Love it or hate it, iOS 7 has introduced a radically new user interface to the Apple iOS devices. Whatever you think about the change of interface, there are some great new features available.
For me, one of the most useful additions is the ability to view timestamps for individual text messages.
Have you ever had a text conversation with someone and found that there’s only a timestamp every now and then on the messages? Prior to iOS 7, previous versions of iOS would usually group together messages sent only a few minutes apart, displaying them with a single timestamp.
Now you can easily see a timestamp for every individual message in a conversation.
As usual, it’s one of those ‘easter egg’ features that Apple like us to discover. So, here’s how to discover it!
To view these individual timestamps:
Step 1. Open the Messages app from the Home screen of your iOS device (or whichever folder you have moved it into).
Step 2. Tap on the message conversation that you would like to view a specific timestamp for.
Step 3. From anywhere in the main message area of the screen, swipe your finger from the far right to left to reveal timestamps for each individual message.
Here’s an example of a typical message conversation by default NOT showing the individual message timestamps:
As you can see, there are no timestamps for each message, they are all grouped together, linked to ‘today at 11:34’.
However, with a quick finger swipe to the left, you can now see at which time each individual message was sent:
If you haven’t already discovered this feature, I hope, like me, you’ll find this really useful. This works for iMessages (blue bubbles) as well as texts sent via SMS (green bubbles).
Disclaimer:
While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.
This feature has been tested using iOS 7.0.2 which was the latest iOS release at the time of writing.