Rich communication services, or RCS, is the successor to SMS messaging. It does what most other texting services do, but without the end-to-end encryption that apps like signal and iMessage have.

Google first unveiled RCS chat as Android’s primary texting platform in 2018. In November, Google announced it was rolling out it to users in the US.

An internal build of Google messages v. 6.2 has several lines of code that offer clues to possible future features for the app. There is n’t enough information available to determine whether the sender and recipient of texts would need to be using the app for the end-to-end encryption to be in effect.