While there’s no limit to how long an iMessage can be, not all of your friends may have iPhones. Which means you default back to SMS, which has a 140 character limit. While Apple has been pretty good about splitting up SMS when sending more than 140 characters, sometimes it doesn’t work as intended, depending on the receiving person’s carrier.
So, keeping track of how many characters you’ve typed may be useful for sending messages to friends on inferior devices.
Follow along to learn how to turn on this feature…
iPhone: How to enable character counter in the Messages app
- Fire up Settings > Messages.
- Scroll down until you see the SMS/MMS portion.
- Toggle on Character Count.
Again, this will only apply to SMS (green bubbles) as iMessage (blue bubbles) don’t have a character limit.
For more help getting the most out of your Apple devices, check out our how to guide as well as the following articles:
- iPhone & iPad: How to turn off or on location services and GPS
- Apple Watch: How to enable power saving mode for the Workouts app
- How to clean HomePod and remove wear
- iPhone: How to customize transit directions in Apple Maps
- watchOS 5: How to add sports updates to the Siri watch face
- iPhone: How to disable short names for contacts
- iPhone & iPad: How to customize swipe gestures in mail
- iOS 12: How to use third-party Password AutoFill apps
