Craig Federighi says scheduled iMessage feature is ‘something we continue to consider,’ lyrics visualizer slated for iOS 13.1 in Music app

iMessage is a rich messenger platform with its own App Store and features like end-to-end encryption. However, advanced features like scheduled iMessages could make it an even more robust service. Recently an Apple user reached out to Craig Federighi about this feature request and got a detailed response about how the company is considering it.

Reddit user Jmaster_888 (via Mark Gurman) shared the response from Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, after asking about Apple bringing a scheduled iMessage feature to iOS. Straight away, Federighi said:

This is something we’ve definitely considered (and something we continue to consider).

However, he then detailed some of the problems Apple needs to solve to bring this feature to users:

Of course, it does come with a bunch of complexity:

• How to represent unsent messages
• Support fo deleting and editing pending messages
• What to do [when] someone send you a message when you have outgoing messages pending (i.e. do you blast them back with the pending messages?)

And of course the social concern that we may end up sending the messages at a time that you are not availabel to respond to any replies that come back — this could be confusing for the person who is under the impression taht you must be at the ready on your phone, since you just sent them a message.

9to5Mac’s Bradley Chambers wrote about this back in January of this year and notably, his idea for implementation could alleviate some of Apple’s concerns.

One of my suggestions is allowing users to mark outgoing messages as not important or “read at some point”. If I want to send someone a text message at 6 AM, I may not want them to see it unless they open their iMessage app. A lot of email apps have the capability to “pre-schedule” messages, so it’s possible for Apple to implement the same for iMessage.

In a separate Reddit post, user diggidiggi1dolla shared a response from Federighi about bringing the lyrics visualizer in the Music app to the Now Playing screen. Federighi said there were problems at first with battery life and CPU usage, but those have been ironed out and the feature “should hopefully” arrive with iOS 13.1.

You can exploit some buggy behavior in the current iOS 13.1 beta, as shown below, but currently the normal behavior is the colorful album art animated backdrops are only displayed when viewing lyrics.