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Apple is lining up one of the most consequential updates to its Messages app in years with iOS 26.4, expected to roll out this spring. The update significantly expands Apple’s support for RCS (Rich Communication Services), signaling a deliberate move away from the limitations of traditional SMS and toward a modern, cross-platform messaging experience that better reflects how people actually communicate today.
RCS is the telecom industry’s long-promised successor to SMS and MMS, designed to deliver features users now take for granted in modern chat apps. It enables high-quality media sharing, read receipts, typing indicators, and reliable delivery over Wi-Fi or mobile data. More importantly for iPhone users, RCS narrows the long-standing gap between Apple’s iMessage ecosystem and Android devices, replacing the fragile “green bubble” SMS experience with something far closer to native chat.
According to the company:
End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA. We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.
What makes iOS 26.4 notable is Apple’s expected adoption of RCS Universal Profile 3.0, which introduces end-to-end encryption for cross-platform messages. Until now, encrypted conversations were largely limited to iMessage-to-iMessage chats, leaving iPhone-to-Android texts exposed to carrier-level access. With encrypted RCS, Apple is effectively extending meaningful privacy protections beyond its own ecosystem for the first time.
Beyond security, Apple is also filling in functional gaps that made its initial RCS rollout feel half-finished. The update is expected to support inline replies, message editing and unsending, and richer reactions, features that have long defined iMessage and competing platforms, but were conspicuously absent from Apple’s early RCS implementation.
Taken together, these changes will make a clear shift in Apple’s posture toward cross-platform communication. Internal beta builds already show carrier-level toggles for RCS encryption, indicating that Apple and mobile networks are actively coordinating to support the transition rather than treating RCS as a checkbox feature.
