What Apple and Google’s 2025 updates mean for email and SMS in 2026 | MarTech

Email and SMS didn’t undergo a massive shift in 2025, but they did change in ways that materially impacted performance and strategy.

Three updates in particular have reshaped the way messages are delivered, served, and used across email and SMS campaigns:

Based on what we’re seeing on the back end of the programs coming into our agency’s pipeline in late 2025 and early 2026, there is significant room for improvement for brands looking to refine their email marketing in the coming months.

Apple’s iOS 18.2 rollout: What it does and how marketers should adapt

iOS 18.2 was released in late 2024, but the updates and their impact became more apparent as 2025 progressed.

First the updates:

• Inbox visibility changed: New tabs were introduced, reducing exposure to the primary inbox.

• AI-generated examples expanded: Apple’s AI summaries replaced preheaders in some views, limiting marketers’ control over first impressions.
• Engagement signals became harder to read: Batch emails, untraceable “See More” clicks, and existing Mail Privacy Protection further clouded the already limited open and click data.
• Live text became more important: AI summaries are delivered more effectively from HTML and live text than from image-heavy emails.

Here are my recommendations to soften the impact:

• Optimize for engagement, not openings: Double your personalization, segmentation, and journey-based shipping.
• Make subject lines work harder: Highlight offers, urgency and promotion duration to stand out in tabs and grouped views.
• Use transactional emails: Drive engagement and send them from the same environment as marketing emails.
• To prioritize live text over images: Improve the quality and accessibility of AI summaries.
• Inbox grouping plan: Design content calendars for message follow-up and visual differentiation.

Dig deeper: Apple and Gmail are making it harder for email campaigns to get into the inbox

Gmail’s Manage Subscriptions Feature (and Why Segmentation Is More Important Than Ever)

Gmail’s Manage Subscriptions feature gives users a centralized view of active subscriptions and makes it easier to unsubscribe, especially from high-volume senders.

The design of the feature is worth mentioning. Subscriptions are sorted first by email volume and then alphabetically. This reinforces an existing reality: Send rate is one of the biggest drivers of unsubscribe behavior, especially when it exceeds engagement.

Rather than introducing a new problem, Gmail made an existing dynamic more visible to subscribers.

Here are the adjustments we’ve made to customer accounts to minimize the impact of the update:

• Match send frequency to engagement levels: Reduce the frequency for low-involvement and low-risk segments. Reserve a higher cadence for highly engaged subscribers. This minimizes exposure in the Manage Subscriptions list for users most likely to churn.
• Double your intelligent segmentation: Create separate segments for highly engaged, low engaged, and inactive users. Fully customize cadence, content, or pause transmissions for unconnected segments.
• Treat unsubscribes as a signal and not as a failure: Subscribers who use this feature are often the same users who would have unsubscribed anyway.
  • Monitor the overall status of the list as disengaged users leave.
  • Expand the display of metrics to evaluate deliverability over time as lower quality subscribers churn.

Dig deeper: More AI for the Gmail inbox doesn’t mean the end of email marketing

How to keep your brand out of Apple’s “unknown sender” text message segment

SMS got its turn in the spotlight with Apple’s iOS 26 update, which improved the “Unknown Sender” filter and can redirect brand messages from the primary message view, similar to email promotion tabs.

The overall impact has been limited so far. Most users are unaware of the functionality and Apple has not yet asked users to opt in as part of updates. However, if adoption increases in future updates, the impact could be significant.

For the small percentage of users currently using this feature, broad SMS campaigns are the most vulnerable. Because most consumers do not store brand numbers as contacts, many non-personalized messages are filtered.

Disruption of engagement is likely. Brands without strong subscriber relationships can expect a decline in SMS engagement and prepare accordingly as adoption increases.

Here’s how we helped customers adapt:

• Shift from volume to value: Reduce the frequency and prioritize personalized, event-driven text messages over broad promotional messages.
• Prompt “known sender” actions: Encourage users to add the brand as a contact or mark messages as known, especially after purchase, during delivery updates, or in welcome flows.
• Use helpful messages to build trust: Use order confirmations, shipping updates, back-in-stock alerts, and price drop notifications to drive relevance.
• Keep SMS separate from email: Make sure messages are concise, authentic and timely. Excessive messaging increases opt-outs and filtering risk.
• Aggressively monitor and repeat: Track KPIs over time and refine content, cadence and triggers as behavioral trends become apparent.

When should you address all these changes? As quickly as possible. More updates are coming this year, and brands that respond quickly will stay ahead of the competition.

Dig deeper: why email and SMS syncing is critical to marketing success