20 Hidden iPhone Messages Features

Here are some fun things to try in the Messages app on your iPhone or iPad. You can send messages with special effects, send special links, respond with a reaction instead of a new message, easily include GIFs or stickers, add subject lines, send audio recordings, and so much more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some fun features of the messages app on your iPhone. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So you may use the Messages app everyday to send and receive messages from friends and coworkers. But here are some features that you may not know about. First you can use special effects when sending messages. Say you type a message like this. Instead of just tapping the Send button tap and hold the button, make sure you have Bubble selected over here, and then there are several different things you can do. It will even show you what it is going to look like if you keep an eye on the message itself. So if I tap Slam you could see what slam looks like. This is Loud and this is Gentle. If you like one of these simply tap it again and it will Send. It will even show you the same effect as it shows the other person. Keep in mind, of course, that this depends on them also having an iPhone and using Messages. It's not going to work with your android friends. 
Now there was one effect there I didn't show you because it deserves its own mention. If you tap and hold here you can use Invisible Ink. Then what happens is the message is obscured. It's just this static there. So when you send it that's what they see and they have to tap on it for it to reveal the message. This could be just for fun but it could also be for preventing spoilers when talking about TV shows or maybe asking them to look at a video first and then read the next message after they have read it. Things like that. 
Now there are also a variety of screen effects you get to in the same way. So tap and hold and switch to Screen. Then you get a whole bunch of effects like this and you simply swipe to go through them. You can see the dots there at the bottom. So you can select a really cool effect like that. Some of these will show up when you type certain words in the messages. So, for instance, saying Happy Birthday will bring up this effect without even needing to go to the Screen to look at the different effects. This one will come up when you say Happy New Year. 
Now have you ever typed a URL to somebody and then sent it and then what they get is a preview like that. If you'd rather them not get a preview but just have the URL in the message as normal there are ways you can do that. One is to simply include the URL inside of a sentence. So, for instance, sending this will actually just send the link like that. If you kind of want to force it what a lot of people like to do is put a period before the URL. So believe it or not if you type this like that, even with the space there and you send it it will just send the URL. Notice it didn't even include the period and space before hand. 
Now you can send other types of links besides links to webpages. Some of those actually trigger certain actions. So, for instance, if you want to tell somebody to send a message to someone else you can type SMS and then colon and then the phone number like that. Then send this and you can see how it appears as a link. If they tap it it will prompt them to send a message to that person. You can do the same thing using FaceTime colon and a phone number or Apple ID TEL colon and then a phone number and then when they tap it it will actually prompt them to call that phone number. The word of MAILTO followed by a colon, all one word with no space in there, then an email address it will  prompt them to send an email to that email address. 
Now say you get a message from somebody. You may be tempted to respond sometimes with just a thumbs up or just a quick little one character emoji or something. But there's actually an easier way to do that. Tap and hold on their message and then you get these various quick reactions here including a thumbs up. I use that all the time. Now what happens is they see a little thumbs up next to their message instead of an entirely new message in the conversation with just that one character or emoji.
Now let's say you want to Edit a message as you are typing it. A lot of times I see people just deleting all the way back to the point where they made the mistake or trying to tap right in the exact spot to try to edit the text. You can actually use the keyboard here as a trackpad. By tapping and holding the space, and you see how all the keys go away, now this is a trackpad you can use to easily place the cursor when you want to make a correction. 
So you may think of text messages as just one line of text. But did you know instead can use the format subject and message. Go to the Settings app and then go in there to Messages. Then one of the options here is to Show Subject Field. Now when you go to type a message you have subject and message here. You can just skip the subject. But if you use it it will actually appear in Bold, like that. 
Another thing you can do is you could have Custom Ringtones or Vibration patterns for different people who send you messages. So you know who is sending you the message before you even look at your phone. Go to the Contacts App and then with the contact go to Edit. There you've got Text Tone. You can set that to a different text tone than everybody else. You could also go to Vibration and use a different vibration pattern. Even creating your own custom vibrations. 
Now if you wanted to copy some text. Maybe somebody gives you some important information in a message and you want to copy it and put it in some other app you probably know that you can Select, wait, and then use Copy to get that message. But you can also Drag and Drop. Better yet you can Drag and Drop multiple messages. So with one finger you tap on a message and hold. Then you drag away and now you're dragging that message. Then you can tap with a second finger and you could see now you're dragging two messages. Now you can use whatever gestures you want to go into another app and drop those two messages or ten messages if you like in there. You can use this for text but you can also use it to Drag and Drop images and other things.  
In addition you can Drag and Drop into Messages as well. So instead of having to fumble around in here to find a photo that you want to send you can instead be in the Photos App. I can use one finger to start dragging and then I can use another finger to switch to Messages and drag into a message there thus sending the photo I was looking at rather than having to go into Messages and then find that photo again. 
Another thing you can do in Settings inside of the Messages Settings is you can filter unknown senders. So if you get a lot of spam text you can turn this On and then what will happen is anybody that sends you a message that's not in your Contacts will be filtered into a separate place in the Messages app. Oh, and by the way, if you've even installed an app on your iPhone that filters messages and looks for spam you won't see this right here. You'll actually see another menu you can dig down into. You can turn On filter unknown senders but you could also indicate you want that app to be able to filter out spam messages. 
Now when answering a message you probably know that you can tap the microphone here and dictate some text. But you could also tap this button right here, hold it down, and speak some text and you could see it's doing a recording there. Then the person on the other end, if you choose to send it, will get that as an audio recording they could playback. It's really handy if you're not able to actually type something in response. Like say you're walking somewhere and typing would be too hard but you do want to respond to what that person asked you. 
Now when you're typing something you may notice that one of the suggestions you get sometimes is for an emoji. So you can type out the word pizza and then tap the pizza emoji and put that in there. You didn't have to and search for the pizza emoji. But even if you missed that and typed more, like that, you could still replace words in your text with emoji by simply tapping the emoji icon there at the bottom left. You get the emoji viewer here and you can search for the emoji if you want. But notice how those two words changed and now you can tap them and substitute emoji for them. 
Another thing you could do is easily include animated GIFs in your messages. You don't have to go to a website somewhere and search for them and drag them in. There's actually a button here, it looks like this, you tap that and it brings up all of these different GIFs. You can search for one that fits what you want to say, like that. It brings up a whole bunch of different ones. You can select one to send for a bit of fun. 
You can also include your current location when you're talking to somebody. So if you want to tell them where you're at just tap up here and it will go to a screen when now you see a map showing you where you are. Then you can say, Send my Current Location, to send your location right now. That's handy if you want to tell somebody, hey I found a great new shop. You should check it out. You can send that current location. They can read that hours later and see exactly where it was you were at. Then, of course, you can also Share My Location, which will give them access to being able to see where you are all the time. So if you're trying to meet up with somebody they can now track you using the Find My App. 
Now what if you are in a Group Chat here and you want to stay in the group chat but you don't necessarily want to get all the notifications. We know how those can go. You can end up getting notifications every couple of seconds if it is very active. Well, you can tap up here and then one of the things that you could do is Hide Alerts. 
Now another fun thing that you could do is you could actually send a digital touch message to another person with an iPhone. So to do that look for this icon right here in the Apps. Then you could tap here, set a color, and then you can draw something and then send it. They get a little message that looks like this. They tap it and they will actually see the drawing in the way that you drew it. 
Now another thing you've got here in the apps below here is this little App Store button. Tap that and you could see other apps that interact with Messages in different ways. One of the coolest things that you can do is you can actually play games with other people. So, most of these you're going to see are just these little games that are just sent back and forth. It's not just simple text messages. It's actually a little game window that appears and you can take a shot in a little pool game or maybe play a hand in a card game that kind of thing. It just goes back and forth. It's a great way to have a conversation with a friend or family member but you don't need to actually have a topic to talk about. For instance a parent or grandparent can have a great conversation with a child just playing a game back and forth that goes on for days or weeks.
Now in addition to typing you can also hand write messages. To do that on an iPhone you need to turn it horizontally. Once you do you're going to see an extra button at the bottom right corner. You could see it right there. Tap that and now you can write something using your finger and send it. 
There so many other fun things you can do. For instance here is Stickers and you can pick an Animoji or one of your Memojis that you've created and then you can send basically a still image or you can tap here and then you've got your Memoji or Animoji and you can see how its actually using the camera to mimic what it is you're doing and you can record with your voice your Memoji or Animoji saying something and send that as a message. Tons of fun stuff to do. 
So I hope you found this useful or at least it has encouraged you to play around a little bit more with the Messages App to see what's there. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 10 Responses to “20 Hidden iPhone Messages Features”

