The GSM Association (GSMA) is developing a feature that will enable messages sent between Android and iOS to support an end-to-end encryption (E2EE) system. With this encryption, messages sent by users cannot be intercepted and then read by third parties.
It will be done using the RCS Universal Profile standard which already supports E2EE but only on Android devices since last year. The iPhone only started supporting RCS this week after the device was updated to iOS 18. One of the reasons given by Apple for not supporting RCS before is because they use their own encryption system through iMessage.
This will be the first time that messaging encryption is standardized between different computing platforms. To users, it will provide the benefit of stronger protection against fraud and other security threats.