At the center of Apple’s promotional materials for WWDC next week is iMessage which may be a hint that the company’s popular messaging service could be seeing substantial upgrades.
Hartley Charlton for MacRumors:
iMessage appears to be a central theme in the marketing for this year’s WWDC. For example, the placeholder for WWDC’s live stream on YouTube, which is already live, features iMessage bubbles, Tapback, and iMessage’s full-screen laser effect. Similarly, the Twitter hashflag to promote WWDC this year is an iMessage thumbs-up Tapback bubble.
Reliable Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman had previously reported that iOS 15 will feature improvements to iMessage, which appears to mirror the theme from Apple’s promotional materials. Specifically, Gurman explained that there will be new options for automatic replies, statuses, and notifications:
There will also be an option to set automatic replies to messages depending on their status. That will be an improvement over the current auto-reply feature, which is only currently available while driving. Apple has added some unique notifications features such as Do Not Disturb and Sleep Mode, but this will mark the first time the company offers a systemwide feature for changing notifications depending on a user’s status.
The company is also working on upgrades to iMessage with the eventual goal of acting as more of a social network and better competing with Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp. Those changes are still early in development and could come later, the people said.
The changes are reportedly in line with a broader strategy to make iMessage more of a social network that can better compete with WhatsApp.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iMessage is a very important piece of the ecosystem and the Messages app can certainly be improved not only on iOS, but macOS, too!
Wish they will allow screenshare like Zoom, Teams, Slack and the like. iMessage has been aging since COVID.
Nick Durrrrnan is reliable? Grrrman more like.
Really need the ability to mark a message as ‘unread’ or to flag it for follow up. As we do more and more business via text, we need better control of the messages much like an email.
On a fun note, Apple needs to add filters like Messenger has that put on sun-glasses, funny hats, backgrounds, and stuff.
iMessage updates are always cringe
Comments from Nick are always #cringe and in no way worthy.
Please please please let this update allow deletion of multiple messages at once — like it used to do under OSX and as it still does on the iPhone!!
Might have to wait for MacOS 12 for that one.
Two-finger tap on a message and then you can select multiple messages and delete them all at once. This was an accidental discovery on my part.