iOS 26 Announcement

Last updated: September 10, 2025

Updated based on September 9th iOS 26 Release Candidate

Apple announced iOS 26 Messaging app changes in early June (shown here, search for “Screen New Senders”) and is launching iOS 26 to the public on September 15th.

The TL;DR

Based on everything we’ve seen so far, including the "release candidate" version of iOS 26 launching on 9/15, we don’t expect this change to be heavily disruptive to political messaging programs, whether for fundraising, supporter engagement, voter outreach, or polling. Political traffic is not generally considered spam by mobile carriers or other industry players (i.e. Apple). The option to have additional inboxes for unrecognized messages is just that: an option that already exists in earlier iOS versions, and (in all beta versions and the release candidate) will not be the default in iOS 26.

Key Observations

  • In the current version of iOS 26, the Unknown Sender Inbox is not on by default and political messages are not being sent to spam. The Unknown Sender Inbox is turned on for devices that had that setting enabled in previous versions. Things can always change in subsequent updates, but we do not expect the default behavior to change. There are no pop-ups or other notifications at this point to nudge users to potentially enable this setting--only a "Manage Filtering" in an unnamed menu on the top right of the messages screen.

  • Based on our testing, in some circumstances, even when a user does have unknown sender filters enabled, they are still getting notifications for some political messages from unknown senders. In particular, if they've enabled notifications for "Personal" messages, some political traffic is currently being included.

  • Mobile carriers and other industry partners have clearly articulated that political traffic is supported and will not be blocked proactively. Especially in the current political climate, we are confident that these companies do not want to be seen as interfering in political activity.

  • We believe that Apple is unlikely to make the Unknown Sender Inbox the default setting anytime soon, as doing so could also affect important transactional texts from banks, airlines, or delivery services—messages Apple knows it cannot perfectly classify.

  • Unlike the mobile carriers, Apple (and Google) have device-level click data, and Apple has indicated their message sorting will be “personalized.” Even if the default settings change or some people do enable the Unknown Sender Inbox, engaged donors and supporters are still likely to see your messages.

Recommended Best Practices

These practices can help you run more successful programs in any context, but they are just recommendations. If we learn that these or other practices are necessary to succeed based on changes to iOS 26 or future versions, we’ll message that separately.

  • The best recipe for good delivery and good ROI in any context is to run the healthiest programs you can, utilizing your own data and our many audience builder filters (and, if you choose, the Switchboard Collective) to maximize the percentage of your traffic that is sent to people who want to hear from your candidate or organization.

  • Apple (and Google, and the carriers) are also much less likely to filter messages from phone numbers having constructive back and forth conversations, so making asks that lead to replies rather than just clicks may be worth testing as well. For example, you could use Switchboard’s automated keyword response features to ask your supporters questions and send automatic follow-up messages with asks based on their replies. Even doing occasional sends of this form may help keep you in the inbox over time.

  • You can send Contact Cards to your recipients by uploading .vcf files in Switchboard the same way you would upload an image or video. Even though an account will typically use several 10DLC numbers to send, each individual recipient will typically be sent messages from a stable phone number over time (and in the 10DLC registered era it’s been much rarer to need to switch the sending number).

  • While link-based filtering is rare, we’ve heard Apple may be more likely to filter new domains that are less than a week old. If you’re onboarding a new client, reach out early so we can provision a shortlink domain in advance. In some cases, we can also use subdomains of trusted domains to help address this issue.

  • To avoid situations where a single recipient gets similar or identical messages from many different programs at once, we’d encourage you to use different copy for third parties sending on behalf of the same candidate or organization at around the same time.

Our Commitment

As always, we’ll continue to keep a close eye on developments here and will provide updates as we learn more. iOS updates roll out gradually, and most message recipients will not upgrade to iOS 26 immediately. That gives us plenty of time to monitor impact and adjust should something change in the coming months.