My Frivolous Apple Wish: Let Me and My Friends Leave Better Voice Messages

If only there were a way for a trillion-dollar tech company to improve this experience

I have group chats with different groups of friends (brag!). There’s one with my two best friends; another with two friends I introduced to each other right before the pandemic, thereby unintentionally creating a triad bonded to each other through whatever happened in 2020 and everything after; one with my family; one with my skeeball team, The Bourgeoiskee, which went from a group of people I personally knew who all wanted to play skeeball together to a veritable group of friends; one for a small group of friends who were fans of a recently shuttered but beloved nearby Greek restaurant; another with my old coworkers. Sometimes I’ll return to my phone after a prolonged set of meetings to discover I’ve somehow missed 122 collective messages, and sometimes I miss nothing.

Sometimes words are too much work, though, and you’d rather leave a voice message. And then other people respond with their own voice messages. I refer to this act of listening to a series of your friends’ back-to-back, occasionally related voice messages as Friend Podcast. But Apple, which created the functionality to upload and listen to your friends’ voice messages, has seemingly abandoned making any updates to its voice messaging feature, which generally has terrible UX, after shipping it years ago. So here is my proposal for Tim Apple and whoever…