You Can Now Send Self-Destructing iMessages

man holding phone looking at confide imessage
Cole Escola/Nina Gonzales/Thrillist
Cole Escola/Nina Gonzales/Thrillist

Some of the iMessage features that were ushered in with iOS 10 are more than a little obnoxious (seriously, lasers?!). But admittedly, it's easier than ever to respond to threads with an on-point GIF, and the ability to react to individual photos and messages is actually pretty cool. The other bonus is that now iOS supports third-party app integration, and one of the niftiest new apps you should know about is called Confide. It allows you to protect your private chats Inspector Gadget-style with self-destructing text messages.

To commence your confidential communication, tap the App Store icon from inside iMessage (it's the one farthest to the right, beside the compose window), hit the four dots in the lower left corner, select "Store," search for Confide, and download it. When you want to send a self-destructing text or photo, tap the App Store icon, swipe until the Confide composition window pops up, and type your missive.

Once you've hit send, the contents of your message will appear to the recipient as a series of orange censorship bars, and can only be revealed by tracing a finger across them. Once it's been read, the message disappears. Similarly, a photo you send through Confide is blurred out, and then promptly disappears once it's revealed. To protect against any funny business, every message is encrypted end to end, and if a recipient attempts to take a screenshot, it'll alert you and kick them out of the message (although, since the censorship bar ensures only a portion of the message is revealed at any one time, getting a damning screenshot in the first place would be tough).

As useful as it can be to cover your tracks, there is one significant catch: Confide only works when both the sender and recipient have it downloaded. So, just make sure your secret lover/whistleblower pals/Edward Snowden has it on their phone, too.

Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email, and get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun.

Joe McGauley is a senior writer for Thrillist who prefers private communication via smoke signals and carrier pigeon.