You can now use every Emoji to react to messages with iOS 18

Apple released iOS 18 to the general public on September 16, a week after the company announced its new iPhone 16 range, Apple Watch Series 10 And more at its September event. The update brought many new features to your iPhone, like the ability to customize lock screens, schedule messages to send later, and much more. And a cool new feature in the update that will make your texts more fun is the ability to use more Tapbacks – Apple’s version of Reactions. With iOS 18, you can use all your emoji, and even your stickers, to react to messages.

Before iOS 18, there were only six Tapback options: a heart, a thumbs up or down, a “Haha”, exclamation points, or a question mark. Some people might be confused or irritated when they see someone reacting to their post with one of these. For example, some people think the thumbs-up emoji is passive-aggressive. With iOS 18, you can use any emoji or sticker on your iPhone to react to messages, giving you more ways to communicate your feelings.

Learn more: Everything you need to know about iOS 18

Here’s how to use all your emoji and stickers to react to texts in Messages.

How to use all emoji for Tapbacks

1. Open Messages.
2. Go to the right chat.
3. Long press on a message.

In the Tapbacks bubble above the message, scroll to the right to see a handful of emoji to use. If you don’t see the right emoji or want to use a sticker, tap the gray smiley face on the far right of the menu to bring up your emoji keyboard. You can scroll through the emoji or use the search function to find the emoji you want to use.

You can also tap the sticker icon – the folded circle – near the left side of the emoji keyboard to access your premade and custom stickers. This means you can react to someone’s post with a sticker of your pet if you want – and who doesn’t want to see more pets?

To learn more about iOS 18, here is my iOS 18 Review and our iOS 18 Cheat Sheet. You can also view everything that iOS 18.1 could soon be coming to your iPhone.

Watch this: 11 Hidden Features in iOS 18

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