14 ms·

It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

607 points by spenvo 5y ago

spenvo 5y ago
Author here: the gist is that it's practically impossible to scroll to the beginning of an iMessage chat, and that's the only way to get to the beginning of a conversation. These old conversations take up several gigabytes of space, yet there's no good way to search them (because search for old messages is unreliable). This aspect of the iMessage user experience has remained untouched for a decade, despite everyone's chats growing longer. Searching for particular iMessages sucks because the results miss the broader context of the conversation (a single message is not useful when you want to reread a conversation). (Also just noting, as the post author I created a title better-suited to HN's 80 character limit.)
- 4f77616973 5y ago
  Have you tried emailing Craig Federighi about this? I emailed him a bunch of times about several things and he's a really nice and responsive person. If you do, tell us about it here on HN.
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    Related, I emailed Tim Cook about iPhone sensor future plans, and a high-level exec of like 25+ years wrote back to me within a week. Apple is remarkably good at getting back to cold emails to top execs.
    - quickthrowman 5y ago
      Interesting, perhaps I’ll cold email them about the pinned contact feature in iMessage being totally worthless. If it just pinned the message thread to the top and didn’t change the icon to a giant circle that sometimes doesn’t show notifications, it’d be fine. I pinned my GF’s message thread and I ended up missing lots of messages and notifications from her and ended up unpinning her so the notifications would show up. Not to mention the comically huge circle icon that is centered when everything else is left aligned.
      - 650REDHAIR 5y ago
        I found pinned messages on Monday. I've now unpinned things. It only made things worse :(
      - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
        Interesting, I love the way pinned threads are implemented, especially the big circles
      - upbeat_general 5y ago
        Same here. Shocked that managed to get past an initial beta. It defeats the entire purpose of pinning.
    - dave_aiello 5y ago
      I concur with that. I had a problem that appeared to be a corner case with Apple Pay. I wrote a paper letter to Tim Cook about it, and within a week got contacted by a staff person in his office. He worked exclusively with me to identify issues I had not considered, and followed up on all of the direct effects and side effects until they were resolved.
      - 4f77616973 5y ago
        I emailed Craig about several controversies and he was very quick to reply to me. We last talked about the rumor that Apple was giving iPhones trust scores.
      - shitRETARDSsay 5y ago
        Seconded, I wrote about an issue I encountered on facetime and I was sent many iPhones to test how widespread the problem was.
  - spenvo 5y ago
    I actually did try emailing Tim Cook a few months ago, but I got bounce backs. I tried tim@apple.com and timcook@apple.com but the mailer daemons said the addresses weren't registered. It sounds like a crazy thing to do, but I remembered how Steve Jobs would reply to users' emails and read an article where Tim said he set aside time to read users' emails.[0] [0] - https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tim-cook-wakes-up-at-4-to-read-emails-from-apple-users.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tim-cook-wakes-up-at-4-...
    - cryptoz 5y ago
      It's tcook@apple.com
      - spenvo 5y ago
        thanks cryptoz
      - JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
        Seems like a humble choice for an executive to not take <firstname>@corp.com.
        eric_h 5y ago
        I was under the impression that Steve Jobs’ was sjobs@apple.com
        alisonkisk 5y ago
        "steve" was a collision from the start.
        dkarras 5y ago
        I could imagine Steve Wozniak offering to use surnames only as a joke - because that wouldn't work either.
- just-ok 5y ago
  If you can remember a term, any term, that was written in the message, you can search & jump to it directly. For my girlfriend and I, it was the bar we went to on our first date. This feature only gives you small subsets (a couple dozen, maybe) messages near the query result, but then you can just search for the last message again and get the next “page,” so to speak. Of course, remembering such a term is hard, which is what I assume you mean by “search for old messages is unreliable,” but it’s at least a possible workaround.
  - Arcuru 5y ago
    In the article they say that they have a screenshot of their first several messages and have tried to search for the text in the screenshot.
    - just-ok 5y ago
      Hm, yet I have no problem searching phrases that go back at least five years.. I would say the burden of proof is on the author here to extract the database from the phone and prove that the messages didn’t get deleted, lost in an upgrade, or otherwise cleaned up.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Please, please just read the article before posting. Please.
iseanstevens 5y ago
Yeah, can second this.
balajiface 5y ago
I've found the only way to read super old imessages is to go to the sqlite db they're stored in on a mac and look directly in the db...
- bydo 5y ago
  If I have an idea of what I’m looking for, I just use search. It was useless until a few years ago but has gotten dramatically better recently. The scroll-load-scroll-load cycle does suck, though.
- carterschonwald 5y ago
  Where’s that? I’ll totally play with that if I can !
- kevinlou 5y ago
  I didn't know that was possible! Is there a guide available to locate/browse the messages?
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...
reiichiroh 5y ago
Can’t you use something like iMazing (I’m not a paid shill just a satisfied user and there are many similar other products from competitors) and do an offline dump from the backup?
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Reading from a backup works marvelously. I have done it.
- oflannabhra 5y ago
  Is there a good option for people who have offloaded some of their Messages to iCloud?
