Google Messages Gets End-to-End Encryption for Group Chats on Android

Group text chats among Android users are getting a little more secure–assuming everyone in the chat uses a beta version of Google’s Messages app.

Google today announced it’s rolling out end-to-end encryption for group chats as part of a blog post(Opens in a new window) marking the 30th anniversary of the first text message received on a phone via a cell network.

Using encryption right now requires a beta version of Google’s Messages app, and not everyone will gain access to it immediately. Google’s post says this feature “will be available to some users in the open beta program over the coming weeks.” To check if you have access, simply sign up to be a tester(Opens in a new window) to unlock the beta version of Messages.

Google spent much of the past five years struggling to replace SMS with RCS, short for “Rich Communications Services.” This wireless-industry-backed standard adds such interactive features as read receipts, typing indicators, and tapback emoji as well as message encryption–the same basic features that Apple provides in iMessage, just not locked into iPhones.

But while RCS securing messages in transit represents a massive upgrade over SMS sending your texts in the clear, until today RCS limited end-to-end encryption to one-to-one chats. Unfortunately, since Apple won’t ship iMessage for Android, doesn’t support RCS in its Messages app, and won’t allow Google to ship an iOS version of its own Messages app, texts between iPhone and Android users get downgraded to lowest-common-denominator SMS. 

That means no encryption for those chats and, even after clever hacks by Google to support tapback emoji, little of the interactivity RCS and iMessage allow. Google’s post takes the opportunity to renew its #GetTheMessage plea to Apple, stating “Apple refuses to adopt RCS and continues to rely on SMS when people with iPhones message people with Android phones, which means their texting  is stuck in the 1990s.” 

The blog post does not, however, note that Google has yet to deliver RCS support to its own Google Voice app, or provide the coding framework required by third-party private messaging apps such as Signal to add RCS support. That leaves those third-party encrypted messaging apps as your only options for secure phone-based messaging between iPhone and Android users.

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