I’d like to submit a feature request regarding the availability of Foundation Models in MessageFilter extensions.
Background
MessageFilter extensions play a critical role in protecting users from spam, phishing, and unwanted messages. With the introduction of Foundation Models and Apple Intelligence, Apple has provided powerful on-device natural language understanding capabilities that are highly aligned with the goals of MessageFilter.
However, Foundation Models are currently unavailable in MessageFilter extensions.
Why Foundation Models Are a Great Fit for MessageFilter
Message filtering is fundamentally a natural language classification problem. Foundation Models would significantly improve:
- Detection of phishing and scam messages
- Classification of promotional vs transactional content
- Understanding intent, tone, and semantic context beyond keyword matching
- Adaptation to evolving scam patterns without server-side processing
All of this can be done fully on-device, preserving user privacy and aligning with Apple’s privacy-first design principles.
Current Limitations
Today, MessageFilter extensions are limited to relatively simple heuristics or lightweight models. This often results in:
- Higher false positives
- Lower recall for sophisticated scam messages
- Increased development complexity to compensate for limited NLP capabilities
Request
Could Apple consider one of the following:
- Allowing Foundation Models to be used directly within MessageFilter extensions
- Providing a constrained or optimized Foundation Model API specifically designed for MessageFilter
- Enabling a supported mechanism for MessageFilter extensions to delegate inference to the containing app using Foundation Models
Even limited access (e.g. short text only, strict execution limits) would be extremely valuable.
Closing
Foundation Models have the potential to significantly raise the quality and effectiveness of message filtering on Apple platforms while maintaining strong privacy guarantees. Supporting them in MessageFilter extensions would be a major improvement for both developers and users.
Thank you for your consideration and for continuing to invest in on-device intelligence.