Here’s a small but long-awaited quality-of-life update coming to Messages in iOS 26: you’ll finally be able to copy just part of a message, instead of the entire thing.
A small but long-overdue improvement
Until now, copying text in iMessage on iPhone meant grabbing the entire message bubble. There was no way to highlight or extract just a specific section, like you can on the Mac.
Of course, there were workarounds. I used to drag the full message into the compose field just to manually select what I needed. Others would take a screenshot and use OCR tools to pull out the right snippet.
With iOS 26, that’s changing.
How it currently works
Right now, the new behavior isn’t immediately obvious, although that could change in future beta versions. To use it, long-press on the message, then tap Select from the pop-up menu. From there, you can highlight exactly the portion you want, then choose Copy, Look up, or Translate.
You can also tap the arrow for even more options, such as Search the web, Speak, and Share just that specific segment you selected.
This brings iMessage for iPhone more in line with other popular messaging apps like Telegram, and even WhatsApp, which rolled out a similar feature just this week.
It’s a small but welcome improvement, especially for longer messages with multiple lists, or detailed instructions where you only need to grab a specific part.
Apple says the official iOS 26 release is coming this fall, with the first public beta set for July.
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