Apple’s visual voicemail was heralded as a notable change when it appeared with the iPhone in 2007. Before that, carrier-controlled voicemail required dialing a number and navigating a menu of cell phone buttons. The interface has remained largely unchanged for 16 years, with the exception of Apple adding raw transcription in 2016.
What if you want to free up your voicemail and not lose precious or important (or legally valuable) messages forever? You can export or record it.
Nasty export the voicemail, open the Phone app, select the voicemail message and tap the Share button. Since the audio is a file and not an image or video, the options you see are file related. You can text it to yourself, use AirDrop to save it to a Mac, save it to Files (the local iOS interface that lets you save to iCloud Drive or other locations), or save it to a third-party service like Dropbox.
If that doesn’t work, or if you prefer to access it directly, or if you don’t use Visual Voicemail, you can take advantage of Apple’s on-device recording feature. Instructions follow below.
Use screen recording to copy a voicemail message
- Time to complete: 5 minutes
- Tools Needed: iOS 16
Control Center
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Go to Institutions > Control Center.
Scroll down and make sure Screen recording is in the list of included controls. If not, tap the + at the bottom left More controls.
Voicemail
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Open the Phone app and tap the Voicemail knob.
Start screen recording
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Swipe to display the Control Center and tap the Screen Recording button (it has a recording icon). A three-second countdown begins.
Set to play through the speaker
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In Phone, tap the voicemail to select it, then tap the speaker icon to play it aloud. Or use the Phone app to call a voicemail service.
Play and record message
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With Visual Voicemail, once the screen recording starts, tap the Play button on the voicemail. It will be a Pause button during message playback. Screen recording should record the message as it plays.
Stop recording and save
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When the voicemail ends, swipe to display the Control Center and tap the Screen recording button (now a square for Stop) to finish. You can also press and hold the Dynamic Island on newer iPhones to bring up a stop button that you can tap.
This recording will be saved in Photos. You can play the message in the Photos app. On a Mac, you can drag the recording to the desktop or use it File > Exportopen it in QuickTime Player and then choose File > Export As > Audio Only to save only the audio track.
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