Americans reportedly send six billion text messages per day, with 81% of U.S. users relying on the built-in messages app on their phones instead of alternatives like Telegram and WhatsApp. If you’re still sending SMS messages, though, you could be leaving yourself open to unwanted threats and security risks. Here’s how and why you should enable RCS messaging on your phone right now.

A brief history of RCS

RCS, short for Rich Communication Services, is the new gold standard text messaging platform that has officially replaced SMS and MMS. It was created all the way back in 2008 by the Global System for Mobile Communications Association, a unified organization consisting of popular cell service providers, including AT&T and T-Mobile, among many others.

RCS didn’t receive broad appeal, however, until Google purchased a company called Jibe Mobile in 2015, which specialized in RCS technology. Google went on to integrate RCS directly into the Google Messages app on Android by 2020, making it the premiere messaging service on Samsung Galaxy phones, Google Pixel devices, and more.

After years of pressure from Google, Apple finally adopted RCS into iPhone in 2023, replacing SMS as the fallback option while maintaining iMessage as its proprietary messaging service.

RCS is meant to unify the text messaging experience across iPhone and Android.

It’s important to note that SMS and MMS are still supported on most devices today, but they’re not nearly as secure, capable, or reliable.

Benefits of RCS

RCS is meant to unify the text messaging experience across iPhone and Android. While iPhone users who text other iPhones will still default to iMessage, Android users who text other Android devices or iPhones will send messages through RCS. These new RCS-style messages come with several benefits that will be very familiar to iMessage users on iPhone while making texts better for Android users overall.

Encryption: For starters, RCS messages between Android phones are end-to-end encrypted, keeping your conversations safe and private from anyone who might want to take a peek, including your carrier or the government. Apple’s version of RCS is currently unencrypted, but a future software update is expected to enable end-to-end encryption later this year.Read receipts: It’s nice to know when someone actually saw the text you sent, right? RCS supports read receipts that indicate when a text message has been delivered and when it was read, along with a nifty date stamp.Group messaging: Group message threads have long been a point of contention for iPhone and Android users. With RCS, users can now name the group, see who’s typing with typing indicators, and even leave emoji reactions for all to see.Media files: Finally, RCS supports high resolution images and videos, making it easier to share photos and other content in their original quality instead of relying on the grainy, compressed MMS images of the past.

An RCS warning

While RCS is safer, more private, and simply better than SMS, the service’s ability to send hi-res imagery makes it easier for scammers to send spam messages to a broader group of people. In fact, the emergence of RCS is partly responsible for the growing degree of spam texts in the U.S.

That shouldn’t deter you from switching to it, though. The benefits of RCS far outweigh its deterrents. It’s also the future of text messaging standards, meaning it will be supported and receive security updates for the long haul, far beyond SMS and MMS.

If you receive too many spam text messages while using RCS, check out our anti-spam text guide. This will banish scammers from your messages app for good.

How to enable RCS on iPhone and Android

It’s fairly easy to enable RCS on both iPhones and Android devices. Before you go looking for these settings, though, note that RCS activation is contingent on your carrier allowing RCS onto its network. Some carriers have been slower than others to enable the service, so if it’s not available on your device yet, it will be in the future. Most carriers are on board, though, so you probably won’t have any trouble.

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Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

To enable RCS on iPhone, open the Settings app. Scroll to the bottom and tap “Apps.” Then scroll to the middle of the page and tap into “Messages.” Near the lower half of the screen in the “Text Messaging” section, you’ll find “RCS Messaging.” Tap on that, toggle RCS Messaging on, and you’re done!

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw

To enable RCS on Android, you’ll first need the official Google Messages app. At the time this article was published, Google Messages is the only messaging app on Android that fully supports RCS’ full list of features, including end-to-end encryption. Inside Google Messages, tap on your profile picture in the top right corner. Then tap on “Messages settings.” “RCS chats” is right at the top. Dive into that menu, toggle RCS chats on, and you’re ready to go. On this page, you can also customize your RCS experience, by either enabling or disabling some of the features mentioned above.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw

Enable RCS now

Text messaging technology has come a long way since the days of flip phones, T9 keypads, and other ancient artifacts of the early 2000s. If you’re not using RCS already, you’re basically inviting your carrier to read your texts, your phone is more vulnerable to cellular network attacks, and your phone number could even be stolen and swapped into another device by a criminal. You can prevent all of this and enjoy a better texting experience by enabling RCS today. There’s really no reason not to.

