Due to adoption of the Rich Communication Services protocol by Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, the three largest mobile providers in the United States, end-to-end encrypted RCS communication between smartphones running the Android operating system will soon become mainstream. This replaces the legacy SMS protocol that is currently the standard for text messaging.

However, Apple Inc., the developer of iOS, has previously refused to implement the RCS protocol to replace SMS fallback messaging. This presents a major cybersecurity risk when communicating between smartphones running Android and iOS since the older SMS protocol is unencrypted and demonstrated to be insecure.

This petition is to request Apple Inc. to implement the RCS protocol so that inter-platform communications may be secure. If RCS is not adopted by Apple Inc., then every chat between Android and iOS devices will be insecure and will be easily accessed by hackers.