Annoyingly, iPhones don't have a great way to schedule messages. This around 100 lines of python to schedule iMessage texts from .txt files on your computer.
If this is useful to you, please give it a try and let me know what you think. Thanks.
If you don’t have an Apple computer but have an iOS device, you can also do something similar with the “Shortcuts.app” + “Calendar.app”.
I have a daily shortcut that runs at X time. Shortcut checks a calendar for events, if today contains one or more events. It will parse the text from these events (comma separated fully qualified phone numbers or iMessage accounts), and send the message contained in the body of the event.
Added bonus here is that I can also send group messages.
If I need to have the message sent on repeat, then I put the cal event on repeat.
I could possibly even have templated messages (ie, insert month and year into message), but I haven’t deep dived into that rabbit hole.
Downside here though is that you need an iOS device to always be on.
Last time i checked you need to swipe to confirm every time your automation attempts to send a message? kinda kills the automation part. I was shocked that there was almost nothing to be automated with messages on IOS as third party apps can't even read or send them. The Tasker app for android is great for this kind of thing.
Although if the script has some dependency on iOS or macOS specific function (ie, existence of “Apple script”). Then the shortcut might not be portable between macOS <-> iOS
I like reviewing my scheduled messages before sending (maybe the person has said something in the meantime), so the solution I came up with is a shortcut which first asks for text input, then a contact, then the time. All in the best possible interface in context, no need to worry about special syntax or formatting.
The message text is URL encoded, the phone number is auto-retrieved from the contact, then an sms: URL is generated and added to my reminders app. When the time comes, I simply click the link and it auto-populates in Messages, ready to send or tweak.
I like your solution a bit more because it doesn’t require scheduling this script to run on a cron or something. How do you URL encode the message? Could you share the whole shortcut
This could be insanely useful for me. Thank you! It means I could have a private monitoring approach that send myself a message on events I want notifications on? I didn’t even know iMessage allowed sending a self message.
I’ve built something similar with ios shortcuts. One shortcut that uses prompts and data jar to schedule and store messages. It also creates a cal event as a reminder to myself. It supports group texts. Then I have three automations that run in the morning, noon, and afternoon that check for scheduled messages and send them. Works well. Happy to share if interest.
Sometimes I’m up at 4am and want to send a message to someone at a reasonable hour when they’re not going to be in Do-not-Disturb mode, seems like a good enough way to accomplish. I use Slack “schedule tomorrow for 9am” pretty frequently for the same use case.
I use it more as a reminder system. Someone tells me to checkin next week or in a couple days and I can just schedule the text right then so I dont forget.
Unfortunately no, Apple has usage limits on iMessage / SMS relaying. Many people hack around this, SendBlue.co being the only long running service, but it's full of the graveyard of folks trying to do this.
What does this mean in practice? I leave my Messages app on my laptop open all day and correspond entirely through it with family. Since I'm typing I send messages rapidly at volume. I've never once hit a limit. Think hundreds of responses a day.
If an app running on my machine has subclassed the Messages app and is reading strings and sending hit strokes to the (Send) button on my behalf, how can Apple possibly rate limit this?
It's probably like those email providers that allows you some number of outbound emails per, but it's like 200 - 1000. High enough that most users won't ever notice, but low enough that there's no way to use the service commercially.
It can also work for SMSs with some changes in the applescript. We made a very similar tool that use to send automated SMSs to experiment participants 2 times per day. The setup is similar and there is a bash script that is called using cron twice per day and calls a matlab script (similar to the python script here) that calls an applescript. This is the applescript that, in practice, sends iMessage to those with iphone and SMS to those without
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
People (and corporations) will pay a lot of money to have someone else manage and maintain their infrastructure.
This is cool. I like code like this that bandaids over someone's problems. I think all of us have things like this laying around, and it's always cool to be reminded of that fact.
I remember when all the basic non-smart phones, like the few Samsung flip phones I had when I first moved to Seoul has this very basic ability. This feature was been dropped in the transition to smart phones for some reason.
I'm honestly shocked that with all the ways iphone users are supposed to live in a better world than me, they lack this simple, obvious useful ability that the lowliest SMS/MMS user has.
In America iMessage has extremely strong network effects. I read about an Android user who carried around an iPhone specifically to avoid having a green bubble with dating prospects.
I have honestly never felt the need for this and had to click on a menu that I am ashamed to say I never thought of clicking on but yes, there it is. Scheduled send for SMS. You can even edit the time/ content right there in the UI.
Here's an Apple Script moving through iMessage to SMS if required. Make sure to add helpers to update the recipients contact to default to SMS, otherwise you're just cluttering your Messages history with failed messages.
--------
tell application "Messages"
set phoneNumber to "+15555555555"
set messageToSend to "This is a test!"
try
set iMessageService to (1st account whose service type = iMessage)
set iMessageBuddy to participant phoneNumber of iMessageService
if exists iMessageBuddy then
set theMessage to send messageToSend to iMessageBuddy
delay 2 -- Wait for a short time to allow the message status to update
if status of theMessage is not "delivered" then
error "iMessage not delivered"
else
log ("sent as iMessage to: " & phoneNumber)
end if
else
error "Not an iMessage user"
end if
on error
try
set SMSService to (1st account whose service type = SMS)
set SMSBuddy to participant phoneNumber of SMSService
send messageToSend to SMSBuddy
log ("sent as SMS to: " & phoneNumber)
on error
log ("ERROR: COULD NOT SEND TO: " & phoneNumber)
end try
end try
I have a daily shortcut that runs at X time. Shortcut checks a calendar for events, if today contains one or more events. It will parse the text from these events (comma separated fully qualified phone numbers or iMessage accounts), and send the message contained in the body of the event.
Added bonus here is that I can also send group messages.
If I need to have the message sent on repeat, then I put the cal event on repeat.
I could possibly even have templated messages (ie, insert month and year into message), but I haven’t deep dived into that rabbit hole.
Downside here though is that you need an iOS device to always be on.