Google’s Group Chats On The Messaging App Makes Way For RCS-Based End-End Encryption

Google is paving the way to a more secure messaging connection by adding RCS E2E to its group chats across the texting platform.

Moreover, this is seen as a huge advancement in terms of the regular MMS group texts that arise unencrypted and hence pose a threat to users.

At the same time, the introduction of this new advancement will pave the way for RCS standards to come up to speed with the usual Signal protocol that apps like WhatsApp and Signal use.

Reports seen on Reddit outlined how Google is ready for a global launch so that the offering can be more widespread and accessible to all users. As recently seen by several people on Google Messages subreddit, Google Messages is working hard to introduce this endeavor across various RCS Groups.

Examples have proven that the feature is failing as viewers can’t open up texts. Moreover, a generic statement pops up claiming how E2E is yet to go live for everyone in the group and how texts can’t be seen as they’re encrypted.

So right now, things are being deemed more complicated than ever for group chats as they don’t only comprise Google Messages but also a few entailing Samsung texts. The latter is also seen showing support for RCS.

When you dig down deep further, Redditors realized that the Messages application of Google had the feature already enabled.

It was confirmed through the evaluation of Phenotype Flags which outline how E2E encryption gets enabled for some people out there. For now, it’s not quite clear which variant of Messages this happens to be at the moment. So experts do feel the platform needs to revert back to the original as unencrypted messaging as this would help stop anyone from being excluded from a chat.

The fact that subreddit and Messages comprise enthusiasts, we can predict that a lot of such people are utilizing beta versions of the chatting platforms and that in turn causes such behavior to arise in the first place.

At the start, Google made huge promises to bring ahead E2E via group chats that are encrypted to Google Messages when the Google 2022 I/O. Here, all of the one-on-one texts get encrypted. So you do end up seeing which chats are getting the feature and which are not. This is seen by the lock that pops up near the screen displaying delivered messages at a recent time.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World