- wrs 5y ago
  Article mentions this: “...there’s a whole slew of third party tools that slurp up your iMessages, and Apple should care about this, because having a strong demand for apps that process users’ messages should be seen as a privacy failure by the company.”
- mhb 5y ago
  Another vote for iMazing. It's great.
spoonjim 5y ago
I save them on the expectation that Apple will someday release a better tool for browsing them. Especially the texts between me and my wife, they are a story of our life from the very first one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- robbyking 5y ago
  I was in a similar situation with email. In 2005 or so I was migrating to new computer when I found a directory of photos I forgot to back up. Rather than burn them to DVD or upload them to my domain, I decided to just email them to myself. I sent a handful of images, then replied to that same email with the next 10, and so on, until the five dozen or so images were uploaded in a single email thread. When I went to open the email on my new machine, the loading indicator just spun and spun until finally my browser crashed. When viewing an email conversation, Gmail will display previews of all the emails in the chain, including their attachments, which was causing my browser to crash. Next I tried connecting my Google account to Apple Mail, but Gmail's SMTP server would time out before the attachments were able to download. After a while I forgot about the photos all together, until I randomly stumbled across them while searching my Gmail account for some other files I had sent myself around that time. At this point it was 2014 or so, and my browser was very easily able to open the messages so I could download the photos, which of course at that point I had zero interest in.
  - anarazel 5y ago
    I used gmail to subscribe to lkml at some point. Then switched back to my own email server. Forgot to unsubscribe on gmail. A few years later I deleted that folder. And couldn't open Gmail anymore for weeks, everything would just time out.
- saurik 5y ago
  FWIW, it is fairly easy to dump them out of your iTunes backup.
dehrmann 5y ago
> A tale of wasted space and Services revenue With photos, I guess this could end up being around 1GB. Maybe this will push you off the free plan to the $1/mo plan, but I don't see it being that big of a needle-mover for services revenue.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  My sister has a chat with 15 GB worth of attachments. Lots of videos :(
- sackerhews 5y ago
  There are 1 billion iPhones in current, active use. A dollar from each of those is 1 billion dollars. That's a nice bonus, no matter how much the needle moves. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-are-1b-iphones-in-use-worldwide-apple-says https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-are-1b-ipho...
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    You have a point that it adds up. I just suspect that your photos eclipses the size of your texts.
- swiley 5y ago
  I made the mistake of turning on automatic photo back up (I have no idea how to bulk copy photos off the iphone without a mac, I've given them up as lost honestly, most of them are random crap anyway) and now my icloud account is completely full and I keep getting told I need to send Apple money. I definitely prefer my current phone that lets me just rsync ~/Pictures.
  - jimsmart 5y ago
    Not that I'm suggesting you should send Apple money: but it's like £0.79 per month for 50gb - less than £10/year. For me at least: that's pretty cheap compared to other services.
  - hedora 5y ago
saagarjha 5y ago
My sister was having a problem where she was taking all the iCloud storage for our family because she keeps sending videos to people but couldn't figure out a way to efficiently delete them. I had to write up a Python script (https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/615dee3c04e226b44828e910a5446188 https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/615dee3c04e226b44828e910a5...) to scrape the iMessage database for large attachments, and then print out the text to messages around it so that you could search for it and jump to around that place in the chat history and then delete the files from there. It's kind of insane how hard it is to manage old messages :/ I feel like Apple didn't really prepare for Messages coming in from iCloud meaning that every device had every single message you've ever sent, and now it's really hard to get through them without reading the database manually…
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Did Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large Attachments not work?
  - ptd 5y ago
    Is every video considered a large attachment?
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      Pulled it up on my phone just to see what they considered "large", looks like 4MB is the cutoff (nothing smaller than that shows up for me). But nearly everything I'm seeing is a video or a photo taken with my real (not phone) camera. And a random PDF I apparently sent over iMessages. However, deleting through this interface would be a pain. You select "Edit" and then each attachment is selected individually.
      - stock_toaster 5y ago
        It seems to just show you the largest set (50? 100?). If you delete them, then you will eventually show smaller ones once you get through enough of them. Really wish there was a "delete all" or "select all".
smoldesu 5y ago
We need a better communication standard. Apple made a killing selling their proprietary iMessage layer on top of SMS, but we could be actually making changes in this sector if we all used a standardized protocol. At least then we have a documented interface that we can choose to store however we want, or (perhaps wishful thinking) in a modular style. RCS is a great start, but I've already started to put my money on Matrix. While the latter won't ever see adoption by Google or Apple, it's a pretty convincing attempt at rich, decentralized communication.
- esolyt 5y ago
  Is it really "on top of SMS" though? The way I see, it's just a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram etc but they just combined it with the SMS app on their platform. I am failing to see the additional value of combining them. If Google bought WhatsApp and combined it with the stock SMS app of Android, I don't think I would prefer that.
  - Someone 5y ago
    The additional value for Apple is that their platform had a billion+ users from the start.
    - zepto 5y ago
      Apple had nowhere near a billion customers when iMessage was launched.
