Hi, it’s Jacob here, and today I’m going to quickly show you how you can customise your iMessage backgrounds on iOS 26. If you find this video useful, you might want to check out my YouTube channel as well — maybe even subscribe. There are hundreds more iPhone QuickTips waiting for you there.

Here you can see I’ve got a conversation with a very strange, handsome man. If I tap on the name at the top there, I can then go to Backgrounds, which is a new option in iOS 26.

From here, you’ll see a variety of different preset categories, including Sky, Aurora, and Water. When you tap on one of these, you get a live preview of how it looks in your message thread.

I’ll go on to the Colour option first. When you tap here, you can see these animated blobs moving in the background. I can simply swipe sideways to change the different colours and browse through the options in this folder. I quite like some of these — they’re quite funky — but let’s see what other options we’ve got for now.

So, I’ll press Back in the top corner, and now I’m going to go on to Sky. Just like before, you’ve got gently animating clouds drifting across your screen. As you swipe sideways, you get different times of day and different sky colours.

We have some nice Water options as well, which are quite calming and grounding. Then there are the Aurora ones, which take us out into the stars and into space.

We can also use our own photographs as chat backgrounds. You can pick from some of Apple’s default presets, but they might not suit what you want. You can also use Image Playgrounds if you like.

Here I’ve put in a couple of prompts — “adventure” and “beach” — and you can see it’s generated an image that’s kind of fun. But the one that really grabbed my interest is the Waves one, that underwater scene. I’m going to set that as my conversation background now.

One quick thing I’ll mention — which I think is really cool and elevates the experience slightly — is that when you interact with your messages, say by long-pressing to leave a reaction, it actually creates a ripple effect in whatever animated background you’ve chosen. This feels completely unnecessary, but it’s a lovely little detail from Apple.

And you can remove your chat backgrounds the same way you added them — simply tap the name of the person at the top of your chat, and then choose None as your background.

And yes — these work in group chats, too! When you change it on your device, it will change for everyone else in that conversation, too.

Right — I’ll see you next time!