Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
RCS messages in Google’s Messages app will now be fully end-to-end-encrypted by default, Google announced on Tuesday. It’s a major change that keeps messages private from Google and the carriers, and it marks a big milestone in Google’s ongoing efforts with RCS.
Alongside Tuesday’s announcement, Google announced that group chats in Messages are now end-to-end encrypted as well. Google had promised last year that the upgrade was on the way. The company first started rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one messages in late 2020.
Google has been pushing RCS for a very long time, especially as a way to compete with Apple’s iMessage and blue bubbles. For a long time, iMessage’s end-to-end encryption for all chats was a big…