The Messages app for your iPhone. You know it, you use it, you probably don’t think
there’s much to discuss about it, but you might be surprised to know
that there are a load of hints and tips, that can make your experience of this app
even better. So in this video, I’m going to share some with you. Quick thing to point out,
I’m using iOS15, but I’ve also got the final beta of iOS16 installed on one of my phones, and with
the release of that right around the corner, I will also take a few moments in this video
to point out all of the new features and changes that are coming with iOS16, to make sure that
you’re up to date, no matter what. OK, let’s get into it.
Unless this is your first time sending a message, I’m sure you already know how to do it,
but in the interest of absolute clarity, let’s just confirm that to send a message,
you type what you want to say in here, and tap this little button to send it. Tap the button,
and off it goes. A nice feature you might not be aware of however, is sending a Message effect.
Instead of tapping the send button, press and hold, and you’ll get these options.
The effects are broadly broken down into Bubble and Screen,
and you can preview each of them by tapping on them, in the case of the Bubble effects,
or swiping through them on the screen effects. Basically, whatever you see at your end, your
recipient is going to see at their end. Although, I should caveat that by mentioning that this is
in the case of both you and the message recipient being on iPhones, if your recipient is on Android,
some Message features that we talk about today, this one included I believe, won’t work for them.
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There is a bar directly above the keyboard, and directly below the message composition box,
with a number of buttons in. You can toggle the visibility of this bar
on and off using this button here. Let me show you what all these buttons do.
The Photos button will take you quickly into your own photo library,
where you can of course tap on a photo or video, and add it to your message.
The App Store button will take you to a very focused part of the App Store, these are all
apps that you can access within Messages. There’s all kinds of stuff in here, way too
much to possibly show you everything, but you’ve got things like Emojis, games, productivity tools,
collaboration tools. For example, 8 Ball Pool is a pool game, which I’m now addicted to after
downloading it for this video, where you take it in turns to play with a friend, via Message.
Polls with friends allows you to set questions, send that question out to multiple contacts,
and have them all vote on an answer. These are just two examples, there’s hundreds in here.
The next button is the Sticker button, where you can add a range of stickers, including stickers of
your own Memojis, into the chat directly, or drop them onto existing messages as a kind of reaction.
Then it’s the Memoji button, where you can record yourself as a Memoji,
and drop that into the chat. Then it’s the Gif library,
where you can search for a suitable little video response to add to the conversation. I will say
that the search library here isn’t as good as other messaging apps that I’ve used, but it works.
Next up is Music, where an Apple Music integration allows you to send suggestions of music to the
other person, then Fitness which appears to be nothing more than an animated image library,
but related to fitness, and then finally Digital Touch. This is probably the most
interesting out of all the options, although a bit faddy. You can do things like draw little
animations with your finger, or hold 2 fingers down to send a heart beat to the other person.
If you keep scrolling, there are other integrations related to apps that you’ve
downloaded. Some of these are simply image libraries, some of them are pretty cool and
offer useful functionality, but with there being tens of thousands of apps out there,
you’ll need to explore these for yourself. Tap on the buttons, see what you can do.
The default for sending a message is of course to type a message in, although like everything else
in iOS, you can also dictate a message, you would do that by tapping the little microphone button,
the position of this will vary depending on your phone, but this is basically the dictation tool.
This icon, the little waveform icon, is your voice recorder,
which is a nice feature for quickly capturing a voice note and sending that.
I use this quite often if I’m out and about and typing a message isn’t really feasible,
or if I’ve got something particularly lengthy that I want to convey to the other person.
If someone sends you multiple photos in a message, they will show like this. If you tap this icon,
you can then view the photos in a more structured grid format, but otherwise, you can swipe with
your finger to kind of swipe through the stack of images. If you then tap on an individual image,
it will go full screen, and if you tap on this icon down at the bottom right, you can download
the image into your own photo library. Tapping on this button will allow you to react to an
individual photo, things like the thumbs up, love heart, and the sender will get informed of this.
You can download all the photos to your own photo library in one go by tapping this button,
which is of course useful if you’ve been sent a few all at the same time.
Oh, and something to point out regarding photos. When you take a photo on your iPhone,
your phone stores Exif data, which includes things like the photo’s name,
the date that it was captured, the device and lens that the photo was captured on,
as well as very detailed photo composition data, the aperture, ISO, that kind of thing.
That data is transferred when you send a photo via Messages, in other words, the receiver can
save the photo to their own photo library, and view that information about the photo.
Most of this won’t be of concern to most people, but it’s worth knowing that your exact location
information might also be captured as part of that Exif data, and would therefore also be sent.
If you don’t want this to happen, you’ve got a couple of options. You can either switch
off location information entirely, by going to Settings, then Privacy, then Location Services,
then Camera, and switching Precise Location off, possibly even changing location access to Never.
Unfortunately, this will also take away your ability to store this information for yourself,
and it can be nice to see location detail when you’re browsing through your own photos.
The other alternative is to open a photo before you send it, tap the ‘I’ button,
scroll down to the map, tap adjust, and choose No Location. The only issue with this, is that you’ve
got to do this for every photo you want to send, which can be a bit laborious. This feels like a
bit of an oversight by Apple, hopefully they’ll find a better solution for this in the future.
