iOS 26 is Live: What You Should Know

What's Happening with Apple's iOS 26?

Since many of you are closely following the iOS 26 rollout and its potential impact on your texting programs, we wanted to share a quick update and make sure you’ve seen our memo.

Apple officially launched iOS 26 on September 15th. Based on our observations thus far, we still don’t expect there to be a major impact to political texting performance from this launch.

We’ll continue testing and monitoring the impact on political texting, and will make sure to update our memo if anything changes!

More Detailed Takeaways

• Political traffic isn’t being filtered as spam. From what we can tell, political messages are not being sent to spam.

• Mobile carriers and other industry partners have clearly articulated that political traffic is supported and will not be blocked proactively.

• The “Unknown Sender Inbox” is not on by default. Even when users enable the Unknown Sender Inbox, we’re still seeing notifications for some political messages — especially when “Personal” notifications are turned on.

• Apple is unlikely to make the Unknown Sender Inbox the default setting soon, given the risk of filtering transactional texts from banks, airlines, and delivery services.

Don't Forget These Best Practices

• Use your own data and Switchboard’s audience filters (and, if you choose, the Switchboard Collective) to target people who want to hear from you.

• Encourage replies (not just clicks) to boost your credibility with carriers and all Apple/Android devices.

• Upload contact cards (.vcf files) so recipients can easily save your number.

• Get your account setup with a shortlink domain early to avoid link-based filtering.

• Vary copy across programs sending for the same candidate or organization at the same time.

We’ll keep monitoring and will update you if anything changes.