Chapter 7. Texting & Messages

iMessages happen automatically. All you do is open Messages and create a text message as usual. If your recipient is using an Apple gadget with iOS 5 or later, or a Mac using OS X Mountain Lion or later...and has an iCloud account...and hasn’t turned off iMessages, then your iPhone sends your message as an iMessage automatically. It somehow knows.

You’ll know, too, because the light-gray text in the typing box says “iMessage” instead of “Text Message.” And each message you send shows up in a blue speech bubble instead of a green one. The button is blue, too.

In fact, when you’re addressing a new text message, the names that appear in blue represent people with iMessages gadgets, so you know in advance who’s cool and who’s not. (The green names are those who do not have iMessage. The gray ones—well, your iPhone doesn’t know yet.)

The actual mechanics of sending and receiving messages are essentially the same, whether it’s SMS messages or iMessage. So the rest of this chapter applies equally well to both, with a few exceptions.

Receiving Texts

When you get a text, the iPhone plays a sound. It’s a shiny glockenspiel ding, unless you’ve changed the standard sound or assigned a different text tone to this specific person.

The phone also displays the name or number of the sender and the message. Unless you’ve fooled around with the Notifications settings, the message appears at the top of the screen, disappearing momentarily on its own, so as not to interrupt what you’re doing. (You can also flick it up and away if it’s blocking your screen.)

If the iPhone was asleep, it lights up long enough to display the message right on its Lock screen. At that point, you have a few options:

Ignore it. After a moment, the screen goes dark again. The incoming-text notification bubble will be there the next time you wake it.
Answer it. On an iPhone 6s or 7, hard-press right on the notification to expand it into a full keyboard, so that you can respond without even unlocking the phone; on an earlier model, swipe to the left on the notification bubble to reveal View and Clear buttons. See Notifications While You’re Working for more on responding to texts from the Lock screen.
Open it. If you swipe a notification bubble to the right, you’re prompted to log in; you wind up looking at the message in the Messages app.

Tap a person’s listing to open the actual messages you’ve exchanged, going back in time to your very first texts.

These listings represent people, not conversations. For example, if you had a text message exchange with Chris last week, then a quick way to send a new text message to Chris (even on a totally different subject) is to open that “conversation” and simply send a “reply.” The iPhone saves you the administrative work of creating a new message, choosing a recipient, and so on.

Similarly, if you’ve sent a message to a certain group of people, you can address a new note to the same group by tapping the old message’s row here.

Tip

Hey, you can search text messages! At the very top of the list, there’s a search box. You can actually find text inside your message collection.

To return to the Messages list from the actual chat view, tap at top left.

If having these old exchanges hanging around presents a security (or marital) risk, you can delete them in either of two ways:

Delete an entire conversation. Swipe away the conversation. At the list of conversations, swipe your finger leftward across the conversation’s name. That makes the Delete confirmation button appear (iMessages, right).
Alternate method: Above the Messages list, tap Edit, tap to select () the conversations you want to ditch, and then tap the Delete button.
Delete just one text. Open the conversation so that you’re viewing the cascade of bubbles representing the texts back and forth.
Now, this technique is a little weird, but here goes: Hold down your finger on the individual message you want to delete (or double-tap it). When the white panel of options appears, tap More.
Now you can delete all the exchanges simultaneously (tap Delete All) or vaporize only particularly incriminating messages. To do that, tap the selection circles for the individual balloons you want to nuke, putting checks () by them; then tap the to delete them all at once. Tap Delete Message to confirm.

Note

Interestingly, you can also forward some messages you’ve selected in this way. When you tap the Forward button (), a new outgoing text message appears, ready for you to specify the new recipient.

Mark All as Read

Here’s a handy option: When you get off the plane, home from your honeymoon, you might see Messages bristling with notifications about texts you missed. Now you can mark them all as read at once, so the blue dots don’t distract you anymore.

To do that, on the Messages screen, tap Edit and then Read All.

