iMessage welfare check

Some people are pretty bad at texting back. Other people are good at texting back, but they don’t want to reply to you specifically. Others still have had something bad happen to them, and they might be rendered incapable of texting you back.

What if you could do a welfare check on someone to make sure they’re okay directly from iMessage? In the context I’ve used to mock this design up, it’s extremely unhinged. Consider for a second if this was a text thread with your spouse or a grandparent. Suddenly, this feature has some potential merit to it.

While I do think that baking welfare checks into iOS by default is a step too far, it’s good to think about how far context can go in selling (or sabotaging) the ideas we share. With the proper context and mockups, you could paint a pretty compelling picture for this feature. However, I still think it would get abused to no end and it probably shouldn’t exist.

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