With iOS 26 this year, Apple announced an incredibly promising improvement to the order tracking feature in the Wallet app. With on-device Apple Intelligence models, the company planned to identify orders in your email to provide tracking updates, eliminating the need for retailers to need to support their proprietary feature.
I was really optimistic about this improvement, but after using it for the past couple months, it honestly feels a dull band-aid solution that never should’ve been implemented. Here’s why.
History of Apple Wallet order tracking
With iOS 16, Apple introduced order tracking in Apple Wallet. It relied on partner merchants supporting the feature, and if you paid with Apple Pay, it would automatically appear in the wallet app. With iOS 17, Apple added manual integration, but at the end of the day it still relied on the same merchants supporting it. Over the years, it never gained much traction – due to the broad lack of merchant support.
That changed with iOS 26, where Apple announced that they’d be utilizing Apple Intelligence to identify order details from your emails.
This sounded great, since you’d no longer be limited to the small number of merchants that support the feature. In reality though, it doesn’t actually improve the feature that much, and in my opinion it just makes it worse.
The shortfalls
The real problem ultimately comes down to one thing: Apple chose to rely on scanning your emails for order updates, rather than just extracting the tracking number and providing real-time updates.
It’s annoying, because ultimately Apple’s email scanning rarely provides me of important information. It relies on the merchant sending you an email for each important order update. If your merchant only sends you one email when it ships and another when it delivers, you don’t really get that much out of it.
Plus, you can often get a flood of notifications if several packages will arrive on the same day, because the feature relies on Mail app background refreshes. It also often gets confused by in-store pickup orders, stating that something was “shipped” when it was in fact ready for pickup.
Wrap up
I will say, tracking packages based on email confirmations is an incredibly smart idea – and it seemed promising. It’s unfortunate that Apple chose the less useful approach of relying on continued email updates, rather than just using proper package tracking APIs to track the package once the tracking number was provided.
In the end, I’ve ended turning off order notifications in the Wallet app. It’s hard to find this feature not spammy.
I imagine Apple took this approach because people would accuse them of sherlocking all of the package tracking apps on the App Store. Perhaps that’s fair, but the feature that they did choose to release feels incredibly underbaked for Apple – at least to me.
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