Mark Holmes

1 year ago

Gary,
Great ideas! Some I knew, but some I didn't , so very cool. One thing you might have also added is using swipe on the keyboard to type faster.

Mark

Gary Rosenzweig

Mark: Check out this one: https://macmost.com/comparing-the-4-ways-to-type-on-your-iphone.html

Great and FUN info, Thanks Gary !

Gene

Do all of these cool features work only iPhone to iPhone?

Gene: some are for iMessages yes. But others like GIFs, the trackpad tip, etc, will work for any recipient.

Joe S.

Tried the single period preceding a URL to avoid 'sending' a preview. Didn't work for me until I discovered/uncovered if I add a period immediately following the URL and preceding the URL the preview won't show just the link. Who knew?

Sam Walker

That was a great update & refresh of functions in the current iMessage App. Be good to Humans, Thanks!

Ira

9 months ago

Can you explain how to delete attached photos in messages? When I try to delete them, they come right back within an hour or so. Must I delete them on all of my devices? This sounds backwards. Shouldn’t my devices keep track of my latest additions and deletions and synchronize that way?

Ira: Deleting them should delete them. Not sure why they are coming back for you. You'll need to contact Apple Support to investigate.

Comments Closed.

20 Hidden iPhone Messages Features

Comments: 10 Responses to “20 Hidden iPhone Messages Features”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information