Apple has several ways for you to communicate in the Messages app aside from texting — and that includes audio messages. You can send a voice recording via iMessage by long-pressing the microphone icon just right of the input field and speaking. However, by default, these audio messages self-destruct after two minutes, which isn't good if you want them archived.
Instead of responding to a WhatsApp message with short texts like "LOL" or thinking too hard about something meaningful to say, use an emoji reaction. They cut down on clutter in group chats and take up less space than typing emoji individually in a conversation. WhatsApp initially limited reactions to just six emoji, but a new update lets you use any emoji you want.
With Signal's class-leading end-to-end encryption, you can be sure your messages will remain secure as they travel to the recipient. However, once the message arrives, its privacy is completely dependent on the receiver, who could share it anywhere if they wanted. To patch this vulnerability, Signal added disappearing messaging.
How many times have you sent a message on Facebook Messenger that you immediately wanted to take back? Most email services have an unsend option, as well as Instagram Direct, and Messenger has caught on to this convenience with a take-back button for any chat you're in — even in groups. Plus, you can also remove other people's messages.
There are a couple swipe gestures in ProtonMail for Android and iOS that let you swipe right on an email to mark it as spam or swipe left to trash it. If you don't get a lot of spam or don't delete a lot of messages, it's easy enough to changes these gestures to perform another action.
You may be familiar with image-based or audio-based steganography, the art of hiding messages or code inside of pictures, but that's not the only way to conceal secret communications. With zero-width characters, we can use text-based steganography to stash hidden information inside of plain text, and we can even figure out who's leaking documents online.
While using end-to-end encryption may be enough security for most of your messages in Telegram, you can go a step beyond this by sending messages that disappear after an allotted amount of time. This prevents you from having to manually delete the message at a later time, so you can send it and forget it without worrying about whether or not it's still out there.
So, you accidentally sent a voice message to someone in an Instagram DM. Maybe it contains an unflattering conversation about the recipient. Maybe it's a record of something embarrassing you said. Whatever your message contains, it's out there, on someone else's smartphone. You might think you're out of luck, and that your life is over. If you act quick, however, it won't be.
Facebook Messenger Lite is an official, de-bloated version of Facebook Messenger for Android. It's snappier and it's a lot more battery-friendly, but this is because there are fewer features complicating everything. One feature they didn't leave out, however, is the ability to send audio messages.
Your iPhone's Messages app has some impressive new features and changes with iOS 17, and you've probably already noticed some of them just by using the updated app. But there are less apparent features, even hidden ones, that have likely eluded you that you're going to want to know about. There are even some new Messages features yet to be officially released.
Message effects in iMessage lets you add a touch of flair to otherwise bland communications. With the feature, you can complement a birthday wish with a stream of balloons, send a congratulatory text along with a shower of confetti, or make the chat bubble slam itself in the thread. If you're on the receiving end, however, they may be distracting and even jarring.
After receiving many requests for the feature, Signal introduced read receipts last year to its mobile apps. However, some users don't like the idea other people knowing when they've read messages. Luckily, Signal lets you disable this feature and reclaim a little privacy.
Welcome back, my rookie hackers! As most of you know, Mr. Robot is probably the best hacker TV show ever! This is a great show about a cyber security engineer who is being enticed to hack the very corporation he's being paid to protect. This show is so good, I began a series to demonstrate how to do the hacks he uses in the show.
If you use the Google Assistant on your Android device, you can easily send a text message to any one of your contacts. But even though that same Assistant is powering the Google Home, you can't use the smart speaker to accomplish the same task — at least, not without some tinkering.
When someone sends you a funny video, image, tweet, what have you, often the first thing you want to do is share it with someone else. Instead of copying the link and jumping over to another chat to do so, WhatsApp makes it easy to share content right from the thread you received it in, via the forward feature.
Let's say you want to send out a message to all of your friends. Normally, you'd have to put all of the recipients into one giant group thread to do this. But when people started responding to your message, everyone in the group would get a notification, so your friends would probably be annoyed that you started the group thread in the first place. Luckily, if you're using WhatsApp, this isn't an issue.
Students have been passing notes in class for decades, so what's the big deal about sending a quick text message? Everybody does it, even your teacher was surely guilty of covertly communicating with his or her peers back when they were in high school.
If your iPhone is rebooting or your Messages app is constantly crashing, you might be the victim of an iOS exploit or just a buggy software update. While one problem sounds worse than the other, they both can get annoying real quick when you can't send any messages or even read new ones.
WhatsApp comes with a ton of great features that make it the go-to messaging app for millions of people around the world. Among these is the ingeniously simple Read Receipts that let you know your message has been viewed. If you want to read a message without alerting the sender, however, there are simple tricks you can perform to give yourself plausible deniability.
If you're looking to keep your conversations private, look no further than Telegram. Its cloud-based chats are secure and its optional end-to-end encrypted chats even more so, but you can't really prevent someone in the conversation from sharing your messages. However, you can lessen that chance by taking back your messages, deleting them for both you and the other end of the discussion.
