Mail, Messages & collaboration
Now it’s easier than ever to share with others – and to change your mind
For those thinking that Mail has long been overdue some real attention from Apple, you’ll like the changes in iPadOS 16. The new Undo Send can help you in those heart-in-mouth moments when you’ve accidentally sent the wrong thing or sent it to the wrong person, and Mail will also warn you if your message says you’ve included a file or photo and forgotten to attach it.
You can now schedule emails to go at specific times rather than right now, put sent messages in your inbox for you to remember to chase the recipient, and you can also get Mail to remind you about emails you’ve looked at but haven’t responded to.
One of our favourite changes is the least spectacularlooking but by far the most useful, though. Search has been massively improved. What sometimes felt like pot luck and often proved very reluctant to find messages we knew were there somewhere is much faster and vastly more reliable, with Mail autocorrecting search criteria to help speed things up.
Messages gets an Undo feature too, although the recipient needs to be using the same app and the right version. You can mark messages as unread, recover accidentally deleted ones and send invitations to collaborate on Numbers, Pages, Notes, Keynote, Reminders and Safari, or to share Apple Music and other media via SharePlay. And it’s easier for developers to use the Messages Collaboration API to add Messages integration to their own apps, enabling you to share more kinds of things with more people.
SharePlay improves with each new release, and it now works with more things than ever before. Third-party services such as Disney+ and many third-party apps now have SharePlay synchronisation so you can watch, listen or interact with them along with friends, family or colleagues, and you can even share Fitness+ workouts (provided you’re both subscribers.
Not all the new collaboration features were available from day one, however. Freeform, Apple’s interactive whiteboard, was pencilled in for release at the very end of the year, a couple of months after the rest of iPadOS 16 was made available.