​Tech, Rcs, Text, Phones 

The pivotal question of what will follow the crack-up of the liberal international order dominated the highest levels of European politics at the recent 2026 Munich Security Conference.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave his own forceful answer, following Vice President JD Vance’s provocative speech last year. Rubio delivered an equally spirited address that issued an ultimatum: Rationalizing collapse and weakness is no longer the policy of the United States — and it should no longer be Europe’s policy either. America has no “interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline,” he said.

Alliances should be made, renewed, or even disbanded depending on whether they help secure America’s interests in the present.

Instead, Rubio urged a reformation of the “global institutions of the old order” to defend and strengthen the key pillars of Western civilization.

The problem in Rubio’s mind was that the 20th-century web of international alliances, designed to counter the Soviets in the wake of two devastating world wars, took on a life of its own. Its keepers began putting the preservation of their supranational relations “above the vital interests of our people and our nations.”

Institutions such as the United Nations have utterly failed to protect national interests, and they simply have no answers to the most pressing problems in international affairs today. Instead, they actively encourage deindustrialization, mass migration, and shortsighted climate policies, causing a loss of confidence in the very sources that have supplied the West’s vitality for centuries.

To counter this, Rubio proposed that the U.S. partner with Europe to lead a “reinvigorated alliance … that boldly races into the future.” It will focus on “advancing our mutual interests and new frontiers, unshackling our ingenuity, our creativity, and the dynamic spirit to build a new Western century.” If the West wants to safeguard and promote its historic ways of life, then an international realignment is inescapably necessary.

The themes Rubio articulated were also the subject of this year’s “Budapest Global Dialogue,” an annual conference put on by the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation. This year’s gathering focused on what HIIA President Gladden Pappin presented as the choices currently before the world: endless conflict that’s likely to spin out of control or the emergence of a foundation for long-term security, peace, and prosperity.

Keynote speakers and panelists agreed that continuing to prop up a decaying international order was not a viable option. Though necessary for its time, it is clearly inadequate in a world that looks far different from the one that featured creeping death in the form of the USSR. As Rubio recently told a gaggle of reporters before his address in Munich, “The old world is gone.” He noted that nations must re-examine their roles in our “new era in geopolitics.”

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Photo by Alessandro Rampazzo/AFP via Getty Images

The urgency of this project has been amplified by the European Union’s various machinations against popular government. Its censorship machine is attempting to export the EU’s liberty-denying laws to America and other Western nations. Unsurprisingly, the problem of censorship, which has been a chief focus of Vice President Vance, took up much of the conversation of the opening-night panel.

Headlined by Sarah B. Rogers, the U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, and Balázs Orbán, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political director, panelists discussed the countless issues stemming from the EU’s Digital Services Act. It uses “trusted flaggers” like HateAid — an organization funded by the German government — to censor online speech, including that of Americans.

Pappin and other participants also noted the myriad problems stemming from unchecked globalization. Nations happily traded away the most basic elements of sovereignty for a mess of pottage in the form of lower prices on select goods. This was justified using free-market language, in which attaining the highest GDP possible seemingly became the summum bonum of political life. Former Trump administration official Andrew Peek termed this problem “economics without politics.”

In the United States in particular, key supply chains were mostly shipped out of the country, the folly of which was fully exposed during the COVID debacle. The U.S. essentially followed a systematic deindustrialization plan as we helped build up other countries, especially China.

China’s rise didn’t happen solely due to its sheer geographic size or population. It occurred because the Clinton administration and Western leaders decided the best way to fend it off was by inviting the Chinese into the heart of the world’s economic system. This was a catastrophic choice that helped hasten the collapse of the old order.

Now, China is by far the world leader in many positive economic indicators. The country is also looking to become the world’s first electrostate, adding another gigawatt of capacity to its grid every year.

Meanwhile, the United States is facing mounting problems with our electric grid, which will be further exacerbated by the construction of data centers and older plants going offline. No nuclear power plants were built in the U.S. between 1996 and 2016. Additionally, as noted in a Department of Energy report last year, utopian green energy mandates have helped bring the U.S. closer to the brink of a full-blown energy crisis.