Deleting text messages on your iPhone may seem like a pretty simple task, but it's those really simple tasks that usually end up causing headaches later on. Data can stick around, even if you asked it not to, so there's always a slight chance that embarrassing and incriminating texts you supposedly deleted may end up in the wrong hands one day.
The car is arguably one of the worst places to receive a text message. You know you can't resist looking, and when you do, your attention is no longer on driving, it's on reading the latest gossip or whatever. You take your eyes of the road for just a few seconds and you could get an expensive ticket, or even worse—an accident. But you can't just ignore that notification sound or vibration, can you? So, if you just have to know what it says right then and there, why not at least do it in a sa...
In the UK, 20 percent of divorce filings include the word "Facebook." You may think you're being slick by using the site to chat with your ex, but the problem is that Facebook saves everything, and I mean everything. All someone needs is your login information and they have access to everything you've ever said on Facebook, public or private.
You know the drill. You need answers, and your friend has them. The problem? It's way too late to text them. Maybe they have Do Not Disturb enabled. Perhaps they don't, and you wake them up, ruining their entire Monday. Don't be that friend. Instead, send a message silently with Telegram.
I'm not a morning person, so getting a "Good Morning" message on my iPhone when I wake up makes me want to toss it across the room. If you feel the same way about this morning greeting, there's an easy way to stop it from showing up on your lock screen. This also applies if your "Good Morning" is actually "Good Afternoon" or "Good Evening," depending on your sleep schedule.
Every time Apple releases a new product or software update, people quickly figure out exploits in order to bypass the lock screen without having to type in the passcode. It happened last year in iOS 6, so it's not surprising that it happened again in iOS 7.
Missing a FaceTime video call no longer means missing out on a conversation. With the latest FaceTime update, an incoming caller can leave you a video message when you don't answer — and you can leave a video message for somebody who misses or rejects your FaceTime video call.
Text messaging is a core component of the mobile experience, and Google has added several AI-fueled features to help you text better, such as Smart Reply for quick response suggestions. But Messages by Google's newest AI-powered tool is possibly the best one yet, giving you improved response suggestions and your own personal copyeditor to fix all your message drafts.
Sometimes, keeping every message comes in handy. Maybe you want to relive fun conversations from months or years ago, or perhaps you need to recall a piece of data such as an address, name, or link. However, not all chats need to stick around forever. Whether you're concerned about privacy or just keeping your threads clutter-free, WhatsApp's "disappearing messages" may be what you're looking for.
Siri has slimmed down in iOS 14. The assistant now appears as a compact icon at the bottom of the screen instead of hijacking your entire iPhone. It's a welcome change to a user interface that has always felt a bit clunky, but just because Siri's UI has simplified doesn't mean that its capabilities have too. On top of several new features, Siri now lets you record and send audio messages using only your voice.
You're in constant communication with your friends and family. The only issue? Nobody uses the same app. Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp — you have contacts spanning all three, and the resulting balancing-act to keep in touch can be overwhelming. That's why Facebook — who owns all three apps — is coming out with a way to call and message friends across all three platforms from one place.
As iOS 10 makes its worldwide debut, many users are noticing that the promised iMessage effects feature in Messages is not working properly. Instead of seeing the actual effects, messages will come through like normal, but with text describing the effect they were sent with. On top of that, you can't send your own message effects if you're one of the affected users.
The Messages app for iOS and iPadOS has a lot of hidden features, but one in particular can save you time and energy whenever you need to forward or copy and paste messages from within an SMS, MMS, or iMessage conversation.
Waking up to hundreds of text messages in the morning usually points to one thing—group messages. Whether it's your fantasy football league, your work buddies, or just a bunch of bored friends, group messages can leave your iPhone vibrating off the hook.
Texting something as simple as "What up, bruh?" can be transformed into something way more baller by adding emojis, emoticons, GIFs, and textspeak. Some people would even argue that texting is a form of art, similar to Shakespearean sonnets, but it still has a ways to go if you ask me.
We've all been there. Our phone rings, but we're at a concert or dinner and don't want to spend time sending a text explaining our whereabouts. While ignoring a call is easy, it isn't always the most polite thing to do.
Whether or not you believe that the government is snooping around in our private emails, texts, and phone calls, it wouldn't hurt to protect ourselves a little better in the digital realm.
When browsing the web, I enjoy my privacy. It's reassuring that I can peruse the internet without the worry of having my activity tracked back to me, allowing me to leave fun, anonymous comments when I get the urge to troll.
Ideas can hit you out nowhere, but texting loved ones in the wee hours of the morning or during work hours isn't always ideal, especially if they've muted their notifications. So you'll want to send a message at a better time to ensure it gets the attention it deserves. Samsung Messages lets you do just that by scheduling messages to send at a later date.
The app that started as simply a photo-sharing social media platform has expanded to encompass so much more than that. Between live videos, stories, chat, and animated stickers, Instagram is more than the sum of its pictures. Now, there's a new feature to add to that list for Android and iOS — video and audio calls.
