Who doesn’t know that little green app on your iPhone that’s more than just a portal for your friends to bombard you with GIFs and questionable (but funny) memes? It’s actually loaded with nifty features, which you’d know about if you’d ever ventured beyond just typing “LOL” or “K.”. What most people don’t know about are the hidden features (well, duh!). So, let’s unearth these overlooked treasures that Apple buried deep down the iMessage trench for some reason, shall we?
Text Effects: Because Who Doesn’t Like to be Dramatic?
Imagine this: You’ve painstakingly typed a message, put a lot of thought into your clever response of ‘cool.’, and you’re about to hit send. But wait! It needs that pizzazz. Well, just hold down the send button, and voila, you’ve got an array of text effects at your disposal. Make your words slam into the chat, or cover them with “Invisible Ink” for an extra layer of pointless but hilarious mystery. Because who doesn’t want to turn a casual chat into a Bollywood movie?
Pinning Conversations: Bros before everything else
Buried under a barrage of group chats and promotional messages lies a conversation with your best friend. A conversation you actually enjoy. Well, that’s no way to treat your BFF, is it? So, what do you do? Give them one of those friendship bands! Or you could just pin their messages. Just swipe right on their chat, tap the pin icon, and watch as it rises to the top. Now you can find them easily, even while half-asleep. Nothing will break that Jai-Veeru bond now!
Location Sharing: No more “Tum Kahan? Main Yahan!”
We’ve all been there. Spending hours texting back and forth about your whereabouts, not actually getting anywhere, pun intended. But worry not, brave adventurers of the path unknown; iMessage is here with a cool solution.
Tap on your contact’s name, hit “Info,” and there you have it- you can “Send My Current Location” or “Share My Location.” Now, instead of saying, “I’m by the weird-looking statue,” or some other abstract landmark, you can send your location and get back to the important stuff, like debating if pineapple on pizza is really that bad (no, it’s not!).
Write in bold: Because why not?
Sometimes, an exclamation mark does not get the point across, you know. Those ‘WHAT!’ or ‘Are you kidding me?!’ are just not the same in plain text. They need to be bold. But there is no straightforward way to format your surprise in the messages. There is a workaround, though (we are Indians. We always have a jugaad!). Go to Settings > Messages and turn on Show Subject Field. Now fill in your OMGs, and they will pack a punch, just like a Michael Bay script.
Undo Text: Shake It till you make it!
Let’s say you are writing an extensive apology to your ‘wonderful’ and ‘understanding’ roommate, stating the coincidental series of impossible circumstances that led you to open the refrigerator and eat the last slice of pizza.
And just as you put in that last ‘🥺,’ you feel like you should use some more big adjectives. Now, you are sitting there pressing the delete button for what seems like longer than you resisted eating that slice. What you probably don’t know is that you can shake your expensive iPhone vigorously, and a bubble pops up asking if you want to undo the text. I don’t know why Apple added such a whimsical feature, but we are glad they added something instead of subtracting.
Now that you have dived it the little rabbit hole of iMessage, suffice it to say you have upped your texting game, now. I know you are just waiting to finish this article and try out all these hidden gems on your dear friend. iMessage is like the closet from Narnia; at first look just an ordinary messaging app. But when you start exploring, you might come across a half-sheep half-man named Tumnus.
So, go forth, brave texter! Explore iMessage to your heart’s content. And use your skills wisely!