Goodbye Bland Texts: Shake Up Messages With These 8 New Features in iOS 18.2

During the vacations when persons are touring to go to household, textual content messaging is extra vital than ever — how else to share footage of the absurd Christmas sweater your aunt gifted you? The Messages app in iOS 18.2 on iPhone (and the newest variations for the iPad and Mac) now consists of new formatting and different options to make texting even higher.

Animated results and textual content formatting make chatting extra enjoyable, and RCS help means your pals with Android telephones can lastly ship high-resolution photographs. If your mind is lively late at evening, you may schedule texts to be despatched at a extra affordable hour with out waking anybody up.

And do not forget the talents to bounce texts from a satellite tv for pc and create your individual emoji with Genmoji — an Apple Intelligence function on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16 and choose iPad fashions.

Here are eight new options within the Messages app you must learn about.

Read extra: iOS 18 Review: Get Ready to Customize Your iPhone

Also, should you’re simply getting began with the brand new system, you’ll want to take a look at the settings it’s essential to change proper now. And do not miss these 9 hidden iOS 18 options.

Thanks to RCS messaging, you may higher talk with Android customers

The addition of Rich Communication Services protocol to Messages ought to cut back friction when texting with associates who personal Android telephones. It permits learn receipts and provides you higher-quality picture transfers and end-to-end encryption (however retains Android message bubbles inexperienced).

If your service helps RCS, it is possible you need not do something to make use of it. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages > RCS Messaging and ensure the RCS Messaging is turned on.

You can even ship textual content messages through satellite tv for pc

The Emergency SOS through Satellite function that was launched with the iPhone 14 has been a literal lifesaver. When you don’t have any mobile sign, you may hook up with a satellite tv for pc and alternate quick textual content messages with emergency responders.

With that infrastructure in place, Apple is opening Messages as much as nonemergency texts too. If you are out of vary of mobile or Wi-Fi networks and personal an iPhone 14 or later, Messages will immediate you to hook up with a satellite tv for pc. While related, the Dynamic Island expands that will help you keep pointed on the satellites overhead.

You can then textual content folks such as you usually would, and options like emoji and Tapbacks ought to nonetheless work. If you need to take a look at a demo of the function, go to Settings > Apps > Messages > Messages through Satellite > Satellite Connection Demo. Or simply exit into the center of nowhere and check out it out your self.

You can now format textual content in Messages

I do not need to come throughout as “that typography man,” nevertheless it has lengthy bothered me that one of many solely methods to emphasise textual content in Messages has been to place it in all caps. We as a society have not developed typography over a whole lot of years and invented probably the most refined computing gadgets simply to shout at one another over textual content.

So yeah, I assume I’m that man. I really feel higher now that I can specific myself utilizing daring, italic, underlined and strikethrough textual content in conversations with my associates who’re additionally working iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia.

You can apply formatting to a whole phrase, particular person phrases and letters, or combos of these, like so:

1. Type your message.
2. To apply formatting to all the message, faucet the Formatting button within the suggestion bar; all your textual content is highlighted. Or, so as to add emphasis to solely a phrase, double-tap to pick out the textual content after which press the Formatting button. You can even select Text Effects from the choices that seem above the choice.
3. Tap one of many choices on the high of the formatting panel that replaces the keyboard: daring, italic, underline or strikethrough.

If you format a message that’s despatched to somebody working an older system, they will see solely plain textual content, which might be complicated should you’ve used strikethrough to point eliminated phrases.

You can animate your textual content messages

Here’s the place I toss apart any pretense of being a typographical purist. A message or chosen phrases or letters might be animated in one in all eight types. Need to ship some massive information with extra emphasis than daring textual content? With iOS 18, there are a number of new animation choices you may add to your textual content. The Big animation expands the dimensions of your letters. Or maybe simply mentioning that it is freezing outdoors would not convey the teeth-chattering chilly — apply the Jitter animation to make the letters shake.

Adding animation is simply as simple as formatting textual content:

1. Type your message.
2. Tap the Formatting button within the suggestion bar to pick out all the textual content. Or, choose particular person phrases or letters after which press that button.
3. Tap one of many animation types to use it: Big, Small, Shake, Nod, Explode, Ripple, Bloom or Jitter.

