‘Stop Texting’—Apple Changes iPhone After 15 Years

The world’s threat landscape is changing fast. But you may remember when the U.S. had time to worry about Chinese hackers marauding through its networks, with the FBI highlighting security vulnerabilities when texting on smartphones. Now Apple has finally responded and 1.5 billion iPhones are about to change.

“It’s not often that a piece of FBI advice triggers a Snopes fact check,” NPR told its audience in December 2024, “but the agency’s urgent message this month to Americans, often summarized as ‘stop texting,’ surprised many consumers.”

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The crux of the bureau’s warning was that while messaging within Apple’s or Google’s walled gardens (iMessage or Google Messages) is secure, texting between iPhone and Android phones is not. GSMA, the telco standards setter promised a fix. But 16 months later, hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens are still waiting.

Rather than focus on a quick platform interface between iMessage and Google Messages, running on top of networks, the fix changes the RCS protocol itself. Rich Communication Services is the successor to aged SMS texting, and its latest variant delivers the core protocol for cross-platform messaging. Finally.

Google’s upgrade is easy — it already uses RCS for its own core messaging, and it has been testing the new protocol for some time. Apple’s job is harder. RCS runs in parallel to iMessage, and doesn’t power Apple’s messaging platform. But it’s much more significant. Apple restricting secure messaging to its own walled garden has always been controversial. Lifting that now genuinely changes iPhone.

But because the “stop texting” fix relies on the RCS protocol itself, it will need carriers to play along with Google and Apple to make it happen, it won’t be an instant fix. The FBI’s warning was for U.S. citizens, which at least narrows the problem to Apple, Google and the domestic carriers connecting their devices.

It’s almost a year since Apple confirmed it would adopt fully secure RCS to address the texting problem, and there were early signs of an imminent release in the beta for the current version of iOS (26.4). Now there are firmer signs in the latest beta (iOS 26.5), with stronger expectations that this may make it into the final release. Even so, the carrier problem remains and the roll-out will be gradual.

Apple changed the messaging landscape in 2011, enabling full encryption for its new iMessage platform from the start. It seems extraordinary that it has taken a further 15-years to bring us to the verge of a cross-platform solution without relying on over-the-tops like WhatsApp or Signal, but here we finally are. Almost.

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It is widely assumed that Apple didn’t especially want to open up iPhone to cross-platform secure messaging in this way. Analysts have suggested this may even have been driven by China’s regulators rather than those closer to home. But either way, it’s undoubtedly good news for smartphone users in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Whichever iOS update sees secure RCS debut on iPhone, it’s clearly imminent. With a fair wind, we may see widespread adoption of cross-platform, secure RCS before the second anniversary of that FBI warning at the end of this year.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com