Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me... by Zak on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @06:19PM (#47870046)

That framing Makes it sound like the app developer has to do something active to keep message cleartext out of notifications. That's not how it is on Android.

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.

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Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me... by avianlyric on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @07:40PM (#47870664)

You can implement either approach on iOS as well.

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.

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Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me... by asteroidburger on Thursday April 23, 2026 @12:53AM (#47872365)

Plus, decrypting using a key stored locally cuts out a network roundtrip, which has battery and data usage impacts.

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Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me... by saagarjha on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @06:36PM (#47870204)

This has performance/reliability tradeoffs.

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