Messages via satellite: Apple’s newest iPhone feature could save your life
With Messages via satellite in iOS 18, users without access to cellular connectivity or Wi-Fi can message over satellite right from the Messages app, while maintaining end-to-end encryption for iMessage.
iOS 18 introduces Messages via satellite for the times when cellular and Wi-Fi connections aren’t available for your iPhone. Powered by the same groundbreaking technology as existing iPhone satellite capabilities, Messages via satellite automatically prompts users to connect to their nearest satellite right from the Messages app to send and receive texts, emoji, and Tapbacks over iMessage and SMS. With Dynamic Island, users always know when they are connected to a satellite. Because iMessage was built to protect user privacy, iMessages sent via satellite are end-to-end encrypted. Messages via satellite will be available in iOS 18 along with Apple’s existing satellite features in the U.S. only on iPhone 14 and later.
[At WWDC], Apple showed off the Messages via satellite iOS 18 feature. And if this were three years ago, it would have been the only thing people talked about.
For the past couple of years there have been numerous reports of people in distress who were rescued or helped, in part, because of their iPhone. Apple highlights these stories before its big shows. One feature behind some of the more dramatic rescues is Emergency SOS via satellite which lets iPhone 14 and 15 owners without a cell signal contact emergency responders.
Now with iOS 18, Apple is taking that technology and expanding it so you can message anyone, even when it’s not an emergency.
If you use iMessage over a satellite connection, all messages will come in no matter who initiates the conversation. For SMS over satellite, you have to initiate the conversation by sending the first message unless that person is an Emergency Contact or part of Family Setup.
“We support SMS,” said [Kurt Knight, Apple’s senior director of platform product marketing]. “So you can send a message to basically anyone who has a phone and they’re able to just reply.”
Apple’s expansion of its satellite service for the iPhone leaps past other companies that had hoped to get into the emerging market… [O] only Apple’s partnership with Globalstar for its iPhone satellite connectivity has linked smartphones to satellites on a large scale.
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MacDailyNews Take: Only Apple. As with Apple Watch’s heart monitoring capabilities, fall detection, crash detection, etc., the life-saving potential of this service will sell plenty of new iPhones and fuel iPhone upgrades to anxiety-ridden Americans (millions upon millions of American iPhone users have not upgraded in 4+ years and Messages via satellite only works with iPhone 14 and later).
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