Macworld

You’ve been able to send little handwritten doodles through iMessages for a long time now. There’s Digital Touch, which lets you create an animated recreation of your little doodles, and you can also rotate the phone to landscape view in the message window to access the drawing feature and use your finger to scribble a message or jot down a doodle. 

In iOS 27, Apple has removed that second option, instead adding a new Drawing app that you access via the (+) button, as you would with other iMessage apps. The concept is similar, but it’s a little more sophisticated in that you have access to all the standard iOS drawing pens and tools.

Why would Apple make this change? It could be that the old method was a little hard to find, as it required both rotating your iPhone and knowing what the small unlabeled button did. But it might also have something to do with a certain folding iPhone expected to debut around the same time as iOS 27.

Some are speculating that the replacement of the old drawing/handwriting feature with a dedicated Drawing app is related to the upcoming iPhone Ultra folding phone, since that Phone will have a larger canvas that’s more suited for drawing. That may be true, but I think the explanation is simpler: The old feature dates all the way back to iOS 12, and was sort of hard to find. Now that Apple has a standard drawing toolbar and features used across Markup, Notes, and other apps, it makes sense to replace the old handwriting tool with something that will match what Apple does through the rest of the operating system.

Whatever the reason, this is how it works.

How to send a drawing to someone in Messages

You’ll find the new Drawing app in the (+) menu to the left of the text entry bar, where all the iMessages apps live.

  1. Start a new message.
  2. Tap the (+) button on the left.
  3. Select Drawing (you may have to scroll the list).
  4. Doodle something. Tap the drawing tools at the bottom to change the tool, its options, or the colors.
  5. Tap the checkbox in the upper right, and your doodle will be attached to your next message as an image.
  6. Compose the rest of your message and hit send.

Foundry