You can combine animations inside a message by making alternatives and making use of totally different types to them. However, you may’t apply multiple animation to a range; a phrase can not shake after which explode, for instance. As with textual content formatting, a message reveals up as plain textual content for anybody not working iOS 18, iPadOS 18 or MacOS Sequoia.

Even with these new options, I need extra: textual content formatting and textual content animation. Currently you should utilize one or the opposite. But if Apple’s engineers could make one thing as advanced as eye-tracking for the Vision Pro, they’ll make this occur in a subsequent replace.

You can flip off auto-playing animations, if that is not your factor

Let’s say your good friend simply put in iOS 18 and desires to check out all of the animation results in a sequence of messages, making a display filled with pulsing, resizing, jittering and exploding texts. You suppose, with all that animation tempting a migraine, what has Apple unleashed?

Don’t stress, as a result of you may set the animations to not robotically repeat. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and switch off Auto-Play Message Effects. Your good friend can nonetheless ship animated textual content that can play as soon as while you obtain it, however you will not be subjected to the animation repeating.

You can add any emoji or sticker as a tapback in Messages

Sometimes phrases are pointless. You may reply to somebody’s message utilizing a Tapback icon to specific love, settlement, disagreement, laughter, alarm or curiosity. They’re fast to use and get your reply throughout simply.

They’ve additionally been restricted to only six icons, and in monochrome no much less.

With iOS 18, Messages provides colour (and a few cartoony shading) to these icons, but in addition the flexibility to answer with any emoji or sticker. Here’s how one can do it:

1. Touch and maintain a message till you see the Tapback bubble seem.
2. Tap the emoji button just under the opposite icons. Or, you may swipe left on the bubble to view latest emojis, stickers and a grey emoji button that results in the emoji library.
3. In the emoji picker, select a sticker (left aspect) or any of the a whole lot of emoji.

You can create your individual distinctive emoji utilizing Genmoji

One Messages-related function of Apple Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro fashions is the flexibility to summarize incoming texts of their notifications. iOS 18.2 brings one other choice to the Messages app: Genmoji, a technique to create your individual emoji on the spot by describing what you need. (It additionally works on iPads with M-series processors and the newest iPad mini.)

Before you begin although, you may have to join the waitlist within the Image Playground app. Once you are accepted, you are able to do the next:

1. In a dialog with somebody, faucet the emoji button to view the emoji choices.
2. Tap the Genmoji button to the correct of the Describe an Emoji discipline.
3. Type (or use dictation to talk) an outline of what the Genmoji ought to appear like. You can kind one thing like “blue hen” or “crying emoji browsing” and the app will begin creating variations of your descriptions. (Learn extra about creating higher Genmoji.)
4. Flip by the icons it creates till you discover one you want. You can even edit the outline to alter the parameters of the generated picture.
5. When you will have a Genmoji you want, faucet Add.

The new emoji seems inline in your textual content and is added to your Recents assortment of emojis. It additionally reveals up as a sticker that you would be able to add.

You can schedule textual content messages utilizing Send Later

I do know which associates are possible up at midnight to answer to a textual content, and which I’d in all probability get up. Because I need the second class to proceed to be my associates, the flexibility to schedule texts within the Messages app is nice for once I need to share a thought however do not want a direct reply. 

To ship a message at a specified time, do that:

1. Type your message.
2. Tap the More (+) button.
3. Tap Send Later; it’s possible you’ll have to swipe as much as discover it within the record of apps and options.
4. In the time picker that seems, set a day and time to ship the message.
5. Tap the Send Message button (the up arrow) to schedule it.

Scheduled messages present up with a faint dashed border.

If it’s essential to change the timing later, faucet Edit above the message after which select Edit Time from the menu. Also, if you end up scheduling messages typically, I like to recommend shifting the Send Later choice greater within the More record so it is simpler to entry.

For extra, see how Apple redesigned the Photos app in iOS 18 and study all the things in regards to the new Passwords app that syncs throughout gadgets and platforms.