RELATED: America won’t beat China without Alaska

Photo by Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images

Though the conference featured discussions on other pivotal topics — especially the promise and peril of artificial general intelligence — there wasn’t a dedicated panel on immigration. But that didn’t stop speakers from addressing the topic. Alexandre del Valle, a professor at France’s IPAG, called mass Islamic immigration to Europe a long-term bomb. And in a keynote address that served as a campaign speech of sorts, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó celebrated the fact that illegal migration to Hungary is nonexistent.

Szijjártó also devoted time to underscoring the stakes of the upcoming Hungarian parliamentary elections. The April 12 contest will feature a rather personal battle between current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Péter Magyar, who resigned from Fidesz in 2024 and then joined TISZA, the Respect and Freedom Party. The campaign billboards and posters I saw plastered around Budapest, which were nearly all pro-Orbán, showed Magyar gladly acquiescing to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s insistence to send Hungarian armaments to Ukraine.

Fidesz is asking voters if they want to keep Orbán’s government in power or elect those who would sacrifice the country’s blood and treasure in war. President Trump clearly wants the former. During Rubio’s trip to Budapest after his Munich speech, he said that the American president is “deeply committed” to Orbán’s victory in April.

As the Trump administration sees it, the path forward is clear: maintaining alliances when political goals and traditions are shared, as is the case between Hungary and the United States. And as Rubio was careful to point out in Munich, when alliances become strained, renewal through strategic thinking that connects means and ends is essential. One such example is Elbridge Colby’s recent discussion of the creation of NATO 3.0, in which U.S. allies bear more of the financial burden.

What won’t work, however, is elevating prudential considerations to the level of principle, as world leaders and bureaucrats have done far too often in recent decades. They have frozen in amber the specific circumstances of the second half of the 20th century, thinking that those paradigms must forever dictate how nations should act. But as Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Observer Research Foundation America, pointed out, the ballroom in which the 2026 Budapest Global Dialogue was held was built in 1896. Five international orders have come and gone in that time.

Contrary to the Anne Applebaums of our foreign policy elite class, who have helped drive the West into a ditch, the Nazis aren’t marching just over the horizon, and Vladimir Putin isn’t the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Alliances should be made, renewed, or even disbanded depending on whether they help secure America’s interests in the present. As Daniel J. Mahoney is fond of saying, it isn’t always Munich 1938. Serious leaders acknowledge current realities and marry their rhetoric to actions that will lead to peace, prosperity, and the good of the West — and the good of America above all.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

​Marco rubio, Munich security conference, New world order, Old order, Ussr, China, Usa, Foreign policy, Eu, Nato, Russia, Opinion & analysis, Donald trump 

The United States and its allies are facing a defining moment in history — one Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck believes most people don’t yet fully recognize.

However, one man who does recognize this moment is Marco Rubio, who laid out Glenn’s feelings precisely in a recent speech at the Munich Security Conference.

“What Rubio was talking about this weekend was this system has failed, and Donald Trump is going a completely different direction, and we will lead the way … but you have to restore common sense,” Glenn explains.

“You cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again. This system doesn’t work, and we all know it. Just we’re the first ones to admit it,” he adds.

And in order to make a change going forward, Glenn believes we need to look at the real history of Western civilization instead of the “woke” version.

“I like history. I know what history means. And when it comes to Western civilization, how could you make the case that it’s worth letting go? You could only make a case if you’ve been carefully taught that Western civilization means nothing except bad things,” he says. “And you’re misinformed on that.”

This is why Glenn says that “we’re already in World War III.”

“We’re fighting World War III. You just don’t know it yet. Islam is on the move. And what is their target? Western civilization. … And they occupy those countries, which they’ve been trying to do for a thousand-plus years. They occupy those countries. They now have nuclear weapons. And if they occupy those countries, you no longer have what built us,” Glenn explains.

“May I suggest that we understand that times have changed, and we want our country to survive, and we want the Western civilization to survive. … We see the world is changing and has changed, and we adapt so we don’t lose who we are. We do it in a different way. We do it in a better way,” he continues.

And that better way, Glenn says, is to “hold our values and what made us a country in the first place.”

“Let’s remember those things. Let’s restore those things, and then let’s adapt those to today’s issues and problems. I think that’s what Rubio was saying. And he was challenging Europe, and at the same time, he was reminding America: This is what Donald Trump is challenging America to do as well,” he explains.

“We’re going to do it. Join us,” he adds.

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