Messages Improvements
While Apple’s Messages app hasn’t gotten the same large-scale overhaul that it’s seen in other recent iOS releases, Apple has added a few nice quality-of-life improvements to make it easier for users to share photos and keep track of other shared content.
Mindy Borovsky, Apple’s Engineering Program Manager for Messaging Apps took the stage to show off how these new features work in iOS 15, including a new way of sharing photos in stacks and collages that can be expanded to view individual photos much more effectively, and even Tapback on individual ones.
Apple has also introduced a new Shared with You section into several key apps that will collect and help to resurface links that have been sent to you via Messages.
For example, if somebody shares a News link with you, this will appear in the Shared With You section in the News app, so you can read it later. It also links back to the original conversation in Messages so you can reply later. Shared items can also now be individually pinned to elevate them in the Shared with You view.
The new Shared with You section will be available in News, Music, Safari, Podcasts, the TV app. It will also appear in Photos, where Apple has added some additional magic to collect photos shared by your friends and family and also include them in Featured Photos, Memories, and even integrated with into your Library (with icons that indicate that they’ve come from Messages).
Don’t worry, though, as Apple promises that this will be handled with some on-device intelligence to make sure that only relevant photos get included in your library, so you won’t have to worry about a bunch of irrelevant things like screenshots or casual snapshots cluttering up your main library.
According to Borovsky, iOS 15 will look for details such as photos that were taken at places and times you were present. This will let you easily see all the photos shared from a party or vacation in one unified view.