      - Someone 5y ago
        There were a billion people you could send messages to, and receive messages from. That’s what got them of the ground. A system where you can’t message half your friends because they bought their phone from a different manufacturer would have had more trouble getting traction.
  - asdff 5y ago
    iMessage is a vestigial product from the days when people had unlimited data but also only 400 text messages a month. It made sense then. It doesn't make much sense now.
gnicholas 5y ago
Searching Messages on my Mac is a joke. If type the name of a friend in the search field, it returns (after unreasonable delay) various results, mostly of texts about the person I'm searching for. How does it not realize that it should first search recipient names and present these results first? A search for "Delilah" should not show a bunch of texts about Delilah, obscuring the one thread with my friend Delilah.
- derefr 5y ago
  I think there’s a separate idiomatic autocomplete flow for what you’re trying to do. Try hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact. Not saying having it also work from search wouldn’t be good — but having this flow available is probably why the other issue hasn’t been fixed sooner.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    Never thought to do this — thanks!
  - ska 5y ago
    > ry hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact. I think this is how MS teams chat works too. It kind of makes sense, because it has a workflow for solving the "do you want your existing chat with Alice, or are you trying to start a new group chat with Alice & Bob" .
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      It does make sense if you're looking to send a new message. In my case, I'm typically doing a search so I can find information/photos from that thread. In this context, it's not so intuitive, and it never occurred to me to even try.
- kemayo 5y ago
tern 5y ago
I'm not sure if it even works anymore or if there's a better option, but I've used PhoneView <https://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/ https://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/> in the past to make a PDF archive of my iMessages.
- neal_jones 5y ago
  I've used this as well, mostly with success, but this last year I tried and it kept failing and I haven't had the time to revisit it. It may be a problem with PhoneView, but I'm not convinced that it is. Also, due to the size of the backup, I do have to do it to an external drive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
The cynic in me says this is all part of the plan. Sure, we'll give you seemingly impossibly large amounts of cloud storage for free, learn to never delete anything that you ever talk about in your entire life. Ten years down the road, "oh, looks like you need to start paying us monthly for more cloud storage!" I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive... And how many will in another ten years.
- derefr 5y ago
  > I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive... Gmail’s storage space has consistently grown over the years to keep up with the average user’s demand. Google don’t want to do anything — like charging for email storage — that would disincentivize their mass of sensors^H users from feeding them ever more data. (If you’re an outlier with way more storage than usual, they’ll happily charge you, knowing that the data point you represent is mostly going to get pruned out of their models anyway.)
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    This was previously true. Free storage at Google hasn't increased from 15 GB since 2013. (I have a few promotional bonuses that bring me up to about 19 GB, but it's been that way for... over half a decade without increase.) Personally, my Google storage is mostly full, even though I haven't used Google Drive or Gmail since 2016, and have removed much of my personal content since then. Also, now they're actually effectively decreasing everyone's storage. Previously, Google Drive document types and Google Photos didn't count towards that 15 GB limit. They will as of June 1st, 2021: https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ So, while cloud storage usage has exploded over the past eight years, Google's storage limits have not only not expanded to meet it, they've actually begun to tighten the belt.
- laurent92 5y ago
  They don’t need that, they can just start saving pics in HEIC at 4MB per pic, and backups start exploding. I use Gimp and generally obtain the same quality with a 450KB JPEG, sometimes 50KB depending on the contents. Images can be remarkably small. They should try increasing the compression ratio until a change is noticeable, but do they care?
olliej 5y ago
I've used a mess of find and rm to clear up space on my local drive, but afaik they'll still take up space in iCloud storage -- I agree that there should be a way to more efficiently discard them, and that automatically deleting old ones is not the right thing to do
nodamage 5y ago
If you have Messages set up on a Mac you can access your chat archives under ~/Library/Messages/Archive. Each conversation is stored by date in an .ichat file which can be re-opened in the Messages app. https://appletoolbox.com/qa-where-are-imessage-files-stored/ https://appletoolbox.com/qa-where-are-imessage-files-stored/
- kemayo 5y ago
  No longer true in Big Sur -- or, at least, that folder is empty for me.
- PhantomGremlin 5y ago
  That's a good hint. It does have some important limitations. 1) I do clean installs when I update macOS, so the Library folder is created new each time. Which means that archived messages only go back to that point. (I browsed via Terminal and used the command line 'open' command to view them.) I do retain old ~/Library folders and it's possible to use the same technique in finding messages there. 2) But, and here's the big limitation: at a quick glance, they're simply individual messages, by date. There's no way to follow entire threads. I suppose it would be possible to write your own program to organize these. But the point of the article is that Apple should make it easy. Your method isn't easy. Edit: response to sibling comment. I'm still on Catalina and the above works. I have no idea about Big Sur.
codeulike 5y ago
On a similar note, deleting old photos to save space on iCloud is very hard. I could mass-delete photos older than a certain date in the Mac Photos app (or whatever its called these days) using a smart album, but then that mass deletion would not sync to iCloud. Or, I could log into iCloud via a web page and select a load of photos (but not more than 1000 at a time) and delete them - but then it takes ages - like about 20 minutes. Why does it take so long to delete 1000 photos from the cloud? Its unfathomable. And then after deleting them you have to go and find them in the iCloud bin and delete them again - which also takes ages. I can only conclude that they have made it deliberately very slow and painful to clear space on iCloud. Because they'd rather you paid for more space ...
