Spice Up Your iPhone Messages in iOS 18

I’d like to think that my witty wordplay is enough to get my thoughts across when I text friends on my iPhone — but let’s be honest, sometimes I really just want to emphasize something with bold or italic text. Or make the letters explode. The Messages app in iOS 18 adds those effects and much more.

Animated effects and text formatting make chatting more fun, and RCS support means your friends with Android phones can finally send high-resolution images. If your brain is active late at night, you can schedule texts to be sent at a more reasonable hour without waking up anyone.

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

Read more: iOS 18 Review: Get Ready to Customize Your iPhone Even More

Also, if you’re just getting started with the new system, be sure to check out the seven settings you need to change right now. And don’t miss these nine hidden iOS 18 features.

Thanks to RCS messaging, you can better communicate with Android users

The addition of Rich Communication Services protocol to Messages should reduce friction when texting with friends who own Android phones. It enables read receipts and gives you higher-quality image transfers and end-to-end encryption (but keeps Android message bubbles green).

If your carrier supports RCS, it’s likely you don’t need to do anything to use it. Go to Settings > Apps > Messages > RCS Messaging and make sure the RCS Messaging is turned on.

You can also send text messages via satellite

The Emergency SOS via Satellite feature that was introduced with the iPhone 14 has been a literal lifesaver. When you have no cellular signal, you can connect to a satellite and exchange short text messages with emergency responders.

With that infrastructure in place, Apple is opening Messages up to nonemergency texts too. If you’re out of range of cellular or Wi-Fi networks and own an iPhone 14 or later, Messages will prompt you to connect to a satellite. While connected, the Dynamic Island expands to help you stay pointed at the satellites overhead.

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

You can now format text in Messages

I don’t want to come across as “that typography guy,” but it has long bothered me that one of the only ways to emphasize text in Messages has been to put it in all caps. We as a society haven’t developed typography over hundreds of years and invented the most sophisticated computing devices just to shout at each other over text.

So yeah, I guess I am that guy. I feel better now that I can express myself using bold, italic, underlined and strikethrough text in conversations with my friends who are also running iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia.

You can apply formatting to an entire phrase, individual words and letters, or combinations of those, like so:

1. Type your message.
2. To apply formatting to the entire message, tap the Formatting button in the suggestion bar; all of your text is highlighted. Or, to add emphasis to only a word, double-tap to select the text and then press the Formatting button. You can also choose Text Effects from the options that appear above the selection.
3. Tap one of the options at the top of the formatting panel that replaces the keyboard: bold, italic, underline or strikethrough.

If you format a message that is sent to someone running an older system, they’ll see only plain text, which could be confusing if you’ve used strikethrough to indicate removed words.

You can animate your text messages

Here’s where I toss aside any pretense of being a typographical purist. A message or selected words or letters can be animated in one of eight styles. Need to deliver some big news with more emphasis than bold text? With iOS 18, there are several new animation options you can add to your text. The Big animation expands the size of your letters. Or perhaps just mentioning that it’s freezing outside doesn’t convey the teeth-chattering cold — apply the Jitter animation to make the letters shake.

Adding animation is just as easy as formatting text:

1. Type your message.
2. Tap the Formatting button in the suggestion bar to select the entire text. Or, select individual words or letters and then press that button.
3. Tap one of the animation styles to apply it: Big, Small, Shake, Nod, Explode, Ripple, Bloom or Jitter.

You can mix animations within a message by making selections and applying different styles to them. However, you can’t apply more than one animation to a selection; a word cannot shake and then explode, for example. As with text formatting, a message shows up as plain text for anyone not running 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’s engineers can make something as complex as eye-tracking for the Vision Pro, they can make this happen in a subsequent update.

You can turn off auto-playing 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 pulsing, resizing, jittering and exploding texts. You think, with all that animation tempting a migraine, what has Apple unleashed?

Don’t stress, because you can set the animations to not automatically repeat. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and turn off Auto-Play Message Effects. Your friend can still send animated text that will play once when you receive it, but you won’t be subjected to the animation repeating.

How to add any emoji or sticker as a tapback in Messages

Sometimes words are unnecessary. You could reply to someone’s message using a Tapback icon to express love, agreement, disagreement, laughter, alarm or curiosity. They’re quick to apply and get your reply across easily.

They’ve also been limited to just six icons, and in monochrome no less.

With iOS 18, Messages adds color (and some cartoony shading) to those icons, but also the ability to reply with any emoji or sticker. Here’s how to do it:

1. Touch and hold a message until you see the Tapback bubble appear.
2. Tap the emoji button just below the other icons. Or, you can swipe left on the bubble to view recent emojis, stickers and a gray emoji button that leads to the emoji library.
3. In the emoji picker, choose a sticker (left side) or any of the hundreds of emoji.

You can schedule text messages using Send Later

I know which friends are likely up at midnight to reply to a text, and which I’d probably wake up. Because I want the second category to continue to 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 reply. 

To send a message at a specified time, do this:

1. Type your message.
2. Tap the More (+) button.
3. Tap Send Later; you may need to swipe up to find it in the list of apps and features.
4. In the time picker that appears, set a day and time to send the message.
5. Tap the Send Message button (the up arrow) to schedule it.

Scheduled messages show up with a faint dashed border.

If you need to change the timing later, tap Edit above the message and then choose Edit Time from the menu. Also, if you find yourself scheduling messages often, I recommend moving the Send Later option higher in the More list so it’s easier to access.

For more, see how Apple redesigned the Photos app in iOS 18 and learn everything about the new Passwords app that syncs across devices and platforms.