The Details Screen

The Details screen offers six options that you may find handy in the midst of a chat. To see them, tap at the top of the screen. Here’s what you see now:

Call. If all this fussy typing is driving you nuts, you can jump onto a phone or video call. At the top of the Details screen, a little strip of icons awaits. They include (place a FaceTime video call), (send a text right from the Details page), and (conclude the transaction by voice, with a phone call or FaceTime audio call). You can also tap this person’s name to open the corresponding Contacts card, loaded with different ways to call, text, or email.
Send My Current Location. Hit this button to transmit a map to the other person, showing exactly where you are, so that person can come and pick you up, meet you for drinks, rescue you when your car doesn’t start, or whatever.
If your correspondent has an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, she can open the map you’ve sent in Maps, ready to guide her with driving directions. If she’s one of the unenlightened—she owns some non-Apple phone—then she gets what’s called a Location vCard, which she may be able to open into a mapping app on her own phone.
Note
If Location Services isn’t turned on (Privacy), the phone asks you to turn it on now. After all, you can’t very well share your location if your phone has no idea where you are.
Share My Location. If you’re moving around, you may prefer this option. It sends your whereabouts to your correspondent—and keeps that location updated as you meander through the city, for a period of time that you specify (One Hour, Until End of Day, or Indefinitely). That’s great when you’re club-hopping, say, and trying to help some buddies catch up with you. As your location changes, the map you sent to your recipient updates itself.
At any time—even before the hour, day, or eternity is up—you can stop broadcasting your location to this person; just open the Details screen again and tap Stop Sharing My Location.
Do Not Disturb. Otherwise known as “mute,” “enough already,” or “shut up.” It makes your phone stop ringing or vibrating with every new message from this person or group. Handy when you’re trying to get work done, when you’re being bombarded by silly group chitchat, or when someone’s stalking you.
Send Read Receipts. If this is an iMessages chat, then in iOS 10, for the first time, you can turn read receipts (Messages) on or off independently for each chat partner, using this switch.
Images/Attachments. Crazy cool! Here are all the photos and other attachments you’ve ever exchanged with this texting correspondent, going back to forever. (Tap Images to see only photos and videos; Attachments shows everything else.)
You can tap one of these tiles to open it; hard-press one to “peek” at it (Peek and Pop); or hold your finger down lightly to get choices like Copy, Delete, and More. (There’s usually nothing under More except Save Image, which copies the texted photo into your Photos collection, and a button.)

Capturing Messages and Files

In general, text messages are fleeting; most people have no idea how they might capture them and save them forever. Copy and Paste help with that.

Some of the stuff in those text messages is easy to capture, though. For example, if you’re on the receiving end of a photo or a video, tap the small preview in the speech bubble. It opens at full-screen size so you can have a better look at it—and if it’s a video, there’s a button so you can play it. Either way, if the picture or video is good enough to preserve, tap the button. You’re offered a Save Image or Save Video button; tap to add the photo or video to your iPhone’s collection.

If someone sends you contact information (a phone number, for example), you can add it to your address book. Just tap inside that bubble and then tap either Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact.

If you’d like to preserve the actual text messages, you have a few options:

Copy them individually. Hold your finger down on a text bubble, and then tap Copy. At this point, you can paste that one message into, for example, an email message.
Forward them. Hold your finger down on a text bubble; tap More, and then tap the selection checkmarks beside all the messages you want to pass on. Now you can tap the Forward () button. All the selected messages go along for the ride in a single consolidated message to a new text-message addressee.
Save the iMessages. If you have a Mac, then your iMessages (that is, notes to and from other Apple gadgets) show up in the Messages chat program. You can save them or copy them there.
Tip
Behind the scenes, the Mac stores all your chat transcripts in a hidden folder as special text files. To get there, press the Option key as you open the Go menu; choose Go→Library. The transcripts are in date-stamped folders in the Messages→Archive folder.
Use an app. There’s no built-in way to save regular text messages in bulk. There are, however, apps that can do this for you, like iMazing (for Windows) or iBackup Viewer (free for the Mac). They work from the invisible backup files that you create when you sync your phone with iTunes.

Tapbacks (iMessages Only)

How many trillions of times a day do people respond to texts with repetitive reactions like “LOL” and “Awww” and “!!!!!”? Many. It’s how you demonstrate to your chat partner that you appreciate the import of her text.

If you and your buddy are both using iOS 10 or macOS Sierra, though, you’ve now got a quicker, less cluttery, more visual way to indicate those sorts of standard emotional reactions: what Apple calls tapbacks.

If you double-tap a message you’ve been sent, you’re offered a Tapback palette: six little reaction symbols: a heart, a thumbs up, a thumbs down, “ha ha,” two exclamation points, and a question mark. When you choose one, it appears instantly on your screen and your buddy’s. You can use them to stamp your reaction onto the other person’s text (or one of your own, if you’re weird).