- alsetmusic 5y ago
  > I could mass-delete photos older than a certain date in the Mac Photos app (or whatever its called these days) using a smart album, but then that mass deletion would not sync to iCloud. Why wouldn’t it sync? If I did this right now, my expectation is that it would sync. Is there a limitation in how this works?
  - codeulike 5y ago
    I expected it to, but it didn't. The photos got deleted locally but not on iCloud. Maybe it was a glitch? Thats what happened to me.
- kossTKR 5y ago
  Sync for some reason hasn't been working for a decade. It never gets fixed - very weird for a trillion dollar company. Take a photo on you iPhone and it take days for i to show up in the photos app, it instantly shows up in iCloud accessed through the browser. Same thing in various other directions, delete on web, and it takes days to disappear from other places. Makes zero sense. Often if i just took some pictures i have to send them via airdrop instead of just opening Photos. Come on Apple!
Apocryphon 5y ago
Wish this could be done to Facebook Messenger as well. I have some old conversations spanning over five years that would be nice to export.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10104187356236413 https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=101041873... https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 https://www.facebook.com/help/930396167085762/ https://www.facebook.com/help/930396167085762/
- dividedbyzero 5y ago
  Not sure if that's available outside the EU as well, but over here you can export an archive with all data they have on you including messages and attached media. I'm sure they leave out things but I use it to backup my chats.
- FreakyT 5y ago
  FB Messenger does have data takeout, it comes in some kind of JSON format. Be prepared for some surprisingly massive file downloads though -- my chat history alone was over 50gb!
turdnagel 5y ago
Flexibits developed an app to do this search called Chatology (https://flexibits.com/chatology https://flexibits.com/chatology) but they've discontinued it since Big Sur came out. Works pretty well on my Mojave machine.
- gogopuppygogo 5y ago
  If it’s discontinued and they don’t charge for it I hope they consider open sourcing the solution so others can try to make it functional.
- kemayo 5y ago
  It unfortunately doesn't work well if you've enabled Messages in iCloud [1]. You can only search the messages that're in your device's local cache. Which isn't actively cleared much, that I've seen, but it does mean that it's not very helpful for any messages that predate the current install of your OS. I'd assume this is why they discontinued it, rather than adapt it to the new from-iOS Messages in Big Sur. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532
neal_jones 5y ago
I'm just commenting because I also find iMessages to be a completely neglected app considering how central it is to so many people's communications.
- novok 5y ago
  You'd be surprised how few engineers work on apple projects relative to their size, and how apple underpays compared to other big tech companies like FB or Google unless your working on the current hot project.
fastball 5y ago
I want a chat app that is: E2EE and allows me to change phone numbers. I started migrating people to Signal when that whole WhatsApp ToS hullaballoo happened, but now I need to change my phone number and apparently this is not supported in Signal, which is just crazy to me.
- remram 5y ago
  Signal is also guilty of the huge-and-useless database of old messages. Turning your chat history into text is not easy.
closeparen 5y ago
On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...
- kccqzy 5y ago
  Can confirm. Shameless plug: I wrote a script to extract the pertinent information from the SQLite database into an HTML page a while back: https://github.com/kccqzy/imessage-db-extract/blob/master/imsgextract https://github.com/kccqzy/imessage-db-extract/blob/master/im... It's open source abandonware though. Lost interest in keeping up with the schema updates because I no longer use iMessage.
- chmaynard 5y ago
  That's an undocumented implementation detail. It might change without warning at any time. Are you seriously recommending this as a solution for users who want to be able to read past messages?
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    Works a lot better than doing nothing.
  - koolba 5y ago
    I’d imagine it’d be difficult for Apple to migrate to anything substantially different as it’d require rewriting a potentially multi GB file, the space for which many users would not have. It’s effectively a massive, distributed, database migration.
    - shepherdjerred 5y ago
      Database formats change all of the time. There's no technical challenge here that hasn't been solved before.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    Seems relevant news for hackers.
KishanBagaria 5y ago
Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema owing to the fact they never designed it from the ground up and instead kept adding new columns and tables with each macOS release. This makes their queries super complicated with multiple joins. Once you have the schema figured out, it's dead easy to build a third-party client that works better than the official one. Even search works great with a simple LIKE query but Apple re-indexes all messages leading to your CPU going over 1000%: https://twitter.com/KrauseFx/status/1396433852126670852 https://twitter.com/KrauseFx/status/1396433852126670852 Source: I built a third-party desktop client for iMessage at https://texts.com https://texts.com and reverse engineered the complete sqlite structure.
