How apps can use iOS 10’s Messages SDK to join the conversation

iOS 10 in context

This post is an excerpted chapter from the iOS 10 in context ebook.

In a year when the new iPhone hardware design is a subtle refinement, holding out for the dramatic reinvention in 2017, the new version of iOS is the headline. iOS 10 makes the platform competitive in new spaces, showcases the latest hardware improvements like Touch ID and 3D Touch, and pushes Apple’s machine learning agenda forward. And, most importantly, iOS 10 opens the platform to developers in all-new ways, giving access to new corners of the operating system that most closely impact the user experience.

Apple has become the kind of company that only makes big moves—and this is iOS 10 in context.

Messages is the most heavily used app of any kind on iOS devices, growing in jumps and spurts over the years to incorporate a wide range of diverse features. What was simply called “SMS” in iPhone OS 1, handling nothing beyond green-bubble text messages, has grown to absorb nearly every conceivable means of communication from images and video to voice recordings, contact cards, GPS coordinates, documents, and more.

But Apple’s iMessage platform, while ubiquitous across iOS, macOS, and watchOS devices, exists in an era of accelerating competition. While Apple has sold a staggering 1 billion iPhones to date, Facebook Messenger has more than 1.1 billion users across iOS, Android, and web, and other messaging apps like WhatsApp, WeChat, and LINE report similar global usage statistics. The messaging ground has shifted under Apple’s feet since Messages saw its last major update in iOS 8, and the lock-in benefits of iMessage usage are as critical to Apple’s long-term strategy as ever. With iOS 10, Messages is ripe for something fresh.

So with its tenth release, Apple is opening iMessage conversations to apps, introducing a specialized App Store and a range of new app categories for experiences that can coexist with iOS users’ conversations. The Messages SDK represents the opening of one of iOS’s most prominent and popular arenas, and a strategic shift in terms of how developers can interact with the iOS platform. iOS 10 fundamentally changes what “apps” can be—and in so doing, effectively obviates a pocket industry of sticker- and GIF-focused third-party keyboards from the App Store.

Introducing Messages SDK

The Messages SDK in iOS 10 is a new framework that allows third-party developers to create new kinds of apps that exist within iMessage conversation threads. These apps typically replace the on-screen keyboard with a custom interface, allowing users to select objects or content to insert into their conversations in place of ordinary text messages.

But while iMessage until this point has seemed best-suited for emoji sticker packs or copy-and-paste GIF generators, typically delivered in the form of a third-party custom keyboard, the Messages SDK opens up the possibility for entirely new types of apps to populate users’ conversations. Sticker packs are still there—and easier than ever for artists and designers to create—but there are new collaborative types of apps that allow users on both sides of the conversation to interact with content within the message thread. It’s a dramatic reinvention of how apps can deliver multi-user experiences, and introduces a new real-time collaborative mode that many types of third-party apps are perfectly suited for.

One example of this functionality is a restaurant menu, where multiple members of a group iMessage thread can add their individual dishes to the order in real time. Another is purchasing movie tickets, where several members of the conversation can select showtimes and seats simultaneously, ensuring they can all sit together. The Messages SDK gives developers access to the message thread in real time, and logs each users’ contributions to these shared sessions as events within the iMessage timeline.

It’s not entirely a novel idea to have users interacting with the same content at the same time, but it’s a feature that has never been so elegantly implemented.

This type of shared-session real-time collaboration is certainly possible within the contexts of native apps, but required a lot of the users—they each needed to download and use the same app, somehow coordinate and schedule a time to work together, and likely enter a cumbersome code or password to ensure they were in the same session. Now, one user simply initiates the app and everyone in the iMessage conversation can jump in within seconds.

Important to note: only one user needs to initiate the iMessage app. The others don’t need to have downloaded the app from the Messages App Store themselves, or even necessarily heard of it. Messages helpfully places a Download call-to-action beneath any messages contributed by third-party apps, allowing users to jump straight into an experience their friends have implicitly shared with them.

While the most common and likely most widely used iMessage apps will be these reimagined sticker packs—which Apple has helpfully included as an out-of-the-box template in the new version of Xcode—the nature of conversation threads introduces an all-new opportunity for different kinds of mobile experiences. Brands whose customer experiences are intended to be enjoyed by groups—think splitting the bar tab, agreeing on a restaurant reservation, picking a movie showtime, holding a fantasy football draft, making a shopping list, and uncountable other examples we can’t even imagine yet—there’s a new outlet to deliver them to more users than ever before.

Customer experiences that are designed for groups—splitting the bar tab, agreeing on a restaurant reservation, ordering group takeout, picking a movie showtime, scheduling a meeting, holding a fantasy football draft, making a shopping list, and more—are perfect for the Messages SDK.

You have a new message from a brand—and you’re weirdly cool with it

iMessage apps represent an opportunity for brands to offer real value to customers in an arena that simply didn’t exist before. Designing custom sticker packs to effect brand affinity is one thing—and a silly trend that far too many brands will probably fall victim to. But reinventing a pain point of consumer software that’s as old as the web—how to get all your friends doing the same thing at the same time—will genuinely help users in their everyday lives, and become important differentiators in an increasingly competitive mobile landscape.

Solving a consumer pain point as old as the web—getting all your friends doing the same thing at the same time—will genuinely improve everyday users’ lives.

Further, the nature of iMessage apps’ growth strategy is significant. While iMessage apps can exist solely on the Messages-specific App Store, or be bundled with a larger iOS app distributed through the primary store, Messages is a new organic avenue for new customers to discover amazing iMessage apps. With the call to action that helpfully prompts users to download the apps their friends use, the best iMessage apps can spread virally, offering developers with the most useful ideas an unprecedented level of discoverability.

The mobile experiences that matter are those that legitimately impact their users’ lives—and the Messages SDK offers a toolset for developers to do exactly that. And no, that doesn’t mean sticker packs. Users will come to expect this level of real-time, social, shared-session collaboration before long, and the apps that adopt it first and best will reap the viral rewards. In many of these cases, until brands rethink their mobile apps take advantage of this new type of experience, their connection to users will feel like a holding pattern, an ellipsis within a blinking speech bubble that feels like the beginning of something amazing. And that real-time collaborative future is the long-anticipated message that users don’t even know they’re waiting for.