Schedule and Edit Messages with Send Later
About this QuickTip
In this video, I’ll show you how to easily set up a text to be sent at a future time and date, ensuring you never miss a birthday or important event. You can even edit or change scheduled messages before they send. This feature is incredibly useful and simple to use—watch now to discover how iOS 18 has made texting even more convenient.
Transcript
My favourite new feature in Messages is the ability to send a message at a future time—similar to when you schedule an email to appear at 8:00 the next morning. You can now do that with Messages as well! No more forgetting people’s birthdays—you can schedule it to send whenever you want to.
So, here for an example, I’ve got a message thread with my wife, and I’m going to leave a little message that I want to send in a couple of days’ time. I would like to hope that I can remember my wife’s birthday, but this isn’t actually her birthday—it’s an example. It’s all made up and pretend, so go with the flow here.
Now that I’ve typed the message, I don’t want to send it straight away. So what I’m going to do is press the Plus button on the left-hand side and then choose the new Send Later option. If it’s not here, you might need to press More first for it to appear. Now I can choose the date and time for the message to be sent—it’s as easy as that!
When I press the blue Send button, the message will appear with a dotted line, and the recipient won’t have received it yet. This means I can then schedule another message for a different time, perhaps like this, and send that as well. Now you can see there’s a queue of messages ready to go on that morning.
But I can also make changes before they get sent. I can press Edit and change the message itself or adjust the date or time it’s being sent. This is a really, really useful feature, and it’s incredibly easy to use, which is brilliant. Just press that Plus button, select Send Later, and you’re good to go!
If you want to go back to texting in real-time, simply press the little X on that blue date and time banner, and you’ll be back to normal texting mode.
And that’s not all that’s changed in Messages this year! I spent my summer playing with iOS 18, and I’ve made a ton of QuickTip videos on my channel down below. But excitingly, I’ve also written my first eBook! I’ve called it 100 QuickTips for iOS 18, and if you follow the link below, I promise you’ll find things that you never knew your phone could do now that you’ve updated to iOS 18. I’ll see you next time!
Technical details: This QuickTip was recorded on an iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 18.1 in September 2024.
The content used in this video is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All rights to the images, music, clips, and other media used belong to their respective owners. I do not claim ownership over any third-party content used. This video has not been authorised, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc. iPhone and iMessage are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. iOS is a registered trademark of Cisco Systems Inc. Whilst I have done my best to list all applicable trademarks for this video, in the (hopefully unlikely) event that I have missed any you can find a full list of trademarks registered to Apple Inc. on their website. Finally, please note that whilst every effort has been made to ensure the information contained within this video was correct at time of publication, please be aware that as future updates and software changes occur some or all elements of this video may become outdated. I will endeavour to remove videos which are completely obsolete so as not to cause confusion!