- eric-hu 5y ago
  Looking over your site, I'm curious about a few things: - The FAQ says you'll eventually open source your SDK. I admire that as a software engineer, but from a business perspective, isn't this risky? It seems like--if you don't pass messages through an intermediary service--your value-add is mostly in this SDK + your design. All of these elements are copy-able. - The jobs page includes a backend engineer, so what will go through your backend, if not any message data? - Are there legal concerns about reverse-engineering these APIs and using them? Some of your supported chat services have open APIs, but others seem intentionally closed. (And a couple parent companies seem downright hostile to 3rd party use.)
- slowraise 5y ago
  Is texts.com a work around for sending live imessages on a PC?
  - KishanBagaria 5y ago
    Yes, with a catch: it requires an always on Mac (which can be in the cloud) or a jailbroken iOS device. We plan to make it work without the catch. I've worked with 10+ messaging platforms so far and Apple's protocol is the most obfuscated and complicated to reverse engineer. Apple has invested millions of dollars to make the iMessage protocol super hard to reverse engineer. It's how they sell tons of iPhones after all: > However, Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and the executive in charge of iOS, feared that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones”. (https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/28/apple-admits-that-imessage-for-android-was-killed-to-keep-its-walled-garden/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/28/apple-admits-that-i...)
kennywinker 5y ago
I have had a bug out on this since 2019 - FB7336938 if anybody inside apple is looking for ammo to make improvements to this
NoblePublius 5y ago
my biggest problem with iOS storage is that if you pay to store a photo in iCloud and then use Messages to send it to 5 friends, you are now paying to store it in iCloud 6x. And of course it’s totally unfair that there is no priced option between 200GB and 1TB. Same with Google Photos.
- social_quotient 5y ago
  Kinda dying to know if they dedup on the server? Cause technically speaking if everyone was on Apple then that 1 photo becomes 12 not to mention it getting send to another layer of people.
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    Yeah exactly. It’s nuts.
willseth 5y ago
The comparison to Photos in TFA is apt. Apple could copy the most relevant subset of features, in particular the Years/Months/Days/All navigation views, and it would dramatically improve the utility of iMessage for old messages. Improving the abysmal search result quality is probably more important, though.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Many comments here are suggesting you can look at the DB on a Mac. What about people who have Windows computers? Is there a way to extract that information? I also have a similar gripe with the browser. How can I sync my Safari tabs that are open on my iPhone with my PC?
- cjohansson 5y ago
  You need to buy a Mac for that, it's all part of their plan. I would recommend switching iOS browser to be able to sync your browsing across vendors
throwaway98797 5y ago
After years of herding imessages i went ahead and deleted everything older than a year. i encourage othes to consider doing the same. its been great for me.
- ciabattabread 5y ago
  Why are we so hung up on keeping texts? (I'm guilty of this hang-up too.) I didn't archive my AIM messages. I don't record my phone conversations.
  - throwaway98797 5y ago
    because it feels free. just in case. i hope we all learn what good digital hygiene is.
  - Tempest1981 5y ago
    The article mentions 2 examples in the 1st paragraph. Maybe not common, but to each their own.
aloer 5y ago
arguably the worst part about imessage and scrolling is that even if you do manage to scroll up and find a previous message, you are automatically scrolled down to the bottom if a new message is received in that chat (on iphone)
- cjohansson 5y ago
  yes it is really bad, the UIs for PMs was better 10 years ago, thinking about ICQ, Adium, MSN Messenger and the like. You could export history as file and easily scroll and search them
- top_kekeroni_m8 5y ago
  You can touch the middle of the top bar and it will automatically scroll to the top of the current conversation. Works in a lot of apps too
social_quotient 5y ago
I wish I could have an ms outlook like interface for the long term storage of the messages. Folder per contact or group and excellent search, sort and filtering. Also could be stored offline or synced up with a mobile app. 2 apps I use for similar non iMessage archival are - x1 - for file and email search https://www.x1.com/products/x1-search/ https://www.x1.com/products/x1-search/ - mailstore https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
- s3r3nity 5y ago
  Nah - it's already hard enough to manage email + Slack, and I don't want yet another workaround to manage / catalog / filter incoming messages to me. No one asked for managing texts like we manage files.
  - social_quotient 5y ago
    They are priceless catalogs of entire relationships. It feels flimsy, or maybe flippant, to not be able to properly search and sort or archive. Maybe not managed like files, maybe you’re right, but it seems like if we can make trillion dollar tech companies we should be able to completely solve this particular issue. I’d frame texts as one of the most intimate expressions of dialog and journaling between people and families and friends. Just seem odd that this isn’t better.
chrischen 5y ago
It seems like a lot of iCloud storage-using services are conveniently designed to just keep eating up more and more space. Take photos for example: most people only need to archive old photos and rarely access them, but such a use case isn't really supported by iCloud photos. You either keep your entire collection in the cloud and in a state of fast (expensive) retrieval, or not at all. For iMessages every photo or video you sent seems to take up separate storage in the iMessage portion of iCloud, and it's difficult to delete because you have to scroll through and select them.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Can you catch downscale them with applescript/automator on a Mac?
lucasnortj 5y ago
Who cares. I clear out my messages all the time
anonymousiam 5y ago
Google Voice has the same problem. The search function is useless. It does not return results that should match, and it does return results that shouldn't. Scrolling back through just a few months worth of messages can take 10-20 minutes. I wish I knew why it was so awful.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  Are those messages queryable in Gmail?
