How to Undo a Sent iMessage on iPhone

If you’ve accidentally sent someone an iMessage and you want to get it back, here’s how to do it on your iPhone or iPad.

I’m sure we’ve all been there before: You write a message and then send it, but soon after you send it you realize that you forgot to add a detail or that you probably shouldn’t have sent that obnoxious message. first place.

In fact, if you are reading this now, chances are this has happened to you and you are looking for a way to protect yourself in the future.

Fortunately, there is a way to hopefully get a sent iMessage back before you deliver it to your recipient.

When you send an iMessage, it may take a few seconds for the sending to actually complete depending on your WiFi or mobile connection. Sending photos and videos via iMessage takes even longer. In that short amount of time, you can actually undo the sending of the message as if you were acting fast enough before it’s delivered to your recipient.

In any case, here’s how to send an iMessage or text message on your iPhone before it’s delivered to the other party. Unfortunately, there is no way to undo sending an iMessage that was previously delivered to the recipient, even if they haven’t read it.

How to Undo a Sent iMessage

The process of undoing a sent iMessage or text message on iPhone is really easy and fast, but you need to be quick to do it properly as it only takes a few seconds for an iMessage to appear officially. send and receive.

To undo a sent message, swipe down from the top-right corner of the iPhone screen to open Control Center and quickly enable Airplane Mode on most iPhones or iPads. On iPhone 8 and older, you have to swipe up from the bottom of the screen. This will cut off all signals to and from your iPhone which will make the message impossible to send and you will eventually get a “Not Delivered” message in red.

When you hit the send button in an iMessage or text message, you only have a few seconds to activate Airplane Mode, so you definitely need to be quick. If you are sending a picture or video, you have a little more time to enable Airplane Mode.

After you get the red exclamation mark and the message “Not Delivered”, you can tap and hold the message and then select . From there, hit the trash can icon to delete the message. You’ll want to make sure you don’t skip this step because once you disable Airplane Mode and your iPhone gets its signal back, it will try to send the message again.

Physically deleting an iMessage sent from a friend’s or family member’s iPhone won’t fix your problem either. This is because when you send an iMessage, the message is immediately delivered to all Apple devices. Even if they let you delete your iMessage from their iPhone in person, they may have seen it on another device like the Apple Watch. Or they might see it in the future when they pick up their iPad or MacBook.

If you feel like you need to send iMessages more often than you would like, you may want to make sure you have photos of your important contacts so you can distinguish conversations at a glance. The Messages app displays contacts’ initials by default, making it easy to tap into the wrong conversation.

Since you can’t always get iMessages back, you can avoid tracking faulty iMessages with something like ‘sorry, wrong speech’ if it’s a minor mistake. Of course, this won’t work for the more embarrassing iMessages, especially if the content is inappropriate.

Other iMessage Tricks

iMessage is more than just a messaging platform where you can message your friends. It can do a lot more, like send voice messages and even share your location so your friends know where to meet you.

Tap and hold the little microphone icon to the right of the text box to send an instant voice message in iMessage and it will automatically start recording.

When you’re done recording the voicemail, lift your finger and you can delete or send the voicemail (the X icon will clear the message and send an upward pointing arrow). You can also tap and hold to save your message and then swipe right up to send it instantly, or swipe left to delete the message and start over.

iMessage also lets you share your location with a friend; this can be great when you’re meeting with someone and you don’t want to explain where you are or how they can get there.

Tap on it in a conversation and you’ll see two options: and . It sends your current location when you select it. It’s important to note that this is a one-time instance, so if you move to another location, iMessage won’t continue to update your friend with your new location.

Instead, you can use which will bring more options depending on how long you want to share your location, and iMessage will keep updating it every time you move to a new location.

Another handy trick that many users can take advantage of is the ability to mute specific contacts. If you want to mute notifications for certain contacts but want to make sure you continue to receive notifications from your significant other, you can turn off notifications for certain friends. Just open the conversation windows, tap on it and then enable it.