A newly-revealed Apple patent application and accompanying illustration reveals work on allowing users to edit sent Messages. “Devices, Methods, and Graphical User Interfaces for Messaging,” US patent application number 20200133478, concerns electronic devices that display “a messaging user interface of a message application.”
William Gallagher for AppleInsider:
“But current messaging applications have numerous drawbacks and limitations,” says the patent. “For example, they are limited in their ability to easily: acknowledge messages; edit previously sent messages; express what a user is trying to communicate; display private messages; synchronize viewing of content between users; incorporate handwritten inputs…”
Apple wants to bring full text editing capability for after you’ve sent a message, and it wants to bring much fuller apps to within Messages, too.
Some messaging services, such as Slack, do allow you to edit a message after you’ve posted it. These are generally working within one central environment, though — they’re not transmitting a message to another user over the cellular network. Each user is logged in to the central server, so an edit can be applied there by the writer and seen by all readers.
With text messaging, it’s much more complicated to retrieve a sent message, edit it, and send it back. Apple’s Messages is not the only service that currently can’t support this. While WhatsApp has a “Delete Messages for Everyone” feature that lets you remove an entire erroneously-sent message, it doesn’t have the ability for you to edit instead.
MacDailyNews Take: Who, besides virtually everybody, wants this feature to come to Messages ASAP?