Mike Wuerthele
New information obtained about Apple's forthcoming operating system releases suggest that Apple is adding functionality to Messages, with big changes possibly coming soon to group chats.
New information about iOS 14 and macOS 10.16 has surfaced about the operating systems, with some long-time feature requests getting added possibly as soon as fall 2020. Apple appears to be testing the ability to retract Messages after sending — with text visible to the sender and recipients indicating that a Message has been deleted from the thread.
Additionally, with the new additions, contacts can be specifically tagged in a group chat, with filters possibly getting added to limit notifications to messages that just include your own name, or the names of select others.
In the report published by MacRumors first on Monday night, other features include expansion of status update sharing, and ellipses displayed when somebody in the group chat is typing.
More controversially, the ability to "unread" a message after opening it appears to be coming as well.
As with the previous PencilKit report, it isn't precisely clear when the features may roll out. They may or may not make a potential early June beta release during the annual WWDC — which is in question because of the ongoing coronavirus situation.
Andrew Orr
Marko Zivkovic
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
7 Comments
Retracting messages is a great feature!! I’ve been using it on BBM for at least 7 years. (Saying this because if it’s do-able for others it’s do-able for Apple.) All the features rumoured in the article above are great ones. In addition, I’d love to see read receipts for each group member like BBM and Facebook Messenger have. It’s handy to know exactly who in a group has read the message. Also, being able to @ a group member to alert them that you’ve addressed them is very handy. In a long group chat they may not want to scroll back. The other feature that Telegram, BBM, Viber and Threema have is open or be able to pop to last unread. That’s a very handy feature.
I would love to see scheduled messages too - I had this on a Nokia device over 20 years ago and would love it to return. Great for New Year messages - write them at 6pm with a schedule for midnight and then enjoy the party!
I hope they spend time on the Mac OS quality as Catalina is still a mess.
Please Apple, make this a Snow Leopard styled release concentrating mainly on reliability and quality of the release.
I'd like the equivalent of bcc. There are many times I want to sent a group message but don’t want to bother the group with everyone’s individual replies.
Lets hope we will get Messages in iCloud! Be nice to login and have access to Messages there!