"Powerful Updates to Messages", lol. Apple hasn't put an ounce of power into messaging. It's been 10 years, and they haven't innovated at all in the message space in any meaningful way (no, Memoji is not a meaningful extension of the messaging space). It's sad to see the lack of energy to actually create powerful and useful software, rather than to doing the bare minimum to compete in the smartphone market.
"Update" which includes the most basic of iterations. I mean 95% of the current offerings could be completed in a few 2-week dev cycles. Its been almost 500 weeks of existence....@'ing people and pinning...c'mon!!! That's default stuff. The "iPhone" should be called the "iMessage" if it was true to it's purpose.
A couple things I would love to see in iMessage having used WhatsApp as my primary messaging app for the past several years: (1) Direct replying/quoting to a specific message. (2) More granular group chat controls (eg ability to add/remove/leave group message threads. (3) Ability to rename group chats so that I don't have 3 chat threads that contain the same first two people plus someone else
Unless I'm mistaken, all three are available on iOS right now. You can reply to a specific message, you can add/remove/leave a group iMessage, and you can name (and emoticon) group chats.
“Inline replies
You can reply directly to a specific message in a group conversation. See all related messages in their own view to easily keep track of a thread.”
Not for SMS (presumably because it can’t be shared to the other participants, but I’d still like a way to apply an alias to these four or five person deep threads for my own devices).
It baffles me that I can't search someone by firstname lastname and have our messages thread come up 100% reliably.
Sure it works some of the time, but not for older threads.
Im ok with waiting 10 seconds as long as it returns the results I know are there. I am forced to go to Contacts and find the person, then click the new message button linking into messages.
Contacts app has a similar issue. I have < 1000 contacts, yet I can't search reliably for a contact I know is there by first / last name. I have to scroll through the list of all my contacts to get to it.
Maybe this is a bug, but its been an issue for me for years.
Threading, better search, tagging, sharing message bits with others, temporary group messages, better in-message features (polls, lists), better ways to send multiple pieces of media in a singular unit, ways to spend "live" time within imessage, higher-level walkie-talkie, ways to schedule messages, ways to send longer forms ("bursting the bubble"), sending rich text in messages,......
You do understand that the iPhone is designed for the widest of audiences from children to elderly. I don't think making Messages significantly more complex is a good thing.
iMessage (blue bubble) conversations are fairly good and well-featured, but I wish they would bring some kind of improvements to SMS text messages (green bubbles).
I wonder how much of it is competitive advantage to push people to switch to iOS vs. Apple executives literally never texting people with Android phones.
Threading, better search, tagging, sharing message bits with others, temporary group messages, better in-message features, better ways to send multiple pieces of media in a singular unit, ways to spend "live" time within imessage...i could go on for awhile