  - anonymousiam 5y ago
    No, I am referring to Google's SMS platform. It interfaces to nearly all other carriers, and is accessible through the "Voice" app or the web page at https://voice.google.com https://voice.google.com
    - efreak 5y ago
      Tell Voice to send your messages to email, and they'll be searchable from there. Use a query to ensure that you're searching text messages from Voice based on from address or subject. It won't help with searching messages that you've sent, unfortunately, not will it help with messages from before you turned the option on; I've had it on forever as I used to use it for desktop notifications.
_hyn3 5y ago
iMsgs, esp vids --> GB --> new phone + icloud $$ But, I'll be honest; if you start to see all of Apple's decisions through the lens of "business decisions", you'll tend to get pretty disenchanted and crestfallen (perhaps even resentful)
varispeed 5y ago
The AI has trouble knowing what is important in the conversation. It seems like such difficulty creates an incentive for a user to ask someone something again instead of looking it up in history (although this also may be a signal for AI that something in the history is important). Other reason may be that it is used by services - they want as long history as possible to find out what kind of person you are in case you are being investigated. Anyway these artificial obstacles most often have sinister motives.
sneak 5y ago
The complete iMessage history in your backups is also not e2e encrypted, so all of it is readable by Apple. They regularly turn this information over to US federal authorities without a warrant (so, no probable cause) too. Having such a huge trove of history of all of your communications saved that can be accessed by the police or a rogue Apple sysadmin at any time is something that I feel should even make the law-abiding nervous.
- jaredwatts 5y ago
  Messages are not included in backups if you use Messages in iCloud as the backup option. Messages in iCloud also offers end-to-end encryption.
  - sneak 5y ago
    The encryption key for “Messages in iCloud” (a cross-device sync service) gets backed up in the iCloud Backup (which is, as discussed, not e2e and thus readable by Apple), however, backdooring the e2e nature of Messages in iCloud by escrowing the key to Apple in the backup. If MIC is enabled, iCloud Backup backs up the key, breaking the e2e. If MIC is disabled, iCloud Backup backs up the plaintext message history, breaking the e2e. This is well documented in the Apple KB article 202303 on the topic. It’s no longer an accident at this point. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 > Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple. It’s written in a misleading style, but if you read it carefully it is apparent what is happening. Turning off iCloud Backup is insufficient, as each conversation is backed up twice: once from each side. Your conversation partners’ devices default iCloud Backup to on. Apple has the ability to read almost every single iMessage sent or received, on a 12-24 hour lag (iCloud Backups happen overnight), from data already on their servers, without ever touching a customer phone. All of the encryption is a handwavey distraction.
soheil 5y ago
You can use this to read the iMessage binary storage file and convert it to JSON [0] [0] https://github.com/matrix-hacks/ichat2json https://github.com/matrix-hacks/ichat2json
alexfromapex 5y ago
They’re not for the user they’re for the FBI and CIA
mtlynch 5y ago
About 10 years ago, I wrote an app for reading, searching, and exporting iPhone texts based on the sqlite files in a backup. I don't think it works any longer on the latest iOS, but I open sourced the code if anyone wants to pick it up: http://www.allyourtexts.com/ http://www.allyourtexts.com/
- hugh-avherald 5y ago
  It doesn't now, but I can confirm that it was an excellent piece of software before. Thank you!
crossroadsguy 5y ago
If Apple is focusing on “services” now, as numerous tech/biz pundits have talking about for quite some time now, it doesn’t show in their tech and software offerings, except for the gloss in the presentations and the painfully obvious exaggerated wordings. With every iOS and Mac OS release I’ve been hoping they’d fix iMessage, iCloud, App Store search, app discovery, extension ecosystem for browsers, or my iPhone taking those extra 7-8 phantom GBs (..iPhone Storage/Others) that everybody guesses could be some cache or logs or something magically else and speculates maybe one day it’ll go away but nobody knows for sure etc. But no! It seems Apple has been saving these things so that after 10 years they get to say on stage “Now you can search apps like never before. We have named this patented revolutionary app discovery as iDiscover™. As simple as searching for apps!“ Or after another 5 years something like “Now you can read your iMessages in a more readable manner and it will truly sync now. Meet TrueSync™“ when their engineers will have a breakthrough after 17 years of backbreaking research. I have always wondered how the engineers look in the mirror after hearing those pathetic stage ridiculousness.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I've had this sort of experience with many systems, which is why I decided to use .txt files as the base data store for my current project. It is indexed in a relational database, and it is presented in a Web 1.1 frontend, but it all flows back through the text files, and they are always available for download, optionally in zip or tar.gz archives.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Ironically SQLite is excellent choice in this situation.
