Privacy is the most used marketing term by Apple — most of the people are buying Apple because of this privacy feature. Some people buy it for other reasons like better camera, performance, ecosystem, and many more, but some buy these phones specifically for their privacy.
But last month, independent news outlet 404 Media stated that the FBI has been able to recover deleted messages from Signal messaging app in Apple phones using some forensic tools. Signal is a highly focused encrypted messaging application that is recommended by cybersecurity experts and journalists worldwide, and is widely used by whistleblowers and activists who rely on it to keep their communications private — you can set a timer between the people you are messaging, and after the certain time limit the message will be deleted automatically and that cannot be extracted, as Signal claims.
But the report stated that 404 Media and the FBI have been able to retrieve the message through OS notification databases in the iPhones, even after it was deleted from Signal. It happened because if you send a message to someone, first it will show on the notification panel and then it will go to the phone database, so they were able to retrieve the message from notification databases from the OS.
Some people might say “just turn off notification previews” — but most users are completely unaware this setting exists or that it has any impact on their message security. But now Apple has come with a fix for this issue, as stated on their support page as “Notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device.” Apple released the fix on April 22, 2026, in iOS 26.4.2 and iOS 18.7.8 for older devices.
And we are not clear about the update whether it was a fix for the previous issue or something related to another feature, but we assume for the time being the update is for the notification error fix. It is also worth noting that this bug sits in iOS’s notification handling layer, which is Apple’s responsibility — not Signal’s.
