If iMessage is so great, why is the Messages experience so terrible?

Apple’s Messages app may have lost the global messaging wars, but in many countries–including the U.S.–it’s still an incredibly popular way of communicating. That’s why Apple keeps upgrading it. This fall’s Messages updates are some of the biggest ever, with the addition of RCS messaging, true emoji and sticker tapbacks, styled and animated text, Send Later, and support for texts via satellite.

But as the people in my Messages group chats all upgraded to iOS 18 and started taking advantage of some of these new features, it all became too much for me. All these new features are good, yes, but they can also be spectacularly distracting. This is why Apple’s next big step in Messages needs to be to give users the power to control when and how we’re interrupted in ways far beyond what’s available today.

Death by tapback

Tapbacks are great. I use them all the time, and so do most of my friends. Now that I can tap back with any emoji, or even stickers that I’ve added–not to mention the forthcoming rain of AI-synthesized GenMoji that will be possible with Apple Intelligence–the use of Tapbacks will just keep increasing in so many of my group messages.

Great! They’re fun! But they also generate, by default, an additional notification and a haptic tap every time a new one is made. And that means that the average post in a group text thread will now generate three, four, five, or more notifications–because it includes not just the post, but notifications for every single reaction.

Right now there’s not a lot a person can do about this. I don’t want to turn off all notifications from Messages, of course, because some messages are more important than others. I also don’t always want to go to the extreme of silencing an entire group chat, because then I’ve got no indication that something is going on that I need to know about. (This happens a lot with a silenced family group I’m in, where I will sometimes glance at the Messages icon and see the indication that 15 messages have somehow come in when I wasn’t paying attention.)

What’s a Messages user to do? What I’m doing is begging Apple to consider adding more granular controls over notifications, and also to apply Apple Intelligence more directly to my group chats.

More than all or nothing

We all need more control over how Messages notifies us about goings on in our individual chats and group threads. First off, it would be great if I could specify that I wanted to be notified when new messages appeared in a chat, but not when a new tapback reaction arrived. The reaction multiplier in active chats is just too much for me to bear sometimes.

Managing notifications should also be smarter. I’d like to be able to mute notifications for a chat for some time, so I can get back to work and catch up on the chat later. Sure, I can set a Focus mode, but again… that seems like a workaround when there’s a more direct way to solve the problem. Namely, “Stop bugging me about this chat for an hour.”

Even better, what about using some intelligence–you can even brand it as an Apple Intelligence feature if you want, Apple–to reduce the number of notifications in an ongoing chat? Imagine some clever software analyzing the incoming messages and realizing that there have been 10 posts and 25 emoji reactions in a chat in the last few minutes and that maybe it’s worth waiting until things settle down a little before summarizing what’s going on? Apple Intelligence can summarize messages, but I wonder if it could use that analysis to be more aggressive in calming down out-of-control threads. Consider the new Reduce Interruptions Focus mode, and apply it to specific Messages threads.

I love that Apple Intelligence can summarize… well, just about everything. If a thread I’m on has a huge number of messages and reactions in it, I don’t necessarily need a play-by-play, nor do I want to permanently mute all notifications from that thread. What about allowing me to subscribe to occasional updates from a thread? That way, if my Family Chat thread suddenly generates a huge flurry of responses–this generally happens once a week or so when my brother-in-law posts a bunch of new cute photos of my niece–I could continue working uninterrupted until, once everything has settled down, I get a single notification from my device: “Mike sent new photos of Mia playing soccer; everyone agrees they are cute.” That sure beats seeing a message that 15 messages are unread or getting pummeled with dozens of sounds or vibrations over a five or 10-minute period as everyone reacts.

Apple, what I’m saying is: You’ve built a fun communication system with Messages, but your all-or-nothing notification system sucks. It’s time to apply some more intelligence to the matter, as well as give users more control, such as muting reactions or designating certain threads as “summarize only.” I love those emoji tapbacks, but I don’t want them to become so annoying that I end up turning them all off.