US campaigners fear Apple’s “aggressive” messaging filters in iOS 26

A small change in iOS 26 could have a massive impact on campaigns in the United States, a campaign committee fears. With an “aggressive message filtering” Apple ensures that political text messages “will be treated as a spam in the future”, warns the official campaign committee of the Republican Party for the US Senate NRSC (National Republican Senatorial Committee).

This will have a massive impact on fundraising, the mobilization of voters and digital campaigns, it is said In a memorandum published by Punchbowl News.

Election campaign committee expects millions of million

The function not only fades out spam senders, but will “push into insignificance” every political message. In contrast to the network operators, Apple ignores the fact that the news from verified senders comes, the NRSC complains. The election campaign committee estimates that this will break away direct donations of $ 25 million. The organization believes that the Republican Party could even be lost $ 500 million in sales. After all, 70 percent of smaller donations would be collected by text message and iPhones have around 60 percent of smartphones in the United States.

The committee notices only a few weeks before iOS 26 is released for the general public. There is only a small time window to act, because Apple has not yet dealt with it, according to the NRSC.

iOS 26 Integrated extended filter in news app

With iOS 26, Apple is expanding the filtering of the pre-installed news app, which now supports messaging by impersage, SMS and RCS and is extremely popular in the USA. At the request of the user, news generally landed in their own view and are no longer signaled by sound and notification. Only the app itself shows with a small symbol in the main view. This function is already available in iOS 18, but so far it has been quite hidden and should rarely be activated – in the future the app promises prominently.

On top of that, Apple has integrated its own local spam filter into the news app, which has already worked reliably in the beta. iOS 26 is now available as a public beta for the test, for the general public the update is expected to appear in mid -September.