There are a couple of really useful functions for helping you to manage your messages.
First up, you can filter messages from known senders, in other words people in your
contacts list, and unknown senders, basically everyone else. If you get a lot of spam texts,
this is obviously going to be useful to you. To do this, head into Settings, then Messages,
then under Message Filtering, toggle Filter Unknown Senders on.
Then back in the Messages app, you’ll see that you have a first screen giving you the option
of viewing All Messages, messages from known senders, or messages from unknown senders.
You can also pin messages to the top of the Messages app, and you would do this
by swiping from left to right, and then tapping the Pin icon. That contact’s image
will now show at the top of the screen, and you can do this for up to 9 message threads I believe.
Swiping the other way, right to left, will allow you to mute the chat, or delete the chat.
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When in a message, the profile picture of the person you’re talking with will be visible up at
the top of the screen. If you tap on that, you’ll be taken to that person’s contact card within
Messages. Here you can call or FaceTime them, email them if you have an email address for them,
and view their info. You can send them your current location, which is obviously useful
if it’s a trusted contact, and you want them to know where you are, perhaps because they’re trying
to drive to your house, you’ll essentially send your location on a map to them, and that person
can then tap on the map that they receive, and use Apple Maps to navigate right to you.
Share my Location allows you to share your location with that person, and there is a
difference to the previous option. Sending your location sends that person a map of where you
are at the moment you hit send. Sharing location allows someone to track you, for a period of time,
using the FindMy app. So, perhaps you’re going out to meet someone and you’d like a friend or
family member to be able to keep an eye on where you are for the night, you could tap on this,
and then choose Share until End of Day. A bit further down you have some more options
for this specific chat, and then below that, you have the media that’s been shared in your chat,
broken down into Photos and Videos, then Links and then Locations would be underneath that.
Final thing to show you here, is that if we jump back to the Message thread itself,
if the contact you’re speaking with is able to be FaceTime called,
you can do that by tapping the FaceTime icon up here at the top right.
You can’t really do fonts in Messages as such, but you can use something called Fancy Text,
which is kind of like having access to some different fonts. To do this, search the web
for a Fancy Text generator, and when you find one, input the text you’d like to send in the relevant
part of that website, then choose Copy. Then Paste into the messaging field, and you can see that the
message you send will be sent in Fancy Text. You can also create Subject lines for your
messages, but you need to enable a Setting for this. Head into Settings, then Messages,
scroll down, and toggle on Show Subject Field. Then back in the Message view,
you can see that you can add a subject line prior to sending a message, which can be in Bold.
Also, another useful feature in Messages that requires a setting is being able to tap on a
message, and have Siri speak it to you. In order for this to work, we need to go to Settings,
then Accessibility, then Spoken Content, and ensure that Speak Selection is toggled on.
Then, back on a Message, tap and hold on the message for a moment, and choose Speak.
Actually, just to cover off the other options within the contextual menu that you can access
when you tap and hold, you can also translate messages here, and reply to specific messages,
which then shows with this line connecting the reply to your message,
it obviously makes it much easier to know what someone’s referring to in a busy message thread.
From the other person’s perspective it’s even better, they can see that a reply
to their message has been received, and if they tap on the notification of this,
they can view just the message and reply in it’s own thread, which is great for focusing.
Finally, when composing a message, tilt your phone on it’s side,
and you’ll have access to this button. You can handwrite a message to the other person.
So the last thing to discuss then is iOS16. This tutorial has been written and recorded
using iOS15, but it’s about 10 days until the new iOS launches as I make this,
chances are by the time you watch this, iOS16 will already be out, and I’ve been using the
Beta to ensure that I’m able to give you up to date information. There aren’t huge updates to
Messages in this new iOS update, but there are a few minor updates, which I’ll now show you.
First up, when you delete a message thread now in iOS16, rather than that thread being
gone forever, immediately, it now moves to a recently deleted folder in iOS16,
meaning that for a limited amount of time, you can undelete the thread if you wish.
You can also now mark a message as Unread, even after you’ve read it.
I don’t know whether this will impact a read receipt that your recipient gets by the way,
I would assume it doesn’t, I think this is just more to give you greater control over managing
your unread messages, a bit like with email. To do this, tap on hold on the Message thread from
the Messages tab, and choose Mark as Unread. The other two changes are related to messages
that you’ve sent, although be aware that both you and your recipient will need to be using
iMessage and specifically iOS16 or later for these to work properly.
You can unsend a message, essentially deleting it from both your phone and your recipient’s phone.
To do this, on a message that you’ve just sent, press and hold for a moment to get
the contextual menu, then choose Undo Send. The other option is to instead choose Edit,
which then allows you to edit the text that you just sent, rather than deleting it entirely.
So there you go, a thorough walkthrough of the Messages app for the iPhone,
including the changes coming in iOS16. How about you? Do you use Messages?
If yes, anything that I’ve missed, that I should have mentioned?
Or if you don’t use Messages, what do you use and why? Drop me a comment and let’s talk about it.