If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.
>If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.
This incorrect on two counts:
1. As per what you wrote immediately before the quoted text, the issue was that the OS keeps track of notifications locally. Google/Apple's notification servers have nothing to do with this
2. It's entirely possible to still have end-to-end messaging even if you're forced to send notifications through Google/Apple's servers, by encrypting data in the notification, or not including message data at all. Indeed that's what signal does. Apple or Google's never sees your message in cleartext.
Apple support applications sending encrypted notifications, where the OS launches the app the decrypt the notification body locally and pass it back to the OS for display.
APNS just taps on the device's metaphorical shoulder and hands them a courtesy phone "call for you sir"
Technically, so can the OS's text drawing primitive while drawing Signal's UI.
A Firebase Cloud Messaging push notification contains what the app developer's server puts in it. That could include the message body or it could just be an instruction to the app to poll the server for new messages. It has nothing to do with the notification that's displayd on an Android device. Those are entirely local.
An app that cares about privacy wouldn't send anything more than a poll instruction over FCM.
But if you have strong end-to-end encryption for messages, then you don’t have to care about the transport anymore, you assume they’re all compromised. At that point you might as well use the push notification system as your transport, given both OSs allow applications to intercept the push notification locally and decrypt it before it’s displayed to the user.
I'm pretty sure that's the default in GrapheneOS. Or at least that's how mine behaves.
With Matrix apps, certain metadata is pushed from the chat server, to a push server, through Google and then to my device. But the message is not part of that data - it's E2EE. What happens is the app wakes up from the metadata notification, and then fetches the message and displays it in the notification field.
Your last point is correct, at least until/unless this is remedied in Android, too.
For many apps, they choose to do it this way. For most e2ee apps, they do not. The notification displayed on screen does not need to be the notification pushed through APNS.
From the linked article:
> The independent news outlet reported that the FBI had been able to extract deleted Signal messages from someone’s iPhone using forensic tools, due to the fact that the content of the messages had been displayed in a notification and then stored inside a phone’s database — even after the messages were deleted inside Signal.
https://www.404media.co/fbi-extracts-suspects-deleted-signal...
The main problem, which is notifications text is stored on a DB in the phone outside of signal, is not addressed. To avoid that you have to change your settings.
In this case, the defendant had deleted the signal app completely, and that likely internally marks those app's notifications for deletion from the DB, so the bug fixed here is that they were not removing notifications from the local database when the app that generated them was removed, now they do.
Impact: Notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device
Description: A logging issue was addressed with improved data redaction.
CVE-2026-28950
Biome — /private/var/mobile/Library/Biome/streams/.../Notification/segments/ — the raw title/body logs
2. BulletinBoard + UserNotificationsCore — /var/mobile/Library/{BulletinBoard,UserNotificationsCore}/.{json,plist} — delivered + dismissed state
3. CoreDuet — /var/mobile/Library/CoreDuet/coreduetdClassD.db — SQLite that re-ingests Biome events
in this case as per reporting, defendant removed the app. unclear if they first dismissed them.
Or maybe it’s impossible for iOS to store the preview content if it never showed in the first place, but not sure if it’s even documented.
Much of the metadata is plaintext, in both Apple and Google's Push Notification architecture.
At no point does the push message payload contain message text or metadata, encrypted or not.
Some people talking about it (different but in the same scope of issue): https://blog.davidlibeau.fr/push-notifications-are-a-privacy...
That would mean Apple stored the cleartext on-device after decryption.
despite "end-to-end" encryption (for WhatsApp) they are sending copy of some messages based on keywords to authorities, PRISM-like.
Officially to protect kids, but who knows what is in this keywords list.
I disabled notifications and instead Signal reminded me to re-enable them…
Some years ago I stopped depending on Apple's purchased downloaded movies for long flights, after an instance of having the files downloaded to the device beforehand, but Apple deciding I didn't have the DRM keys to play said files during a long transoceanic flight. I then moved to storing DRM-free movies in VLC, but iOS prioritized keeping system storage and other data cruft around, and wiped VLC's stored files. Talk about paying for an expensive device and media you don't really own.
I'd imagine the metadata picture that could be synthesized from that data could be extensive in some cases. This stuff is hard and I'm sure there are good reasons for caching things, especially on a device positioned to primarily act as a readily available front end for online stores, but I have a hard time believing that Apple's executing it well.
For those on iOS 18, beware that the update to iOS 18.7.8 will toggle Automatic Updates back on. Make sure to switch it back off so you don't wake up to a nasty surprise when iOS 26 is non-consensually forced onto your iPhone.
The new iOS 18 update will _also_ toggle Automatic Updates back on. I had it happen just now on my 13 Mini against my will. I had to go back into settings and very carefully navigate to disable automatic updates.
The way major upgrades are presented in the Settings UI makes it clear that users installing these security updates while not upgrading to a newer major version do so very intentionally. So Apple is now supporting these users deliberately.
Please substantiate that claim. Why would Apple need mystical third party devices to transfer data? They've designed both the user devices and the software, and they're both capable of exchanging data, and I'm sure Apple can do even more once they put the devices in diagnostic mode. What am I missing? What is Cellebrite providing here?
I’m sure Apple could do everything that box does and more. But why bother designing, building and manufacturing your own specialist device when someone else already sells a perfectly good tool that does the job.
Don’t forget this is for use in a retail store by people who will have been given 5mins training on how to use the device. You want something that just requires a person to plug two phones in and hit a big “go” button. And it needs to work 99% of the time with zero messing around.
Not saying they should use it to reverse engineer hacking tools.
Just saying they have access to Mythos now.
Wow, such a risky bet, I'm not sure it'll pay off.
Let screens always show garbled pixel vomit, decoded on device only by your private AR glasses
It’s not a perfect system so right now you still have to trust someone at some point in the chain.
Apple should have fixed this long ago (not that you can trust a closed system), but Signal should also have strong guardrails & warnings around allowing message content in push notifications.
It has to do with the fact that any notification displayed on your device goes via a separate system service which was caching them.
It is amusing to see how often people confuse device notifications with Apple notification service.
Why can't we have notification history just like on Android then. It's very useful when you dismiss a notification you didn't want to, or you look for some old stuff.
UPDATING IOS WILL ENABLE AUTOMATIC UPDATES TO IOS 26.
(Bad!) This is a new shady tactic they're using trying to get iOS 18 users to install iOS 26.