iOS 18 brings a new quality to messages on your iPhone

Chatting with friends will be a lot more enjoyable with Apple’s latest text messaging improvements, coming to iPhones (and iPads and Macs) this fall in iOS 18.

If you are running iOS 18 beta version Now you can craft the perfect reply with new features in Messages, like text formatting and animated effects. Chatting with your Android friends? RCS support finally makes it easier. You can even send messages via satellite when you’re out of range of a cellular or Wi-Fi network. And if the conversation gets too heated, cool down by scheduling a text message for later.

Here are seven new features in the Messages app you should know about.

Read more:It’s Here: How to Download iOS 18 Public Beta on iPhone

Also, check out our full coverage of WWDC 2024 in June and find out why iOS 18 could be more interesting than the upcoming iPhone 16.

With RCS messaging you can communicate better with Android users

Adding the Rich Communication Services protocol to Messages should reduce friction when texting your friends who have Android phones. It enables read receipts, and provides higher-quality image transfers and end-to-end encryption (but keeps Android’s green message bubbles).

If your carrier supports RCS, you probably don’t need to do anything to use it. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages > RCS Messages and make sure that RCS News is on.

You can also send text messages via satellite

The Emergency SOS via Satellite feature, introduced with the iPhone 14, literally saved lives. When you have no cellular signal, you can connect to a satellite and exchange short text messages with rescuers.

With this infrastructure, Apple is also opening up Messages to non-urgent messages. If you’re out of range of cellular or Wi-Fi networks and have an iPhone 14 or later, Messages will prompt you to connect to a satellite. During a connection, Dynamic Island expands to help you stay pointed at the satellites overhead.

You can then text people like you normally would, and features like emojis and Tapbacks should still work. If you want to check out a demo of this feature, head over to Settings > Apps > Messaging > Messaging via Satellite > Satellite Connection Demonstration. Or just go to the middle of nowhere and try it yourself.

Now you can format text in Messages

I don’t want to be seen as “that typography guy,” but I’ve long been bothered by the fact that one of the few ways to emphasize text in the News is to write it in all caps. As a society, we didn’t spend hundreds of years developing typography and inventing the most advanced computing devices just to shout at each other over text.

So yeah, I guess I’m that guy. But I feel better now that I can express myself through bold, Italicunderlined and strikethrough text in conversations between my friends who are also using iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia.

You can apply formatting to an entire phrase, individual words and letters, or a combination of them, as follows:

1. Enter your message.
2To apply formatting to the entire message, tap Format button in the suggestion bar; all text is highlighted. Or, to add emphasis to just one word, double-tap to select the text, then press Formatting button. You can also choose Text effects from the options that appear above the selection.
3. Click one of the options at the top of the formatting pane that overrides the keyboard: bold, italic, underline, or strikethrough.

If you format a message to send to someone using an older system, they will only see plain text, which can be confusing if you’ve used strikethrough to indicate deleted words.

You can animate your text messages

Here, I’m throwing out all pretense of typographic purism. You can animate your message or selected words or letters in one of eight styles. Need to convey important messages with more emphasis than bold text? iOS 18 has a few new animation options you can add to your text. A large animation increases the size of the letters. Or maybe the mere mention of the cold outside doesn’t convey the gnashing of teeth—use Jitter animation to make the letters shake.

Adding animations is as easy as formatting text:

1. Enter your message.
2. Click Formatting button in the suggestion bar to select all text. Or select individual words or letters, and then press this button.
3. To apply an animation style, tap it: Big, Small, Shake, Nod, Explode, Wave, Bloom, or Tremble.

You can mix animations in a message by creating selections and applying different styles to them. However, you can’t apply more than one animation to a selection; for example, a word can’t shake and then explode. As with text formatting, the message displays as plain text to anyone not using iOS 18, iPadOS 18, or macOS Sequoia.

Even with these new features, I want more: text formatting AND text animation. Currently, you can use one or the other. But if Apple engineers can create something as complex as eye tracking for Vision Pro, they may do so in a future update.

You can turn off autoplay animations if that’s not your thing

Let’s say your friend just installed iOS 18 and wants to try out all the animation effects in a series of messages, creating a screen full of pulsating, resizing, jittering, and exploding text. And you think, with all that migraine-inducing animation, what has Apple unleashed?

Don’t stress out because you can set the animations so that they don’t repeat automatically. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and turn off Autoplay Message Effects. Your friend can still send an animated text that will play once when it is received, but the animation will not repeat.

How to Add Any Emoji or Sticker as a Tapback in Messages

Sometimes words are unnecessary. You can respond to someone’s message using the Tapback icon to express love, agreement, disagreement, laughter, alarm, or curiosity. They are quick to use and easily convey your response.

They have also been limited to just six icons, and they are all monochrome.

In iOS 18, Messages adds color (and some cartoon shading) to these icons, but also the ability to reply with any emoji or sticker. Here’s how:

1Tap and hold the message until the Tapback bubble appears.
2. Tap the emoji button just below the other icons. You can also swipe left on the bubble to see recent emoji, stickers, and the gray emoji button, which takes you to the emoji library.
3. In the emoji picker, select a sticker (on the left) or any of the hundreds of emojis.

You can schedule text messages using the Send Later feature

I know which friends are likely to wake up at midnight to respond to a text and which ones I’m likely to wake up. Since I want the second category to still be my friends, the ability to schedule texts in the Messages app is great for when I want to share a thought but don’t need an immediate response.

To send a message at a specific time, follow these steps:

1. Enter your message.
2. Click More (+) button.
3. To obtain Send later; you may need to swipe up to find it in the list of apps and features.
4In the time selector that appears, set the day and time to send the message.
5. To schedule a message, press the Send Message button (up arrow).

Scheduled messages are displayed with a subtle dashed border.

If you need to change the time later, tap Edit above the message and select Edit time from the menu. Also, if you frequently schedule messages, I recommend moving the Send Later option higher in the More list so that it is easier to access.

To learn more, see how Apple has redesigned the Photos app in iOS 18 and how the new Passwords app will sync across devices and platforms.