How to unsend iPhone messages to avoid blowing up your life

Knowing how to edit or unsend iMessages on your iPhone could come in clutch. Like when you text your mom, “Finally got laid today” when you meant to say “paid.”

Thankfully, it’s easy to rewrite history in iMessage. Let me show you how this lifesaving feature works.

How to edit and unsend iMessages

Potentially embarrassing or career-ending texts aside, there are plenty of reasons you might want to edit or unsend iMessages. For one thing, you might not text everyone the same way. I bash out texts to my partner quickly and haphazardly. I text everyone over the age of 45 in complete sentences, with proper punctuation.

Even the societal rules for when to end a text with a period evoke convoluted psychology theories that could fill an entire college lecture.

If you’re texting, mistakes will be made. And sometimes, you will desperately wish you could edit or unsend a message.

To use these features, you need to be using iMessage (Apple’s blue bubble chats within its Messages app). You can’t edit or unsend SMS or RCS text messages, even if you sent from Apple’s Messages app (where they will appear as green-bubble messages). How to edit or unsend messages in other apps like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and WhatsApp will vary as well.

Edit a message on iPhone after sending it

Sometimes you don’t need to go nuclear and unsend an iMessage — simply editing it will do the trick (although recipients will be able to see the original message).

To edit an iMessage in the Messages app on iPhone, tap and hold the message to show the context menu. Tap Edit to make your changes, then tap the checkmark to confirm them. Your message will be marked as edited for both you and the recipient.

Note that you can only edit an iMessage within 15 minutes of sending it, and you can only edit a message up to five times. The recipient can also see the edit history by tapping the “Edited” indicator.

If you’re texting someone running iOS 15 or earlier, be careful — your phone will still let you edit your message, but the message will not show up edited on the other person’s phone. Instead, a second version of the message will be sent, preceded by “Edited to…”

Unsend iMessages on iPhone

You can unsend an iMessage on iPhone in a similar way. After sending an iMessage, tap and hold to show the context menu, then tap Undo Send. The other person will see that you unsent a message, but they won’t be able to read what it said. This is in contrast to message edits, where the recipient can see the edit history.

Note: If the recipient is running iOS 15 or earlier, Apple warns that they might “still be able to see your message.”

Unlike editing messages, you only have two minutes to unsend a message.

More Messages features

Now that you know how to unsend an iMessage, why not learn more about how to make the most of the Messages app? The how-tos below will show you more advanced texting techniques.

• Schedule texts to send later on iPhone to make sure you never forget to send a reminder, birthday greeting or early morning message for someone in a different time zone. You can schedule a whole slew of texts up to a week in advance, with links, photos, attachments and more.
• iMessage effects can add much more meaning, emotion and fun to your texting. You can add bold, italics, underline and strikethrough text, just like a formatted document. Even better, you can choose from a bunch of cool, animated effects.
• Check In is an iPhone feature that tracks your travels and lets contacts know when you’ve safely reached your destination.
• RCS messaging makes features like read receipts, video and file attachments and named group chats — previously exclusive to iMessage (and some apps) — possible between iPhone and Android.

We originally published this article on how to edit and unsend messages on iPhone on June 24, 2022. We updated the information on September 15, 2022, and October 22, 2025.