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    SQLite is great, and I use it for caching and for providing data summaries... but it is not near-universally compatible and accessible, human-readable, the way text-files are.
meneoune 5y ago
11 GB of old conversations? The Bible contains about 3.5 million characters and an average Bible weighs about 500 grams. 11 GB of conversations would then be about 1.5 tons of Bibles.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  The Bible doesn’t contain pictures and video.
ping_pong 5y ago
I think people should get in the habit of deleting all their convos that are more than a month old. Most convos are 99.99% worthless, and it's very freeing to be rid of them. One of my friends had her H1B cancelled and was given a 10 year ban from entering the US because of her text messages. When she crossed the border back into the US, the border guards requested her phone, and searched it and found messages to her ex-bf about marrying him for a green card. She was joking but it didn't matter and she had to fly back to her country of origin that she didn't live in since she was a kid. Since then, even though I don't have anything to worry about, as a habit I delete all my apps except iMessage and delete all my conversations there.
- pacifika 5y ago
  Yup auto delete your old messages, social media and downloads. Forward anything importantly email and archive that locally; or photos and self hosted blogs. That works for me.
- DavideNL 5y ago
  Yea, i do this too. It’s a setting in iOS, you can auto delete iMessages after 1 month/1 year/etc.
perryizgr8 5y ago
Imagine buying a top of the line smartphone in 2021 and it comes with 64GB of storage. Truly Apple has done wonders with their marketing that people buy their phones.
zahma 5y ago
It’s tedious, but all conversations can be reviewed by size and manually deleted. Far from ideal, but not quite limited to automatic Apple tools.
kfrzcode 5y ago
Try Google Messages. How do I export them? There's no chat.db. It's impossible scrape, unless you wait(5) and scrollTo() etc. I've found no good solution for extracting/backing up Google Messages (outside of Google's dominion).
john_alan 5y ago
The contention that iMessage doesn't do a "space save" mode on device is wrong. I have 75GB of messages in iCloud, I see 25GB on my 500GB Mac and 11GB on my 64GB iPhone.
specialist 5y ago
> Texts has integrations for all major messaging platforms... Any plans to include phone calls, voice mails, and email too? Future perfect: RSS reader-like UI. Top level is Contacts. Including groups (w/ aliases). Drill down to see missives. Show read, unread, return receipt, etc. Sparklines representing activity.
Aeolun 5y ago
Why would anyone keep using iMessage under these circumstances? My chat messages take up less than 1% of my phone storage.
erikbye 5y ago
I regularly delete all messages and call entries. Could not care less about reading any of them more than once.
sporkland 5y ago
Dropping in here to say that as a programmer I'm always super impressed with how easy it is to go back many years in WhatsApp via find and quickly scroll around it. Always makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong in my client-server app which struggles at the tens of thousands scale and if I'd be better off re-architecting to replicate all data to the client and just using the insanely powerful CPUs that are available there. I'm sure if I did it in my high scale, highly mutable (esp access control), high user count application replicating all that state reliably would also become a nightmare, whereas whatsapp has a pretty clear replication model built in.
nrvn 5y ago
One of the options without using third party tools and sdripts: 1. Use macbook. 2. Open imessage and scroll 1 year back. 3. Export to pdf. 4. Ensure the pdf contains 1 year of chatting. 5. Delete all the messages that have just been exported. 6. Repeat above for another year. In the end you will have a pretty looking archive of imessage. Even an old 2013 macbook with 8gb RAM is capable of accomplishing this task.
pacifika 5y ago
Apps that are not have a good export story should be considered as keeping your content hostage. Either treat these as ephemeral, syndicate the content into them or switch. Your content in their app is lock in.
Angostura 5y ago
https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/ Is worth a look if you want to backup export old messages.
alerighi 5y ago
Who uses iMessage? I mean, I never seen one using it seriously. All my friends and family members uses WhatsApp (that has more or less the same problems, but at least you can export a conversation in a text file, or now import it in Telegram), and Telegram is nowadays used by all the young people. This is probably due to the fact that in my country the majority of people has Android phones, and thus even who has an iPhone uses the same app that uses with people with Android to chat with other Apple users.
AnonC 5y ago
Tangential: Telegram has a great search feature. It’s super fast, allows to visit messages by date and in group chats you can even see the list of people who feature in the keyword search results. The UX is great, and all chat apps should just imitate it as a start.
foobarbazetc 5y ago
I recently had to restore from an iCloud backup that contains all my messages (which I never and will never delete) and it took over 24 hours to restore them. The restore daemon actually downloads every single image and attachment you’ve ever sent or received one file at a time. Not that I can scroll back that far, but you never know when you need to search for something.
petemir 5y ago
I have an awful problem with iMessage, that also speaks IMHO about the lack of care behind it. I upgraded an iPad Mini 1st. Gen (iOS 9.3.6) to an iPad Mini 5st. Gen (iOS at the time of exit I think), restoring from a backup. iMessage never worked since the upgrade. I can only send messages, I see them once, but once I close the app and open it again, I don't see anything else. There's absolutely no way to reset the db of an Apple-included app unless I do a full format of the device, which after my full custom-configuration, I don't want to do. It sucks.
helge5 5y ago
If you have them archived as iChat files on a Mac (Library/Messages/Archive), you could try Past: https://zeezide.de/en/products/past/ https://zeezide.de/en/products/past/

607 points by spenvo 5y ago

Author here: the gist is that it's practically impossible to scroll to the beginning of an iMessage chat, and that's the only way to get to the beginning of a conversation. These old conversations take up several gigabytes of space, yet there's no good way to search them (because search for old messages is unreliable). This aspect of the iMessage user experience has remained untouched for a decade, despite everyone's chats growing longer. Searching for particular iMessages sucks because the results miss the broader context of the conversation (a single message is not useful when you want to reread a conversation). (Also just noting, as the post author I created a title better-suited to HN's 80 character limit.)

