Editing sent messages has always been a dream for many users. It can help you correct your mistakes, wrong punctuations, and even incorrect phrases that auto-correct managed to mess up. And thankfully, iOS 16 makes this dream come true for iMessage users. You can now edit your sent messages and here’s how you can do it on your device.
Besides allowing you to edit a sent message, iOS 16 also gets you cool new features like redesigned lock screen, photo cutouts, lock screen widgets, focus linking to a lock screen, and even unsend a message.
Now, let’s check out how to edit a message on your iPhone with the iOS 16 update (or newer).
Related: Depth Effect Not Working on iOS 16 on iPhone? 7 Ways to Fix
How to edit messages on iPhone
- Note: This feature required iOS 16 update.
Once you’ve installed the iOS 16 update, you can then edit a sent message. Note that you can edit a message within 15 minutes of sending it.
Also, remember, it has to be an iMessage as those green bubble texts are not supported. You can’t edit a regular text message that were sent to another non-iPhone device.
To edit a (recently) sent message, launch the Messages app on your iPhone.
Inside Messages, select a conversation from which you want to edit a message.
When the conversation loads up, locate the message you want to edit and tap and hold on it.
When you do that, an overflow menu will appear on the screen. On this menu, select Edit.
The selected message will now be visible in a text box with the keyboard appearing at the bottom.
From here, you can make necessary corrections to the text and then tap on the tick mark on the right to save changes.
When you save the edited text, the new text will appear inside the conversation with an “Edited” label under it.
You can repeat this to edit the same message if you want to make corrections to an edited message. You can edit a message for up to 5 times within 15 minutes of sending the original message.
What happens when you edit a message in iMessage?
Editing a message happens instantly in iMessage. Once you edit and finalize your changes, they take place immediately. iOS uses the latest framework and changes in iOS 16, on both devices, to reflect the edited message instantly.
However, during this editing phase and the time before, the message’s contents will be visible to the recipient. The changes will only be visible once you hit the Blue checkmark. Additionally, Edited will be shown under edited messages for all parties involved in the conversation which can be tapped to show the edit history of the selected message.
How long can I edit sent messages?
You can only edit sent messages for up to 15 minutes. Within this time frame, you can edit a sent message for up to 5 times. Once you reach any of these two limitations, the Edit option will disappear from the overflow menu when you long-press on it.
Will older iOS users be able to see edited messages?
No, older iOS versions do not support this feature. Thus edits made to your sent message will be unavailable to users running iOS versions older than iOS 16.
We hope this post helped you easily edit your sent messages on iOS 16. If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out using the comments below.
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