iMessage but the entire background is the other person’s face

Recently, I’ve been connected to more and more people on apps like WhatsApp and Signal instead of iMessage. As if my life wasn’t complicated enough, I now get to juggle jumping between multiple applications to have text conversations. Oh, what fun.

I will say, I do enjoy some of the quirks that WhatsApp and Instagram’s Messenger applications have. You can customize your message backgrounds and, it’s much easier to talk with people in other countries.

All of this got me thinking, what if there was more visual customizability for iMessage? What if the background of your chat was a close-up photo of the other person’s face?

In theory, if iMessage supported custom backgrounds you could do this by uploading an image. However, I think iOS doing this by default is much funnier. You could take it a step further and have your phone record a front-facing camera view of you that plays as a looped video on the recipient’s background.

Given Apple’s historical aversion to customizability, I don’t think we’ll see a feature like this any time soon. However, after seeing the custom app icons from iOS 18, I think anything is possible.

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