Did you hear the news? Texting just got a lot more customizable.
During Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC 2024) on Monday, Apple announced new iOS 18 features for iMessage and Mail, including more tapbacks, the ability to schedule texts, new text formatting, text effects, and more.
New iMessage features coming to iOS 18
With iOS 18, users will be able to add new effects in response to texts. Currently, you can only respond with a heart, thumbs up, thumbs down, laugh, emphasize, and question mark tapbacks. With the new update, you’ll be able to choose from a whole host of emojis for tapping back.
Most notably, you can schedule texts ahead of time — so you’ll never have an excuse to miss a birthday again.
Users will also be able to format their texts with bold, italic, strikethrough, and more, turning an ordinary message into something you’d see on Tumblr in 2015. There are also new text effects, like jitter, bloom, ripple, nod, shake, big, small, and more, which you can use directly on a specific word in a text. And all of those iMessages and SMS texts can be sent via satellite now.
Most users are pretty elated about the new features.
One feature that felt notably absent was Apple’s move to adopt Rich Communication Services (RCS). Many fans anticipated that this would take center stage, as it would replace SMS and make texting your friends with Androids far less annoying — and hopefully will help us evade the dreaded green bubble.
But that feature was mentioned for maybe one second without much elaboration.
New Mail features coming to iOS 18
Beyond iMessage, Apple also introduced new organization and categorization features for the Mail app, which now enables users to filter their emails by categories. You can also group all emails from the same sender into one category. For example, say you have a flight coming up; now, all of your flight emails can be grouped together under one category for easy searching.
It will be available later this year and is objectively much less exciting than the iMessage updates and announcements.
