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Here's What The New "App" Button Does On iOS 10

by Kaitlyn Wylde

Hooray for iPhone users — Apple announced on Sept. 7 that the highly anticipated iOS 10 will be released on Sept. 13! If you've already made the switch to iOS 10, first of all, congratulations (and welcome to the land of endless texting fun and diversified emojis). If you've started to play around with your new and improved iMessage app, you might be asking yourself: why there is an app button in the iOS 10 text screen? Like, what's it doing there? What are you supposed to do with it? What is this new world? Fortunately for you, I've been playing around with this new operating system in beta for awhile now, and know the answers to your questions. Let's jump in.

The new iMessage, as you might be noticing, has a media attachment interface that it never had before. Basically it got a media facelift. The folks over at Apple made it really easy for us to send media through text without having to leave the app. They've also made it easy for us to view media in the text box. You no longer have to send your friends impatient, "I'm at work, can't open it, what is it?" texts. Because you can now see the attachment in your chat window. In the past, if you wanted to send your friend a GIF, you'd either have to mine it from your saved camera roll, or you'd have to leave the chat, open up Safari and do a GIF search, and save it to your camera roll. There were so many steps! Woe to our fingers!

But now, iMessage has a built in app store that comes loaded with a GIF library, a default sticker library, and Apple Music. So not only can you send images, videos, GIFs, stickers and even songs, you don't ever have to leave your conversation to do so. All thanks to inline playback and viewing, one of the update's maybe most exciting features.

Here's how to use it:

Head To iMessage

When you tap the message field, three option icons will appear: the camera, the digital touch and the app store. Tap the "A" for app store and notice that page one of two will pop up with sharable media options.

To The Right, To The Right

Scroll once to the right if you want to access your built-in GIF liberally because honesty, why wouldn't you? You'll notice that welcome page has some pre-loaded options for you to scroll through, but if you want to find something specific, just type it into the search bar as you would with Google Images.

Select And Send A GIF

Add, text, emojis, whatever you want and hit send. The GIF will open up directly in the text box for the recipient to see. And unlike this static image, it will move on loop, in the text box.

Now Send A Song

Scroll back to the left to access your Apple Music library. If the recipient is signed up for Apple Music, you can send any song from your own library and it will open up just like this. You can play it in the text, without having to be taken to iTunes! iMessage is now officially your one-stop-shop.

If you're not seeing the GIF option right away, make sure you've downloaded the new operating system. You should be prompted right as it becomes available, but just in case you've missed it, go to "Settings," then "General," then "Software Update," where the option should be available to you. Then BOOM, access to the iMessage content catalogue of your dreams.

Images: Pexels; Kaitlyn Wylde/Bustle