How to change the background in Messages for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26

Tips How to change the background in Messages for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 Malcolm Owen 6 e-mail BlueSky Mastodon X Facebook Reddit Mon Jul 07 2025, 11:39 PM EDT · 3 minute read You can now change the backgrounds of conversations in Messages for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 Bring more life and personalization to your group chats, by adding backgrounds to your conversations in Messages in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. Here's how to change yours for the better. Messages is an essential app for iPhone users, with it used to communicate with your closest relations. However, people may be getting a bit bored of seeing the usual grey and blue (and sometimes green) speech bubbles floating up a plain white page. During WWDC , Apple finally made a change to Messages, allowing users to select the background for conversations. A work chat could be jazzed up with corporate-approved branding, while speaking to parents can be done to a background of favorite pets, for example. As well as making conversations less formal, the backgrounds also serve a more practical purpose. By using different backgrounds for your conversations with other contacts, or group messaging sessions, you can more easily tell at a glance what conversation is currently visible without necessarily seeing the actual content. What the feature does is bring to Messages something that has already been made available on other messaging platforms for some time. It's nice that Apple has caught up, though it's still short of some of the more outlandish personalization options available elsewhere. Messages backgrounds prerequisites The first thing to remember is that this is a change that requires devices to be running on iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 . You cannot change the background in earlier versions at all. Also, any changes you make to the background propagate across your logged-in-devices, if they're on the new operating systems. A background for a conversation set on an iPhone will be visible in the same thread on an iPad , or on