iOS 10: How to get the most out of the exciting new iMessage features

The biggest feature of the new version of iOS is probably the huge changes that have been made to Messages. But those changes might be a little too huge; so huge that it’s sometimes hard to get lost in.

Apple has introduced a host of changes to the built-in messaging app. They include new ways of playing games in text messages, of sending pictures to each other and even going back to old school handwriting. It can all be a little confusing at first.

The best place to start is to head into the app and find the new settings that have been added alongside the bar that you usually type. That’s not where every new addition can be found, but it’s got the best of them.

Probably the best thing to have a go with at first is to click the third icon along, to go through to the App Store. Except it’s not the App Store as we know it – instead it’s a special version for apps that run within Messages, and can be used to send stuff to friends.

To get through to the actual App Store, rather than the apps you’ve already got, click the four boxes in the bottom left corner and choose “New”. The special App Store will then pop up.

In there, you’ll find a specially curated selection of apps that Apple has picked out. Those includes stickers, games and a range of other things.

Some good first apps to try out include Square Cash, which lets you send money to friends just through iMessage; Yelp, through which you can send information about a specific location that you’d like to go to; or games like Words With Friends, Checkmate and Four In A Row.

But perhaps the quickest way into the new apps is to download some sticker packs. You can choose from a huge selection of them – though many of them, confusingly, are fairly high-priced – and some good ones include Super Mario Run, WWF Origami and Pokémon Pixel Art.

Once you’ve downloaded one of those, they’ll appear in the panel at the bottom when you click on the app icon. You can swipe through them all, and when you open one up you can click a sticker to send it; if you want to see it bigger, click the little up arrow in the bottom right corner.

Stickers are good fun, but once you’ve tried them out you might want to get into the meatier apps. So check out a game like Four In A Row, where you choose where you want your token to go and send it off to a friend, in a hope that you’ll get a row before your recipient and opponent does.

That App Store is already fairly full of apps that got themselves ready before iOS 10 drops. But since the tool is a whole new platform, it’s likely to mature and broaden out quite quickly.

But now that you’re acquainted with apps, it’s worth getting on with the rest of the changes introduced with iMessage.

Those include a special mode for sending drawings to people. That can be done in two slightly different ways: you can either click the little heart with two fingers on it, where you can draw in neon lines, or you can tip the phone to the side and press the flicked line, which can let you draw properly.

Either way, those will send what you’ve drawn to the other person, who gets to see it in their normal iMessage transcript.

And then you can check out all of the various things that the new Messages app can do with your pictures. Click the camera like you used to, and you’ll see a preview of what it can see.

Then once you’ve taken a photo, you can tap on the image and choose to edit it.

After pictures, try out the various ways that Messages actually lets you send normal, boring messages.

When you send a message, you can click and hold the arrow that you usually press to push it off to the other person. Now, that will bring up a page of effects – which you can use either to make the message huge, or to accompany it with whole screen effects like fireworks and balloons.

And you can fill your normal messages with emoji now, too. The app has special emoji predictions that watch out for words that could be swapped out for pictures – when it finds one, it’ll turn it orange, and you can click on that word to choose an emoji for it instead.

One thing of note is that while it’s possible to send some of the app’s messages to people using Mac, they don’t seem always to work. Apple’s own features do – including their own apps, like the Music one – but third-party ones don’t always seem to show up as expected.