In short, the tapback palette lets you react to a text without having to type anything.

Tip

What’s cool is that you can change your tapback icon later, if new information affects your reaction. Just double-tap again to bring up the same palette.

Sending Messages

If you want to text somebody you’ve texted before, the quickest way, as noted, is simply to resume one of the “conversations” already listed in the Messages list.

You can also tap a person’s name in Contacts, or next to a listing in Recents or Favorites, to open the Info screen; tap Send Message.

Note

In some cases, the iPhone shows you your entire Contacts list, even people with no cellphone numbers. But you can’t text somebody who doesn’t have a cellphone.

Actually, options to fire off text messages lurk all over the iPhone—anytime you see the Share () button, which is frequently. The resulting Share screen includes options like Email, Twitter, Facebook—and Message. Tapping Message sends you back to Messages, where the photo, video, page, or other item is ready to send. (More on multimedia messages shortly.)

In other words, sending a text message to anyone who lives in your iPhone is only a couple of taps away.

Note

You can tap that button to add another recipient for this same message (or tap the 123 button to type in a phone number). Repeat as necessary; they’ll all get the same message.

Yet another way to start: Tap the button at the top of the Messages screen. Or, easiest of all, use Siri. Say, “Text Casey” or whatever.

In any case, the text message composition screen is waiting for you now. You’re ready to type (or dictate) and send!

Audio Texting (iMessages Only)

Sometimes an audio recording is just better than a typed message, especially when music, children, animals, or a lot of emotion in your voice are involved. You could probably argue that audio texting is also better than typed texting when you’re driving, jogging, or operating industrial machinery.

If you and your friend are both Apple people, your phone can become a sort of walkie-talkie.

Hold down the button at the right end of the Messages text box. Once the sound-level meter appears, say something. When you’re finished, release your finger. Now you can tap to cancel, to play it back, or to send what you said to your buddy as an audio recording.

Tip

If you’re pretty confident that what you’ve said is correct, you can slide your thumb directly from the button straight up to the to send it.

The guy on the receiving end doesn’t even have to touch the screen to listen. He just holds the phone up to his head! Your audio message plays automatically. (This works even if his phone is asleep and locked.)

And then get this: To reply, he doesn’t have to touch anything or look at the screen, either. He just holds the phone to his head again and speaks! Once he lowers the phone, his recording shoots back to you.

Throughout all of this, you don’t have to look at the phone, put your glasses on, or touch the screen. It’s a whole new form of quick exchanges—something that combines the best of a walkie-talkie (instant audio) with the best of text messages (you can listen and reply at your leisure).

Tip

The off switch for the Raise to Listen/Raise to Speak feature is in Settings→Messages. But why would you want to disable such a cool feature?

Now then: That business about holding down the button, talking, and then sliding up is probably how you’ll always do it—once you become friends with this feature. But, at the outset, you can proceed more cautiously.

If, after speaking, you simply lift your finger from the glass, you can tap to review your recording before sending it, or the to cancel the whole thing.

But, really, it’s that hold down/speak/slide up business that makes audio transmissions so much fun.

Tip

Audio eats up a lot more space on your phone than text. If you do a lot of audio messaging then, over time, those audio snippets can fill up your storage.

That’s why iOS comes set to delete each audio message 2 minutes after you receive it. If that prospect worries you, then visit Settings→Messages. Under Audio Messages, you can tap Expire and change that setting to Never.

Even if you leave it set to 2 minutes, you’re free to preserve especially good audio messages forever; just tap the tiny Keep button that appears below each one.

Help with Emoji and Info-Bits

Apple has done quite a bit of work in iOS 10 to make Messages a more helpful assistant, especially in the area of emoji—those popular little icons once known as smileys or emoticons. Now there are hundreds upon hundreds of them, representing people, places, things, food, emotions, household objects, and on and on.

Until iOS 10 came along, finding and using emoji was something of a headache, simply because there were so many. You’d have to scroll through page after page of them, eyes bugging out trying to spot the one you needed. But no longer! Consider:

Auto-emoji. If iOS 10 has an emoji symbol for a word you’ve just typed, it shows that symbol right in the row of autocomplete suggestions (facing page, left). If you tap the emoji before tapping the space bar, then you replace the typed word with the image. If you tap space and then tap the emoji, you get both the word and the picture.
Auto-emoji part 2. When you tap the button on your keyboard, Messages highlights, in color, any words in your freshly typed (but not yet sent) message that can be replaced with an emoji symbol (facing page, right). Tap any highlighted word to swap in the icon. That’s a huge timesaver—you’re spared the ritual of scrolling to find the one you want.
Jumbo emoji. When you send one, two, or three emoji symbols as your entire response, they appear three times as large as normal (at least if the recipient has iOS 10 or macOS Sierra).
Auto-info. You know the QuickType word suggestions above the keyboard (QuickType)? In Messages, those suggestions include information you might want to type.

