After launching notification summaries as one of the flagship features of Apple Intelligence, Apple disabled the feature for apps in the News and Entertainment categories in the iOS 18.3 update, following backlash from publications like the BBC about Apple Intelligence portraying its news headlines inaccurately.
Having been disabled entirely for these apps since mid-January, Apple announced this week the feature will return as part of iOS 26. Users running the developer have noticed that these notifications get a different visual treatment compared to normal notification summaries generated from other categories of apps.
You can see an example of the updated styling in the header image above, taken from iOS 26 beta 4.
For news apps like Apple News, notification summaries will include a special subtitle that reads “Summarized by Apple Intelligence”. This is in addition to the affordance that summarized text is italicized. Other categories of apps do not have this subtitle applied, when their notifications are summarized.
Additionally, as well as asking users as part of the onboarding flow whether they want to summarize notifications from news apps, the Notification Center interface will also offer another opportunity for users to make a decision.
After updating, summarized group of notifications from news includes a special prompt that asks if the user wants to “continue summarising groups of notifications from [app name]”. There are two buttons presented, Turn Off or Continue.
This additional UI is only shown once, and is dismissed if the user makes an explicit decision by pressing one of the two options. The subtitle, however, is persistent and is always displayed.
These changes show how Apple is treading carefully, in response to the criticisms that publishers levied during the first rollout. As well as these UI updates, Apple has also been continually improving the underlying models to create higher-quality and more representative summaries in general.
Screenshot of the new Summarized by Apple Intelligence footer message
Similar changes apply across Apple’s platforms where notification summaries are presented, including iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, visionOS 26 and watchOS 26.
Apple will continue to evaluate the performance of news & entertainment notification summaries throughout the remainder of the beta period. All customers will be able to benefit from the feature when the software updates roll out publicly in the fall.