iMessage has some great animations, and here are my favorites

Usually, when my friends hype up Apple’s iMessage, all they care about is showing up as blue bubbles on each other’s screens. And, for most people, that’s good enough — they want to include all of their iPhone-carrying friends in the same group chats, ignoring that RCS now makes pretty much every group chat feel the same, whether green or blue. However, that only scratches the surface of what iMessage can do.

Once you move past the fact that you can react with emojis, cut stickers out of pictures, and send iMessage games back and forth in GamePigeon, you might realize that you can add animations to your messages, making iMessage much more fun. Now, Apple’s animations aren’t quite as secretive as those in Google Messages, but you can still do a lot to your text. Here’s what you need to know about iMessage animations.

Now, before you sit there and think I’m incredibly late to the iMessage animation game, know that’s not the case. In fact, you’ve been able to add certain effects to iMessage since the days of iOS 10, and I remember doing so as far back as when I had an iPhone 7 in my pocket. For a while, though, Apple seemed content not to add to its list of animations or change the keywords, making its balloon, confetti, and laser effects feel more like an open secret.

Now, with iOS 18, things feel a little bit different. There are suddenly three types of text animations you can check out, each with its own intensity. Some take over your entire display, while others spice up the text itself, so let’s get into the three main categories, starting with the smallest effects and working our way up.

The simplest set of animations in iMessage is none other than its set of text effects. These are exactly as they sound — effects that only impact the actual text of your message. You can access them via the icon in iMessage that looks like the letter A with a few lines behind it, and they allow you to modify the size of your text, give it a shake, let a ripple run through it, and more. On top of the more animated effects, iMessage also lets you bold your message, put it into italics, underline it, or put a strike through it — all the basics that a good messaging app needs.

Up next are the iMessage animations that take over your entire message bubble. They’re a bit bigger than the text effects, yet they don’t come close to taking over your iPhone screen in the way that the next effects will. Apple’s bubble effects include one of my absolute favorite animations, which is the ability to send a message with invisible ink, but you can also deliver messages gently, which gives them more of an exhale effect — a weird one to explain, I know. Bubble effects also include the ability to make a message loud, expanding and shaking the text, or deliver it with a slam for emphasis.

To access bubble effects (and the screen effects we’re about to talk about), you’ll have to first type out your message and then long-press on the send arrow, at which point the effects menu will open.

And now, for the OG of iMessage animations, the screen effects. Yes, if you’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for a long time, these are the animations that you probably recognize from any time you’ve sent a “happy birthday” or a “congratulations” — these are the effects that used to kick in automatically whenever you typed a trigger phrase, much like they do in Google Messages.

These days, however, you can add screen effects to any message, and they work like the bubble effects above. You can still access them in the original way, of course, but with new effects like Echo (which sends a hundred little copies of your message) and Spotlight (which shines a light on your text), it might be easier to add them to messages without the required keywords. If you want to use keywords, though, here’s how you trigger each effect:

• “Congratulations” — Confetti
• “Happy Birthday” — Balloons
• “Happy New Year” — Fireworks
• “Happy Chinese New Year” — Red background with sparklers
• “Pew Pew” — Laser beams

If you’re only learning about iMessage animations now, you might be wondering how you missed them previously. You might also be wondering if you have to opt into Apple’s exciting messaging features — possibly thinking that’s the reason you didn’t know they existed. Well, the good news is that, no, you don’t have to turn on iMessage animations, they come active by default.

However, just because you don’t have to turn on iMessage animations doesn’t mean you have to keep them on, either. If you’re photosensitive or would otherwise prefer not to see laser beams dance across your iPhone display, you can opt out of Apple’s automatic effects by heading to the Accessibility menu and opening the Motion subheading. From there, you deactivate the automatic animations, meaning they’ll only play when you allow them to — or not at all, if that’s your preference.

So, now that we have a pretty good understanding of Apple’s toolbox full of messaging animations, let’s play favorites. To keep things from getting too totally out of hand, I’ll stick to one (or maybe two) animations from each category, just because there are so many to explore. Up first, the Text effects.

• Honestly, my absolute favorite of Apple’s text animations is Jitter. It’s a simple effect, causing your text to shiver in place, but I think it does a good job of expressing impatience without feeling over the top.
• Explode is another good effect, which sends the characters of your message tumbling through the air as if a bowling ball struck them — or, well, an explosion. It’s a bit more practical for short messages since I can’t imagine having to read more than a few words while they’re busy flying off in different directions.
• For whatever reason, Apple also likes to automatically apply the Big effect in messages when I use words that relate to scale in just about any way. I often catch the recommendations and turn them off when they’re inappropriate (most of the time), but sometimes I’ll leave one there for fun.

Now, for my favorite Bubble effect — which should come as no surprise.

• Far and away, the bubble effect I use most often is Invisible Ink. For those not familiar with it, it essentially takes the text of your message and sensors it behind little floating pixels, which you can then swipe away with a finger to read the message before it disappears again. I should also clarify that I’m not using Invisible Ink to hide conversations so much as discretely make birthday plans and discuss spoilers before all of my friends have had a chance to see a new movie.

And finally, the best of the bunch (or two bests of the bunch) when it comes to Screen effects.

• My longtime favorite Screen effect in iMessage is the Lasers, which used to trigger with the phrase Pew Pew. Now, you can trigger them just like any other Bubble effect, allowing you to send a light show across your screen for updates as simple as letting your friends know that your foster puppy went to the bathroom or successfully ignored a piece of trash — small victories, but made better with lasers.
• I’ve also come around on the Spotlight effect, as obnoxious as it can be. It dims your entire display before swinging a spotlight onto your message as if it had just taken the stage at an awards show. Like the Explode effect, it’s best used with short messages, but it ensures your recipient couldn’t miss what you had to say. That said, I think I’d appreciate it if I could add the Spotlight effect to a message after sending it to draw attention to whatever I was saying rather than un-sending my iMessage and re-sending it for effect.

Of course, there are several other iMessage animations to explore, including several that you might like better. These are my favorites, as I feel they fit best into my seasonal usage of iMessage when Apple releases new flagships and mid-range models.

Have other ones you prefer or secret animations you’ve stumbled upon? Let us know in the comments.