If you type “I’m available at,” then one of the suggestion buttons includes the next open slot on your calendar. If you say “Stacy’s number is,” then the button offers her phone number (if she’s in your Contacts). If someone texts you, “Where are you?” then one of the buttons offers to drop a Map button. Quite handy, actually.

The Finger-Sketch Pad

New and crazy in iOS 10: If you turn the phone 90 degrees, the screen becomes a whiteboard. What you scribble with your finger looks like real ink on paper and gets sent as a graphic. (You also see your previous masterpieces displayed here for quick reuse.) Just so cool.

Of course, this whiteboard business deprives you of the 90-degree behavior in previous versions of iOS: A wider keyboard and, on Plus-sized iPhones, a separate column that lists your various chats in progress.

If you miss that arrangement, no problem: On the whiteboard screen, just tap the button in the corner. The keyboard pops up.

From now on, turning the phone 90 degrees will bring back the keyboard—until you change your mind (by tapping the button in the corner of the keyboard).

Sending with Animated Fun

If you’re used to older versions of the Messages app, the first thing you might notice is that the Send button no longer says “Send.” It’s now a blue up-arrow (). And it’s more than a button.

If you hard-press (or long-press) the blue arrow, you get a palette of four new sending styles.

The first three—Slam, Loud, and Gentle—animate the typography of your text to make it bang down, swell up, and so on, at least when you’re sending to fellow iOS 10 or Mac fans. For example, Slam makes your text fly across the screen and then thud into the ground, making a shock wave ripple through the other messages.

The fourth special “Send with effect” is called Invisible Ink. It obscures your message with animated glitter dust until your recipient drags a finger across it (as shown at bottom above).

This idea is great for guessing games and revealing dramatic news, of course. But when you’re sending, ahem, spicy text messages, it also prevents embarrassment if the recipient’s phone is lying in public view.

When you hard-press (or long-press) the , the fifth option is Screen. It opens pages of full-screen animations. These, upon sending, fill the entire background of the Messages window to indicate your reaction to something: ascending balloons, a laser show, fireworks, a shooting star, falling confetti, and so on. Swipe horizontally to preview each style before you commit to it.

If your text says “Congrats,” “Happy birthday,” or “Happy New Year,” Messages fills the screen with a corresponding animation automatically. Which may or may not get old fast.

Note

The full juiciness of these text and screen styles is available only if your recipient also has iOS 10. So what if you’re sending to an Android phone, an older iPhone, or a Mac?

In that case, the animation you’ve so carefully picked out doesn’t show up. Instead, the other guy can only read about what you intended. He’ll see the somewhat baffling written notation “sent with Slam effect,” “sent with Balloons,” or whatever.

The “Drawer”

iOS 10 introduces a nearly overwhelming new universe of expressive possibilities in texting. Apple has stuffed them all into three buttons that generally hide to the left of the typing box in Messages.

Tap the to see them.

Those three little buttons (shown on the facing page) may not look like much. But each is, in fact, a portal into a different vast universe of options. Let’s tackle them one at a time.

Photos and Videos

The first button in the “drawer” () opens the Photos picker, new in iOS 10.

It consists of a simplified Camera app and a simplified Camera Roll of your existing pictures—but it also gives you access to your actual Camera app and your actual Camera Roll.

To take a new photo, tap anywhere in the live preview (you don’t have to aim for the white round shutter button). Wait patiently until it appears in the Messages text box, ready to send.
The Photos browser also displays two scrolling rows of all photos and videos you’ve taken recently. Tap one (or more) that you want to send.
To take a video, panorama, time-lapse video, slo-mo video, or any other fancier shot, tap the 〈 (next to the camera preview, shown above) and then tap Camera. You’ve just opened the regular Camera app.
If you tap the 〈 and then tap Photo Library, you open the regular Photos app, where you can find your albums, videos, and other organ-izational structures of the regular Photos app, for ease in finding an older picture or video to send.

