Google Messages End-to-End Encryption in testing phase for Group Chats

Google has been fighting the good battle for quite some time now, improving the RCS experience on Google Messages by adding features that bring it more up to par with its biggest messaging app competitor in the U.S. — iMessage. It also added end-to-end encryption to protect the privacy of its users’ communication. Still, unfortunately, it only worked in one-on-one conversations, and group chats were left unprotected.

However, it appears that Google is in the initial testing phase to add end-to-end encryption to group chats as well. This discovery was made by a group of redditors on the r/GoogleMessages subreddit when a message showed up in a group chat with more than twenty users using both Google Messages and Samsung Messages combined. The message stated that it was encrypted using Google Messages, which prompted users on that subreddit to launch their own investigation into the settings for each of the users involved in the group chat.

Although this finding is purely speculative and not 100% confirmed, it is important to note that Google did confirm to 9to5Google earlier this year that group chat encryption to RCS messages would be added in Beta around this time, so it is completely possible this is what is happening in this case. I am just glad to see that Google is taking privacy and security seriously and taking this step. Unfortunately, messages received from iPhone users will continue to come in as SMS messages and, therefore, will not be encrypted at all since SMS does not support it. It’s just unfortunate that we are still having to worry about a 20-year-old technology in 2022.