How To Schedule a Text Message On an iPhone

You can use a personal automation to schedule a text message to be sent at a specific time with your iPhone. There are a few catches, though.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can schedule a text message to be sent later on your iPhone. 
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Now there's no real way to schedule a text message on your iPhone to be sent later. But you can do a bit of a work around using this Shortcuts App. So I'll launch the Shortcuts App and then go at the bottom to Automation. We want to create a personal automation that's going to trigger at a specific time. So we'll do that and you can see one of the options here is Time Of Day. Now this sounds like what we want but there is a catch. Let's schedule it for a specific time of day and let's set it up so that it is going to take place just slightly in the future here. Now at the bottom you have to choose a Repeat. It's either going to repeat daily, weekly, or monthly. Chances are you don't want to send the same text message every day, week, or month. You just want to send it this one time. So, we'll set it to Monthly which means we're going to have to remember to turn this Off before the next month rolls around.
Now we'll tap Next. Now we want to add Send Message as the Action. If you don't see it here under Suggestions you can always tap Add Action, search for it or search for it down here. I'm just going to add it right from here. So Send Message is what we want. Now you get to choose what the message should say. Let's just do a test message. Then you get to choose the Recipient. So tap here and then type the name from your Contacts or the email address or the phone number for the recipient. You can add multiple ones if you want. Then tap Done. 
Now we're not quite finished with this automation yet. You have to tap Next and then the very important setting you need here is Ask Before Running. You need to turn that Off. If you don't turn that off you're going to get a notification and you're going to have to perform an action to actually send the message. You might as well make it a scheduled reminder then. The idea is to have this sent without you doing anything. So we'll set this to Don't Ask and we'll turn on Notify When Run. Why Not. That sounds like a good option to have if you're doing something with your iPhone you'll notice that that appears. Then we'll tap Done. 
Now whatever it is we're doing it will actually send that message at that time. It doesn't matter if your iPhone is awake or asleep or if you are with it or not. It should just run automatically. But of course it does matter if your iPhone is On or Off. Naturally you wouldn't normally be turning your iPhone off. Now, you have to, of course, remember to go back into Shortcuts and get rid of this automation afterwards. You can set a Reminder to do that or just trust yourself to remember or maybe if you're doing a bunch of these just remember at the beginning of every month to kind of clear them out. 
So the functionality isn't perfect but it does allow you to do this if you really need it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Schedule a Text Message On an iPhone”

Cyndi

3 years ago

Don’t see Automation in my shortcuts on iPhone SEII.

Very useful! Hadn't even began to think about using Shortcuts for this. Appreciated!

Gary Rosenzweig

Cyndi: Are you running an older version of iOS?

Comments Closed.

How To Schedule a Text Message On an iPhone

Comments: 3 Responses to “How To Schedule a Text Message On an iPhone”

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