Once you’ve inserted a photo into the text box, you can edit it (that’s new), draw on it with your finger (also new), and even type text on it (definitely new). Just tap it to open the editing window, and then tap Edit (to edit using the photo-editing tools described in iMovie for iPhone) or Markup (to draw or type on it, as described in Marking Up Your Photos).

Note

The new Markup features are mostly described in Chapter 10 of this book, but they’re super-useful in Messages. It can be amusing and educational to make notes on a photo, draw a little mustache on someone you don’t like, or enlarge a certain detail for your chat partner’s enlightenment.

You now return to your SMS conversation in progress—but now that photo or video appears inside the Send box. Type a caption or a comment, if you like. Then tap to fire it off to your buddy. Or you can tap the × if you change your mind about sending this photo.

Digital Touch

The second drawer button, , opens a palette of crazy interactive art features, mostly inherited from the Apple Watch.

Here’s what all these controls do:

Color picker. Tap to open a palette of seven colors, which will determine your “paint” color in the next step.
Tip
You’re not limited to those seven colors. You can hard-press or long-press any one of those swatches to open a complete color wheel, from which you can dial up any shade you like. (Tap Done when done.)
Doodle with your finger. Once you’ve selected a color, you can start drawing on the black background. There’s no eraser and no Undo, but this should be fine for quick scrawls, comic exasperated faces, or technical blueprints.
Tip
A much larger, full-screen canvas awaits you when using the Digital Touch feature. Tap the at lower right to perform the expansion. At that point, the (top right) collapses the panel to its smaller incarnation and takes you back to your chat.
Tap to send your sketch. What’s cool is that if your recipient is an iMessage customer, she’ll see the actual playback of your drawing, recreated before her eyes. (If you’re corresponding with someone who doesn’t have iOS 10, he’ll receive your doodle as a finished piece of artwork, without the benefit of seeing its animated creation.)
Shoot a photo or video, and then deface it. Tap the icon to open the new Selfie camera mode. Here, you’ll find both a white “take a still” shutter button and a red “record a video” button (). (The button is here, too, in case you want to take a picture using the phone’s back camera.)
You can draw on the photo after you’ve taken it; in fact, you can even draw on a video, or stamp a Digital Touch graphic onto it (see below), while you’re recording it. Your iMessages recipients will see the doodle “played back” on their screens, recreated line by line as you drew it. (Non-iMessages folk simply receive the finished sketch superimposed on the video or photo.)
Send animated feelings. The right side of the Digital Touch screen shows what look like three little buttons. In fact, though, they’re just a cheat sheet.
They’re meant to teach you about the five canned animations you can generate by tapping or pressing your fingers on the black canvas here: an animated ring of fire, fireball, kiss, beating heart, and broken heart. (Tap anywhere on these indicators to open the full cheat sheet.)
You tap for a ring of fire (as many as you want); hold down your finger for a flaming fireball; do a two-finger tap for a lip-kiss; hold with two fingers for a beating heart; and tap-and-hold/drag-downward for an animated breaking heart. (No, the heart doesn’t beat at the speed of your pulse, as it does on the Apple Watch; the iPhone doesn’t have a heart-rate sensor.)

Tip

You can perform any of these special taps while you’re recording a video, too.

As you explore these Digital Touch options, you’ll gradually become aware of how fluid and intermixable they are. You can draw or stamp fire/kiss/heart animations on top of a photo or video you’re recording, for example. Or, after tapping the icon, you can draw something—for example, a hand-sketched frame—and then take a photo or video that goes inside it.

As usual, fellow iMessages people will see all these glorious animations played back just as you saw them—but non-Apple people receive only a finished image or video.

The Messages App Store

The third icon in the “drawer,” the , is where Messages really goes off the rails—into a world of options beyond belief.

Apple has created an app store just for add-ons to the Messages app. You can download all kinds of tiny apps that work within Messages. Some are “stickers” or animations that you can stamp onto other people’s texts.

Others simply give you access, while you’re chatting, to popular apps like Yelp or OpenTable (so that you can research or book restaurants), Airbnb (to book lodging), Square Cash or Circle Pay or Venmo (to send money directly to friends), Fandango (to research and book movies), iTranslate (to convert your texts to or from another language), Kayak (to book flights), Doodle (to find a mutually free time to meet), hundreds of popular games, and on and on. The idea is that you can do all of this right there in Messages, collaboratively with your buddy on the other end.

