iMessage

Check In is an iPhone feature that tracks your travels and lets contacts know when you’ve safely reached your destination or finished a workout. It’s great for traveling, for kids trudging to and from school, for going on a date, and for biking on a dangerous road.

With this feature enabled, you no longer need to remember to text someone when you make it home safely — your iPhone will let them know for you.

Check In is like sharing your ETA in Apple Maps, but tweaked for personal safety. Friends, family and loved ones will be automatically notified if you’re stopped for any reason before reaching your destination.

The safety feature also offers timer-based check-ins, which come in handy for situations like meeting a stranger from Craigslist. If you don’t check in after a set time, your iPhone will alert your contacts.

Here’s how to use it — frankly, everyone should know how this works (especially parents).

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.

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, and even choose from a bunch of cool, animated effects. Plus, you can use full-screen animated effects, including lasers, confetti and  fireworks — which seems perfectly appropriate on the Fourth of July.

With Apple’s text message effects, you can make quite an impression. You can make congratulations more bombastic (to rejoice in someone’s finest moments). Or, you can use formatting and effects to convey sarcasm, stress and sorrow more clearly.

These text effects are fun and incredibly useful. Keep reading below or watch our video.

If you know how to schedule texts on iPhone, you can 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, using the iPhone’s Send Later feature.

This can save your bacon if you’re often the type of person to forget to text someone later. And it’s really easy to do, once you figure out how to use the somewhat hidden feature.

Rich Communication Services messaging is new to iPhone, and it makes chatting with Android users much more fun. 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.

What RCS features can you take advantage of? Keep reading or watch our video guide.

You can back up your text messages (and iMessages) with iMessage Exporter, a free tool for the Mac. Whether you want to preserve your family message history for sentimental reasons, or need to keep conversation records for business, iMessage Exporter will get the job done.

You might already back up your messages in iCloud, but Apple charges an arm and a leg for space. You can save space (and money) by making a local backup and clearing out your cloud storage.

Keep reading or watch our video to see how.

A little-known feature in macOS lets you share your Mac’s screen to someone else’s Mac directly from the Messages app — no third-party apps or downloads required. It’s great if you need to give tech support to a far-off family member in a pinch. Often, you just need to see what’s happening instead of counting on what your dear old father is trying to describe over the phone.

Get him to share his Mac’s screen with you, and you likely can solve his problem quickly. Even better, it’s not complicated setting up screen sharing on a Mac like it is on a PC. It takes only a few clicks in the Messages app. Let me show you all around this awesome hidden feature.

WhatsApp is taking a cue from iMessage and finally adding support for voice message transcripts. This will allow the app to show transcriptions of voice notes when you cannot listen to the audio itself.

Meta beta test voice message transcription in WhatsApp for over a year before rolling it out to the public.

Apple pays Globalstar to provide the satellites needed for the iPhone’s Messages via satellite service, and an updated agreement between the two companies includes a $1.1 billion payment for the infrastructure.

Clearly, this is an iPhone feature that’ll be available for years to come.

Location sharing is an incredibly versatile feature of iOS that makes coordinating with others much easier. Whether you’re meeting up with someone, exploring a new place, or spending the day out with friends, it’s a breeze to share your location. This feature is especially helpful in large public spaces, such as malls, amusement parks, and stadiums. If you’re wondering how does sharing location work on iPhone, you can check out this detailed guide: Everything You Need to Know About Location Sharing in iOS.

Giving directions on precisely where to pick up someone along a street block or in a parking lot is made much easier by sending a pin in an iMessage chat. With Family Sharing, I can see if my wife is on her way home without first sharing her ETA in Apple Maps. Another benefit is that I can use Find My to ping her phone if it’s lost in the house.

Here’s how to use location sharing.

US carriers have enabled support for RCS messaging for iPhone users on their networks. This comes following the release of iOS 18 beta 2, which shipped with an RCS toggle in the Messages app.

Multiple reports from iPhone users running iOS 18 beta confirm that RCS messaging is now live for them.

Apple previewed support for RCS messaging in the iOS 18 Messages app at WWDC24. Adding Rich Communication Services will bring enhanced texting between iPhone and Android users, with features not possible before.

It’s a change Apple dragged its feet on for many years. Along with RCS support, Apple is also introducing new features like polls for iMessage, enhancing group chat interactions. Learn more about these changes.

Knowing how to unsend an iMessage can help you out of a pickle if you accidentally shoot off a text to the wrong person. You also can edit a message after it’s sent to fix a grave typo you didn’t catch. Like if you accidentally text your mom “Finally got laid today!” when you meant to type “paid.”

