SMS message preview generator

Liquid Glass is the material Apple introduced in iOS 26: controls float above the content on a translucent layer with a specular edge and a soft shadow, instead of sitting flat against a tinted bar. In Messages that means the back control, the unread badge, and the sender name each sit in their own glass pill over the thread, and those pills read as near-opaque white over a light conversation rather than as grey fills.

Most mockup generators still draw a flat iOS 16 or iOS 17 navigation bar, which dates a screenshot immediately to anyone who owns an iPhone. This tool draws the current material at the iPhone 17's real 393-point width, so an export matches what a recipient actually sees today.

A single SMS carries 160 characters in the GSM-7 alphabet. Longer messages are split into 153-character segments and stitched back together on the phone, and each segment bills separately. One emoji or curly quote outside GSM-7 switches the whole message to UCS-2 encoding, dropping the budget to 70 characters per segment, which is the most common cause of surprise SMS bills.

This tool's counter assumes GSM-7. If you use emoji or non-Latin characters, expect the segment count to roughly double.

Keep transactional texts short, front-load the payload (codes first: Your code is 284916 survives truncation and autofill better than prose), and identify yourself, since short codes carry no caller ID. In the US, include opt-out language like Reply STOP to opt out on marketing messages; it is a carrier requirement under CTIA guidelines and TCPA rules.

Links belong at the end, shortened, and on a domain you control. Carriers filter messages with public shorteners like bit.ly aggressively.