Apple starts you out with two such apps:

Images. This one is a searchable database of “reaction GIFs,” which are very short, silent video loops, usually swiped from popular movies or TV shows. People (well, the young ones) use reaction GIFs to respond to something someone says. For example, if you text your friend about a disastrous decision you made today, you might get, in response, a 2-second loop of Kevin Spacey sarcastically slow-clapping.
Music. This mini-app lets you send a 30-second snippet of any song on your phone—handy if your conversation is running along the lines of “You know that song?” (If you’re both Apple Music subscribers, you can both play the entire song.)

The “home screen” for your Messages apps awaits behind the button at the bottom left corner of the screen (facing page, left). If you then tap Store, you’ll find a universe of add-ons, both free and costing a couple of bucks. You can search or browse this store just as you do the regular App Store (right).

For example, you can find them using the Featured and Categories tabs, or the search box at the top. Or you can tap Manage to see a list of the apps you already have on your phone that can show up within Messages, if you flip their switches here.

Some of the most popular “apps” are sets of “stickers”—animated or still icons—that you can drag anywhere onto any message you’ve sent, thereby adding your own sarcastic or emotional commentary to it (facing page, left). The Messages app store gives access to endless sets of free or for-purchase stickers.

Once you’ve downloaded a few apps, their icons appear whenever you tap the button; swipe horizontally to see the various “pages” of them.

When you tap an app to use it, you may discover that it’s fully operable within a small space below your chat, as in the examples on the facing page at right. Others open up into a full-screen app that really doesn’t interact much with Messages itself.

Messages Prefs

You might not think that something as simple as text messaging would involve a lot of fine print, but you’d be wrong.

Settings for Texts and iMessages

Tap Settings→Messages to find some intriguing options:

iMessage. This is the on/off switch for the entire iMessages feature. It’s hard to imagine why you would want to, but you know—whatever floats your boat.
Show Contact Photos. If you turn this on, you’ll see a little round photo next to each texting correspondent in the chat list and at the top of a chat window—or the person’s initials, if there’s no photo available. If you turn this off, then you see the person’s name at the top of Messages instead.
Text Message Forwarding. This switch is the gateway to the cool Continuity feature described in Texting from the Mac, in which you can use your Mac to send regular text messages to non-Apple phones.
Send Read Receipts. When you turn this option on, your iMessage correspondents will know when you’ve seen their messages. The word “Read” will appear beneath each sent message that you’ve actually seen. Turn this off only if it deprives you of the excuse for not responding promptly (“Hey, I never even saw your message!”).
Tip
In iOS 10, you can turn read receipts on or off independently for each chat partner; see Capturing Messages and Files.
Send as SMS. If iMessages is unavailable (meaning that you have no Internet connection at all), then your phone will send your message as a regular text message, via the regular cellphone voice network.
Send & Receive. Tap here to specify what cellphone numbers and email addresses you want to register with iMessages. (Your laptop, obviously, does not have a phone number, which is why iMessages gives you the option of using an email address.)
When people send iMessages to you, they can use any of the numbers or addresses you turn on here. That’s the only time these numbers and addresses matter. You see the same messages exactly the same way on all your Apple gadgets, no matter what email address or phone number the sender used for you.
(If you scroll down on this Settings screen, you’ll see the Start new conversations from options. This is where you specify which number or address others will see when you initiate the message. It really doesn’t make much difference which one you choose.)
MMS Messaging. MMS messages are like text messages—except that they can also include audio clips, video clips, or photos, as already described. In the rare event that your cell company charges extra for these messages, you have an on/off switch here. If you turn it off, then you can send only plain text messages.
Group Messaging. Suppose you’re sending a message to three friends. When they reply to your message, the responses will appear in a Messages thread that’s dedicated to this particular group. It works only if all of you have turned on Group Messaging. (Note to the paranoid: It also means that everyone sees everyone else’s phone numbers or email addresses.)
Messages tries to help you keep everybody straight by displaying their headshots (if you have them in Contacts), or their initials (if you don’t).
Show Subject Field. If email messages can have subject lines, why not text messages? Now, on certain newfangled phones (like yours), they can; the message arrives with a little dividing line between the subject and the body, offering your recipient a hint as to what it’s about.
Note
It’s OK to leave the subject line blank. But if you leave the body blank, the message won’t send. (Incidentally, when you do fill in the subject line, what you’re sending is an MMS message, rather than a plain old text message.)
Character Count. If a message is longer than 160 characters, the iPhone breaks it up into multiple messages. That’s convenient, sure. But if your cellphone plan permits only a fixed number of messages a month, you could wind up sending (and spending) more than you intended.
The Character Count feature can help. When it’s on, after your typing wraps to a second line, a little counter appears just above the Send button (“71/160,” for example). It tracks how many characters remain within your 160-character limit for one message. (Of course, if you’re sending an iMessage, you don’t care how long it is; there’s no length limit.)
Blocked. You can block people who are harassing or depressing you with their texts or calls. Tap here to view the list of people in your Contacts app you’ve decided to block; tap Add New to add new people to the list.
Keep Messages. How long do you want your text messages to hang around on your phone? This is a question of privacy, of storage, and of your personality. In any case, here’s where you get a choice of 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever.
Filter Unknown Senders. When you turn this on, the iPhone turns off notifications for senders not in your Contacts and sorts them into a separate list, which you can find in the “Unknown Senders” section of the Messages app.
Expire. The iPhone ordinarily deletes audio and video messages a couple of minutes after they arrive, to avoid filling up your phone with old, no-longer-relevant audio and video files. The two Expire controls here let you turn off that automatic deletion (by choosing Never).
Raise to Listen. Here’s the on/off switch for the “raise to listen”/“raise to talk” features described earlier, where the phone plays back audio messages, and sends your spoken replies, automatically when you hold it up to your head. You might want to turn that feature off if you discover that the phone is playing back audio messages unexpectedly—or, worse, recording and sending them when you didn’t mean it.
Low Quality Image Mode. This feature, new in iOS 10, is a gift to anyone who has to pay for cellular service. It automatically reduces the size (resolution) and quality (compression) of any photo you send to around 100 kilobytes. At this point, sending 50 low-quality photos uses about the same amount of cellular data as one full-blown iPhone photo. Not only do you save a lot of money in the form of cellular data, but you save a lot of time, too, because these photos are fast to send.
And here’s the best part: The photo looks exactly the same to the recipients at the other end (at least until they zoom in).

