We are an e-commerce team currently facing persistent issues with Google reCAPTCHA v3 returning very low scores on iOS apps. This started recently and seems to correlate with Apple’s changes in iOS 26, where User-Agent strings are now frozen.
Apple introduced User-Agent freezing in iOS 26, which reports incorrect OS versions (e.g., showing iPhone OS 18_6 instead of 26). This change is part of Apple’s privacy-driven signal reduction strategy. While it improves privacy, it can confuse device detection systems and potentially impact Google’s machine learning model for reCAPTCHA scoring, which relies on signals like user-agent for risk analysis.
We’ve observed:
- Scores dropping below 0.4 primarily for iOS traffic.
Questions for the community:
- Has anyone else experienced similar low-score issues on iOS apps after the recent iOS updates?
- Are there recommended mitigation steps (e.g., using Client Hints, updating SDKs)?
- Any official guidance from Google or Apple on this?