Apple Confirms RCS E2EE Will Ship with iOS 26.5

Pretty bitter sweet. Obviously encryption is better than no encryption. Though this will likely mean the end of being able to use a GrapheneOS phone without play services always running - at least while telling yourself you’re not giving up anything privacy/security wise. To get RCS to work, you need Play Services and Google Messages both installed on your Owner profile. You need to also hand over network, phone, and, SMS permissions, and likely device identifiers to Google (depending on carrier). If you intend to know who’s texting you, then you need to provide permission to contacts as well. It would be pretty ridiculous declare contact scopes for each person that you message. I’d have to declare hundreds just to read old Messages. At that point, why even bother storing your contacts outside of Google if you’re going to let them see your contacts anyway. Even without signing into an account for Google Messages, they’ll still be able fingerprint you off your phone number, device identifiers, IP addresses etc. Might as well use Google Voice at that point due to already trusting Google with your contacts, phone, and messages. And just like that, you’re back in the Google ecosystem.