We know a fair bit about the new features in Apple’s upcoming iOS 9 – some Apple announced onstage last week, while others have been uncovered in the first beta by industrious developers.

A new report Tuesday from Quartz highlights three new messaging features in iOS 9 – only one of which Apple mentioned onstage.

Time-sorted notifications in Notification Center

To date, the Notifications Center in iOS grouped notifications by app in no particular chronological order. This means users have to check individual apps one at a time to track down their most recent message or notification.

In the iOS 9 beta, Notification Center displays all notifications – regardless of app – in a chronological order. Simply put, a user’s newest notification or message will always be at the top of the list. This is perhaps most useful when carrying on multiple conversations across multiple messaging apps.

Quartz notes that users have the option to manually change the order or even revert to the old setup of grouping notifications by app if they so prefer.

‘Quick reply’ to any message

Users of Apple’s iMessage app will be familiar with replying to notifications directly in the Notification Center via “quick replies”; in iOS 9 this feature is made available to all third-party apps.

Combined with time-sorted notifications, users will be able to reply to their most recent messages without even opening the app in question.

App developers like Twitter, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and more are likely to roll out support for this feature in time for iOS 9’s general public release in September.

Search across all message apps

Apple announced new search APIs in iOS 9 that create deep links into apps to surface relevant content when a user performs a Spotlight search.

While a Spotlight search in iOS 9 will surface public content from apps, Quartz noted that it will also surface private content such as conversations in messaging apps.

Some messaging apps do offer search functionality; however, if you are looking for a message but cannot remember which messaging app you sent/received it in, a Spotlight search will now surface that message regardless of which app it is in.

Image via apple.com