One of several big updates to Messages this year lets you actually change how your text looks within the message itself. In the past, you could long press the Send button and change the effect your message landed with—maybe it was going to echo around the screen, or maybe the bubble was going to be really big and in your face. But now, on iOS 18, you can actually add formatting and effects to the words in your message to really emphasise a point or a saying that you’re using.

So, as I’m typing this message here, I’m just going to double tap to highlight the word beautiful, and then I’m going to press the new Text Effects button here. Straight away, you’ll see this new menu coming up, and there are several different animation options I can apply to any word that I’ve highlighted. As I tap through them, I’ll see a real-time preview at the top in the message bar, and I can choose exactly the animation that emphasises the point. When I’ve chosen it, I can simply press Send, and the recipient will see that effect as well—provided they’re running iOS 18 or later on their device.

Now that iOS 18 has been released, there are so many more things that your phone can do that it simply couldn’t do before. 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’re going to find things that you never knew your phone could do now that you’ve updated to iOS 18. I’ll see you next time!