Mitchel Broussard, writing for MacRumors:

Popular music-detecting app Shazam today rolled out an update that adds support for the service within Messages, so users can send new artist and song discoveries directly to friends and family members.
[…]
The only user interface option within the Messages app for Shazam is “Touch to Shazam,” so whenever a song is playing nearby, allow the app to listen and once it does it’ll create a card to send to the current contact. The created message can be tapped on to jump into Shazam, buy the track on iTunes, or listen to it on Apple Music.

This is clever: if you’re in iMessage and want to share a song you’re listening to, you don’t have to go look for the Shazam app. Between iMessage and interactive notifications, I like what Shazam is doing with iOS 10.

With stickers coming to iMessage in iOS 10, Connie Chan has posted a great overview of stickers in WeChat and Line and why they’re more than glorified emoji:

Besides invisible messages, bigger and predictive emoji, full-screen effects, and movie/TV GIFs, Apple recently announced that stickers, too, are finally coming to its most popular app, iMessage. It’s no surprise that messaging is the company’s most popular app — if smartphones are like extensions of our fingers, then messaging is like touching people and things.

What is surprising — especially when compared to the more mature messaging ecosystem in Asia — is that many people still tend to treat stickers (i.e., the ability to easily incorporate pre-set images into texts) as just-for-fun frivolity, when they’re an important visual digital language fully capable of communicating a nuanced range of thoughts. For example, a single sticker could convey very different messages: “I’m so hungry I could collapse” or “I miss you” or “I’m sound asleep snoring”. Complex feelings, actions, punch lines, and memes are all possible with stickers.

(via Jeremy Burge’s excellent Emoji Wrap newsletter.)

I don’t usually cover concepts and mockups here at MacStories, but this idea by Michael Steeber is exactly what I’ve been wanting to see in Apple’s Messages app for a long time.

One of the best parts of these inline previews is that they aren’t limited just to the Messages app. The same previews could work in other Apple apps like Mail and Notes, or even in third party apps that support document-style text input. A feature like this, while subtle in implementation, has the potential to save a significant amount of time and remove points of friction in anyone’s workflow.

Steeber has come up with several ideas for inline previews, such as web links and Twitter, but also calendar invitations, documents, notes, and weather conditions.

Here’s what I wrote in my iOS 9 wishes in May:

Messaging services like Slack and Messenger have proven the utility of automatically generating previews for content shared in conversations such as direct links to images, tweets, or web articles. Considering Apple’s integration with Twitter and Safari’s Reader capabilities, I’m surprised they didn’t consider richer previews for content shared over iMessage before. Compared to the aforementioned messaging services, sharing links to web content on iMessage feels primitive, without the context granted by snippets of information embedded directly in a conversation. It’s time for a refresh.

As messaging continues to grow as an interface of its own, it only makes sense to make conversations faster and more contextual by using rich previews of what’s being shared. Considering that Apple is using open standards such as schema.org and Open Graph for rich results in iOS 9’s Search, they could use a similar system to build rich previews in Messages as well.

Craig Mod has a few suggestions that would go a long way towards improving iMessage. He talks about conflicting IDs, unsynced histories (and someone else had to make an app to fix how terrible searching history is on the Mac), and the lack of proper profiles for the people you’re conversing with.

The biggest problem I have with iMessage is that it’s capable of but really poor at handling group conversations. Our issues revolved around the “Send and Receive” settings. For a group chat to really work, everyone has to be sending from the same address. More often than not, this was different between a Mac and iOS devices. If someone in the group was sending a message on their iPhone, the default was likely a phone number. If someone in the group was sending a message on their Mac, the default was probably an email address. Linking helps, but keeping track of all these settings is difficult. If one person in the group was sending from a different address, it would cause a new conversation to appear in iMessage (thus “splitting the thread”) for the receivers. For the sender, everything would appear to be the same. With a big group of people this became a daily annoyance because it became difficult to follow conversations when different instances or pieces of it showed up in different places. It’s a hard problem to describe, especially when receivers can opt to receive messages at multiple email addresses (and if the same person you’re conversing with decides to send you something to an alternative address, I believe the message should show up in the same conversation). The reality is that the settings are kind of a mess and talking about this stuff caused a lot of frustration and we eventually gave up.

And we won’t even get into the problems that the iMessage for Mac app has. But that was a mess for a whole different reason, the main problem being that it would lock up our Macs when they awoke from sleep as hundreds of messages were downloaded. This is why our team fled to Google Hangouts once those apps became available on iOS (more on that in a minute).

iMessage is fine for its intended use, as an SMS replacement for talking to friends or family one-on-one, but people are treating it as the next Aol. instant messenger. And can you blame people? Our expectations are measured by how fast iMessage is at sending messages. Today’s virtual keyboards allow us to rapid fire messages and hold conversations a lot longer than our T9 phones did years ago. The days of traditional slow texting are over.

Google Hangouts has its own problems. The iOS apps in particular aren’t terrible aesthetically, but they slow down and I get frustrated waiting for messages to be sent and received a lot. I’m mostly happy with the Chrome extension, except when I play video in the background and the app gets bogged down because of something intensive happening in the browser. The good thing is that we haven’t had a problem following conversations and Google’s history (especially for images) is fantastic. The bad news is that it’s the opposite of iMessage: Hangouts fixes the history and contact stuff, but isn’t very good with the sending and receiving part on mobile. It has a desktop app (Chrome extension) that works but mobile apps that struggle. Ugh!