While text messages are an easy way to communicate with people, one of the downsides is unsolicited or unwanted messages—particularly ones that are trying to scam you. But today at WWDC 2025, Apple introduced a new way to handle them in the Messages app.
With iOS 26 (the new naming scheme for Apple’s software), the Messages app will now include on-device spam detection, allowing you to screen spam text messages as they come through. The Messages app will automatically flag texts from unfamiliar numbers in a separate folder under Unknown Senders. From there, you can mark a phone number as known, get more info, or delete it; messages from these Unknown Senders will be silenced until a user accepts them.
The Messages app will let you easily filter out those spam messages so then they’re not in your main conversation view and you can focus on your important threads. Apple says the new on-device spam detection feature in the Messages app will be launching with iOS 26, which is coming later this year for compatible iPhones.
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