting it in the shared specification is what made an encrypted iPhone-to-Android chat possible at all. Nothing changed on your phone the day this was announced — it changed what Apple and Google were able to ship afterwards.
The iPhone supported RCS for the first time, so texts to Android phones stopped being MMS by default.
Typing indicators, read receipts and photos that are not a blurry mess all became possible between an iPhone and an Android phone. The bubble stayed green, because green has always meant "not iMessage" rather than "bad". If your iPhone is older than this, every one of your Android conversations is still MMS no matter what the other person does.
Google Messages added end-to-end encryption for RCS, first for one-to-one chats and later for group chats.
If both of you are on Android and both use Google Messages, your texts have been encrypted for years already — no carrier involvement needed, because both ends were the same app. That is the reason Android-to-Android is the simplest answer our checker gives, and iPhone-to-Android is the hardest.
Version facts on this page: not verified yet — the site-wide verification pass has
not been completed. See the update log
Why version boundaries matter more here than usual
For most software, knowing which release added a feature is trivia. Here it is the whole answer. If
your iPhone is one release below the line where RCS support starts, none of the rest applies to you —
every message to an Android number is MMS, and no setting on either phone will change that. If it is
one release below the line where cross-platform encryption starts, your messages are modern and fast
and readable by your carrier.
That is why our checker asks you which band your software falls in rather than asking for an exact
number. The bands are the thing that changes the answer. And it is why we treat a wrong version
boundary as the most expensive kind of mistake this site can make — worse than being vague, because
being confidently wrong about it is invisible to the reader.
What is not on this list
Plenty of releases changed something about messaging without changing anything about the questions this
site answers. Interface redesigns, new sticker formats, scheduling, better search — real features, but
they do not change whether a message goes as RCS, or whether anyone else can read it. Listing them
would make this page longer and less useful, so they are not here.
Carrier-side changes are the awkward category. They matter enormously and they are announced badly, one
press release at a time, sometimes not at all. What we have is on the
carriers page, with the same honesty about which parts we have confirmed.