Today, the folks at APKMirror got ahold of an internal “dogfood” build of Google Messages version 6.2. Here, “dogfood” is used in the sense of the phrase “eat your own dog food,” meaning actually use the product you’re building. Of course, our APK Insight team immediately dug in to see what all is coming with the next version of Google Messages. While we’re still actively looking through the many changes found within, one in particular stood out — end-to-end encryption for RCS messages.
About APK Insight: In this “APK Insight” post, we’ve decompiled the latest version of an application that Google uploaded to the Play Store. When we decompile these files (called APKs, in the case of Android apps), we’re able to see various lines of code within that hint at possible future features. Keep in mind that Google may or may not ever ship these features, and our interpretation of what they are may be imperfect. We’ll try to enable those that are closer to being finished, however, to show you how they’ll look in case that they do ship. With that in mind, read on.
RCS end-to-end encryption
For years now, folks have been excited about RCS messaging as being the true successor to SMS and MMS messages and an open competitor to Apple’s iMessage. However, one thing that iMessage has long offered that RCS could not is the ability to know your messages are secure thanks to end-to-end encryption. For an over simplified explanation of end-to-end encryption, your message is encrypted on your device in such a way that it can only be decrypted and read on the recipient’s device, meaning no one should be able to snoop on your conversation.
In this dogfood build of Google Messages 6.2, we’ve found that work is well under way to allow you to send end-to-end encrypted messages via RCS. In fact, there are a total of twelve new strings in the app that make reference to encryption (sometimes shortened to “e2ee”).