Keep reading to see how to unsend or edit an iMessage on your iPhone, or watch our quick video tutorial.

Apple could add new text effects to iMessage in iOS 18. One of the effects reportedly includes the ability to animate individual words in a message. If you’re curious about how to bold text in iMessage, Apple has some useful tricks that can help make your messages stand out.

iMessage, Apple’s proprietary instant messaging service, already supports many message effects and animations to add some excitement to texts. The possible new text effects in iOS 18 should make things even more eye-catching and fun.

You can make custom stickers from photos on your iPhone and send them in iMessage, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Stickers made from your own pictures are a lot of fun to send in group chats. They’re great for sending highly personal reactions using photos of people or pets that everyone knows. You can even add fun sticker effects.

Making these custom stickers from photos stems from an iOS 16 featured that brought the ability to copy and paste the subject from a picture. Now, in iOS 17, it’s easy to collect your personalized cutouts int a set of digital stickers you can use anywhere. I’ll show you how it all works.

Google let slip that Apple will fulfill its promise to add support for Rich Communication Services to the iPhone Messages app “in the fall of 2024.”

That almost certainly means iPhone and Android users will enjoy higher quality cross-platform texting with the release of iOS 18 and not before.

An iMessage upgrade with post-quantum cryptography will make Apple’s instant messaging platform ready to fend off future hackers. Today’s encryption methods likely won’t be able to stand up, which is why Apple is bringing in the cutting-edge protocol.

The new tech will launch in March, making iMessage the most secure, widely used messaging service in the world, according to Apple.

The European Commission decided not to require Apple to further break down its barriers between iMessage and rival messaging services.

It would seem Apple’s decision to add RCS support helped persuade the European regulator that no additional changes are necessary.

Beeper Mini will soon require you to have access to a Mac for using iMessage on Android. Or you will have to use your friend’s Mac to set up Beeper Cloud.

Beeper’s latest workaround comes after Apple’s crackdown. The service has experienced multiple outages this week, with the company claiming its latest fix will address them and deliver a reliable experience.

Security and privacy concerns caused Apple to block messaging service Beeper Mini, the company said Sunday. But on Monday Beeper Mini got around the block and pledged to keep making its service available.

This followed Beeper Mini’s highly publicized launch on December 5. It said it had successfully reverse-engineered iMessage to turn green Android text bubbles blue on iPhones.

From that moment, many people wondered how long Apple would let it stand (just a few days, it turned out).

Update: Beeper Mini is back with improvements, according to a new blog post that puts the ball back in Apple’s court. Beeper said it’s willing to share its codebase with an independent research firm and reirterated it could add a pager emoji to enable filtering of Beeper Mini messages in iMessage. See more on the story so far below.

Believe it or not, a 16-year-old high school student may have been the first to fully reverse-engineer iMessage and turn green Android text bubbles blue on iPhones with the new Beeper Mini app, released Tuesday.

The text messaging world is buzzing over it, wondering how it may avoid security pitfalls like other recent attempts to merge the two texting worlds — and puzzling over whether Apple may put a stop to this incursion into its “walled garden.”

 In what is apparently an enormous change of direction, Apple reportedly plans to add support for Rich Communication Services to the iPhone Messages app in 2024. This will enable iPhones and Androids to communicate more effectively, with more of the bells and whistles associated with Apple’s proprietary iMessage platform.

It also could be the end of the green bubble versus blue bubble controversy, though not necessarily. If you’re wondering how to get RCS on iPhone, Apple’s latest update will bring end-to-end encryption to RCS messaging. Find out more here.

Samsung used a short video to join Google in urging Apple to add support for Rich Communication Services to iMessage, which would end the blue bubble vs. green bubble divide.

The reason for their campaign is obvious: if Apple made the change, people would be more likely to switch from iPhone to Samsung’s Androids.

iOS 17 brings with it a lot of new features to the apps you use to communicate every day: iMessage, FaceTime — and last and certainly least — Phone. If you’re trying to call someone and have a missed connection, you have many more options for leaving them a message to pick up later. Changes to iMessage bring small but impactful improvements to stickers, threaded replies and sharing your ETA.

iOS 17 is out now. If you bought a new iPhone 15, you’ve got it already. Otherwise, head over to Settings > General > Software Update to get it. Upgrading may take about 20 minutes after downloading, so make sure you don’t start it at a bad time.

The U.K. government dropped a plan that would have allowed it to access the contents of any online message looking for illegal content. It had sought a way around the encryption that protects messaging services like iMessage and WhatsApp.

Apple threatened to disable iMessage and FaceTime in the UK rather than submit to the proposal on the grounds that it would completely compromise the privacy of all users. Other companies said the same about their apps.