Have you tried all 8 of these new iPhone messages in iOS 18.2?

Look, sometimes words just aren’t enough. Communicating something monumental—even monumentally absurd to your best friend—requires word formatting with bold, cursive and maybe even explosive animations in your texts. And now there’s also the Messages app iOS 18.2 it gives those effects and more.

Animated effects and text formatting make chatting more fun, and RCS support means your friends with Android phones can finally send high-resolution images. If your brain is active late at night, you can schedule texts to be sent at a more reasonable time without waking anyone up.

And don’t forget the ability to bounce texts from satellites and create your own emoji Genmoji — an Apple Intelligence feature on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 models.

Here are eight new features in Messages that you should know about.

Read more: iOS 18 preview: Get ready to customize your iPhone

Also, if you’re just getting started with a new system, be sure to check it out settings you need to change immediately. And don’t miss these nine hidden features of iOS 18.

Thanks to RCS messaging, you can better communicate with Android users

Adding the Rich Communication Services protocol to Messages should reduce friction when texting with friends who own Android phones. It enables read receipts and gives you better image transfer and end-to-end encryption (but keeps Android message bubbles green).

If your carrier supports RCS, you probably don’t need to do anything to use it. Go to Settings > Applications > Messages > RCS messages and make sure that RCS Messaging is included.

You can also send text messages via satellite

The Emergency SOS via satellite The feature introduced with the iPhone 14 is a a literal savior. When you don’t have a mobile signal, you can connect to a satellite and exchange short text messages with emergency services.

With that infrastructure, Apple opens messages for non-urgent texts as well. If you’re out of range of cellular or Wi-Fi networks and have an iPhone 14 or later, Messages will ask you to connect to a satellite. While connected, Dynamic Island expands to help you stay focused on the satellites above you.

You can then message people as you normally would, and features like emoji and Tapbacks should still work. If you want to check out the demo features, go to Settings > Applications > Messaging > Satellite Messaging > Satellite Demo. Or just go out in the middle of nowhere and try it yourself.

You can now format text in messages

I don’t want to seem like “that typographic guy,” but it’s been bugging me for a long time that one of the only ways to emphasize text in messages is to put it in all caps. We as a society did not develop typography for hundreds of years and invent the most sophisticated computing devices just to yell at each other over text.

So yeah, I guess I’m that guy. I feel better now that I can express myself using bold, cursiveunderlined and crossed out text in conversations with my friends who are also using iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.

You can apply formatting to an entire phrase, individual words and letters, or combinations thereof, for example:

1. Enter your message.
2. To apply formatting to the entire message, tap Format button in the suggestion bar; all your text is highlighted. Or, to add emphasis to just a word, double-tap to select the text, then press the key Formatting button. You can also choose Text Effects from the options that appear above the selection.
3. Tap one of the options at the top of the formatting panel that replaces the keyboard: bold, italic, underline, or strikethrough.

If you format a message that is sent to someone using an older system, they will only see plain text, which could be confusing if you used strikethrough to indicate removed words.

You can animate your text messages

Here is where I drop any pretense of being a typographical purist. The message or selected words or letters can be animated in one of eight styles. Need to break some big news with more emphasis than bold text? With iOS 18, there are several new animation options you can add to your text. A large animation expands the font size. Or maybe just mentioning that it’s freezing outside doesn’t convey the teeth-chattering cold – apply the Jitter animation to make the letters jiggle.

Adding animation is as easy as formatting text:

1. Enter your message.
2. Touch it Formatting button on the suggestion bar to select the entire text. Or select individual words or letters, then press that button.
3. Tap one of the animation styles to apply it: Big, Small, Shake, Nod, Explode, Ripple, Bloom or Jitter.

You can mix animations within a message by selecting and applying different styles to them. However, you cannot apply more than one animation to a selection; a word cannot shake and explode, for example. As with text formatting, the message is displayed as plain text for anyone not using iOS 18, iPadOS 18, or macOS Sequoia.

Even with these new features, I want more: text formatting and text animation. You can use one or the other right now. But if Apple’s engineers can build something as complex as eye tracking for Vision Pro, they can do it in the next update.

You can turn off autoplay animations if that’s not your thing

Let’s say your friend just installed iOS 18 and wants to try out all the animation effects in a series of messages, creating a screen full of text pulsing, resizing, flickering, and exploding. You mean, with all that migraine-inducing animation, what did Apple unleash?

Don’t stress, because you can set the animations not to repeat automatically. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and turn off Effects for automatic playback of messages. Your friend can still send an animated text that will play once you receive it, but you won’t be subjected to the animation repeating.

You can add any emoji or sticker as a tapback in Messages

Sometimes words are unnecessary. You can reply to someone’s message using the Tapback icon to express love, agreement, disagreement, laughter, alarm, or curiosity. They are quick to apply and easy to get your response.

They are also limited to just six icons, and in black and white no less.

With iOS 18, Messages adds color (and some cartoon shading) to those icons, as well as the ability to reply with any emoji or sticker. Here’s how to do it:

1. Tap and hold the message until you see a Tapback bubble appear.
2. Tap the emoji button just below the other icons. Or, you can swipe left on the bubble to see recent emojis, stickers, and a gray emoji button that leads to the emoji library.
3. In the emoji picker, choose a sticker (left side) or any of the hundreds of emojis.

You can create your own unique emoji using Genmoji

One feature related to messages Apple Intelligence on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models is the ability to summarize incoming texts in their notifications. iOS 18.2 brings another option to the Messages app: Genmoji, a way to create your own emoji on the spot by describing what you want.

Before you begin, you’ll need to sign up for the Image Playground app waitlist. Once you’re accepted, you can do the following:

1. While chatting with someone, tap emoji button to see emoji options.
2. Touch it Genmoji button to the right of the Describe Emoji field.
3. Type (or use dictation to speak) a description of what the genmoji should look like. You can type in something like “blue bird” or “crying emoji surfing” and the app will start making variations of your descriptions.
4. Scroll through the icons it creates until you find one you like. You can also edit the description to change the parameters of the generated image.
5. When you have a Genmoji you like, tap Add.

New emoji appear in the text and are added to your recent emoji collection. It also shows as a sticker that you can add.

You can schedule text messages using Send Later

I know which friends are likely to get up at midnight to reply to a text, and which ones I’d probably wake up with. Since I want the other category to still be my friends, the ability to schedule texts in the Messages app is great when I want to share a thought but don’t need an immediate response.

To send a message at a specific time, do the following:

1. Enter your message.
2. Touch it More (+) button.
3. Touch it Send later; you may have to swipe up to find it in the list of apps and features.
4. In the time selector that appears, set the day and time for sending the message.
5. Tap the Send Message button (up arrow) to schedule it.

Scheduled messages are displayed with a faint dotted border.

If you need to change the time later, tap Edit above the message, then select Edit the time from the menu. Also, if you schedule messages frequently, I recommend it moving the Send later option more in the More list so it’s easier to access.

For more, see how Apple redesigned the Photos app in iOS 18 and learn all about the new Passwords app that syncs across devices and platforms.