Bonus Settings in a Place You Didn’t Expect

Apple has stashed a few important text-messaging settings in Settings→Notifications→Messages:

Allow Notifications. If, in a cranky burst of sensory overload, you want your phone to stop telling you when new texts come in (with a banner or sound, for example), then turn this off.
Show in Notification Center. How many recent text messages should appear in the Notification Center (The Notification Center)?
Sounds. Tap here to choose a sound for incoming texts to play. (You can also choose a different sound for each person in your address book, as described in Tip.)
Badge App Icon. Turning this on makes the Messages icon show a little red badge to let you know when you have a new text message.
Show on Lock Screen. Do you want received text messages and iMessages to appear on the screen when it’s locked? If yes, then you can sneak reassuring glances at your phone without turning it fully on. If no, then you maintain better protection against snoopers who find your phone on your desk.
Show in CarPlay. If your newish car has Apple’s CarPlay software in its dashboard, here’s where you control whether or not incoming texts appear on it.
Show Previews. Usually, when a text message arrives, it wakes up your phone and shows the message contents. Which is great, as long as the message isn’t private and the phone isn’t lying on the table where everyone can see it. If you turn off Show Previews, though, you’ll see who the message is from but not the actual text of the message (until you tap the notification banner or bubble).
Repeat Alerts. If someone sends you a text message but you don’t tap or swipe to read it, the iPhone waits 2 minutes and then plays the notification sound again. That second chance helps when, for example, you were in a noisy place and missed the original chime.
But for some people, even one additional reminder isn’t enough. Here you can specify that you want to be re-alerted Twice, 3 Times, 5 Times, or 10 Times. (Or Never, if you don’t want repeated alerts at all.)

Free Text Messages

Text messaging is awesome. Paying for text messaging, not so much.

iMessages are great because they send messages over the Internet instead of the cellular carriers’ voice networks—but only when you’re sending to fellow owners of Apple equipment.

Fortunately, there are all kinds of sneaky ways to do text messaging for free that don’t require your correspondents to have an Apple device. Apps like Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Google Allo, Slack, Viber, Line, and WeChat offer most of the same features as the iPhone’s Messages app sending iMessages—except that your recipient doesn’t have to have Apple gear. There are versions of these apps that run on any brand of phone and computer.