Satellite texting might be the biggest thing Apple showed off at WWDC 2024.
Satellite texting might be the biggest thing Apple showed off at WWDC 2024.
The iPhone is undoubtedly the biggest product Apple sells, and a new feature that adds the ability to send text messages using a satellite could make it even bigger. The days of not being able to contact friends, family or even a co-worker when you don’t have a cell signal or Wi-Fi are numbered.
During the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, before Apple Intelligence and the iPad’s calculator app were announced, Apple showed off the Messages via satellite iOS 18 feature. And if this were three years ago, it would have been the only thing people talked about.
For the past couple of years there have been numerous reports of people in distress who were rescued or helped, in part, because of their iPhone. Apple highlights these stories before its big shows. One feature behind some of the more dramatic rescues is Emergency SOS via satellite which lets iPhone 14 and 15 owners without a cell signal contact emergency responders.
Now with iOS 18, Apple is taking that technology and expanding it so you can message anyone, even when it’s not an emergency. And I got to see the feature in action.
Kurt Knight, Apple’s senior director of platform product marketing, walked me through a demo of Messages via satellite at Apple Park during WWDC. In a remote part of the company’s campus, on a warm sunny day, Knight sent messages, emoji and even tapbacks using satellites orbiting in the sky hundreds of miles above us.
« It is just like using iMessage that you’re used to, super easy », Knight said. « We have a custom protocol so that this is still end-to-end encrypted. We had to do extra work to make the [data] packets extra small, because you need to be really efficient sending things up to space and back. »
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Knight didn’t have to do anything special to get the feature to work, aside from following the onscreen guide on how to connect to a satellite and occasionally adjusting the direction he was facing when prompted in order to have a stronger connection to the satellite.