4f77616973 5y ago
Have you tried emailing Craig Federighi about this? I emailed him a bunch of times about several things and he's a really nice and responsive person. If you do, tell us about it here on HN.
- cryptoz 5y ago
  Related, I emailed Tim Cook about iPhone sensor future plans, and a high-level exec of like 25+ years wrote back to me within a week. Apple is remarkably good at getting back to cold emails to top execs.
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    Interesting, perhaps I’ll cold email them about the pinned contact feature in iMessage being totally worthless. If it just pinned the message thread to the top and didn’t change the icon to a giant circle that sometimes doesn’t show notifications, it’d be fine. I pinned my GF’s message thread and I ended up missing lots of messages and notifications from her and ended up unpinning her so the notifications would show up. Not to mention the comically huge circle icon that is centered when everything else is left aligned.
    - 650REDHAIR 5y ago
      I found pinned messages on Monday. I've now unpinned things. It only made things worse :(
    - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
      Interesting, I love the way pinned threads are implemented, especially the big circles
    - upbeat_general 5y ago
      Same here. Shocked that managed to get past an initial beta. It defeats the entire purpose of pinning.
  - dave_aiello 5y ago
    I concur with that. I had a problem that appeared to be a corner case with Apple Pay. I wrote a paper letter to Tim Cook about it, and within a week got contacted by a staff person in his office. He worked exclusively with me to identify issues I had not considered, and followed up on all of the direct effects and side effects until they were resolved.
    - 4f77616973 5y ago
      I emailed Craig about several controversies and he was very quick to reply to me. We last talked about the rumor that Apple was giving iPhones trust scores.
    - shitRETARDSsay 5y ago
      Seconded, I wrote about an issue I encountered on facetime and I was sent many iPhones to test how widespread the problem was.
- spenvo 5y ago
  I actually did try emailing Tim Cook a few months ago, but I got bounce backs. I tried tim@apple.com and timcook@apple.com but the mailer daemons said the addresses weren't registered. It sounds like a crazy thing to do, but I remembered how Steve Jobs would reply to users' emails and read an article where Tim said he set aside time to read users' emails.[0] [0] - https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tim-cook-wakes-up-at-4-to-read-emails-from-apple-users.html https://www.inc.com/business-insider/tim-cook-wakes-up-at-4-...
  - cryptoz 5y ago
    It's tcook@apple.com
    - spenvo 5y ago
      thanks cryptoz
    - JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
      Seems like a humble choice for an executive to not take <firstname>@corp.com.
      - eric_h 5y ago
        I was under the impression that Steve Jobs’ was sjobs@apple.com
        alisonkisk 5y ago
        "steve" was a collision from the start.
        dkarras 5y ago
        I could imagine Steve Wozniak offering to use surnames only as a joke - because that wouldn't work either.
just-ok 5y ago
If you can remember a term, any term, that was written in the message, you can search & jump to it directly. For my girlfriend and I, it was the bar we went to on our first date. This feature only gives you small subsets (a couple dozen, maybe) messages near the query result, but then you can just search for the last message again and get the next “page,” so to speak. Of course, remembering such a term is hard, which is what I assume you mean by “search for old messages is unreliable,” but it’s at least a possible workaround.
- Arcuru 5y ago
  In the article they say that they have a screenshot of their first several messages and have tried to search for the text in the screenshot.
  - just-ok 5y ago
    Hm, yet I have no problem searching phrases that go back at least five years.. I would say the burden of proof is on the author here to extract the database from the phone and prove that the messages didn’t get deleted, lost in an upgrade, or otherwise cleaned up.
- mdoms 5y ago
  Please, please just read the article before posting. Please.

iseanstevens 5y ago

Yeah, can second this.

balajiface 5y ago

I've found the only way to read super old imessages is to go to the sqlite db they're stored in on a mac and look directly in the db...

bydo 5y ago
If I have an idea of what I’m looking for, I just use search. It was useless until a few years ago but has gotten dramatically better recently. The scroll-load-scroll-load cycle does suck, though.
carterschonwald 5y ago
Where’s that? I’ll totally play with that if I can !
kevinlou 5y ago
I didn't know that was possible! Is there a guide available to locate/browse the messages?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...

reiichiroh 5y ago

Can’t you use something like iMazing (I’m not a paid shill just a satisfied user and there are many similar other products from competitors) and do an offline dump from the backup?

actually_a_dog 5y ago
Reading from a backup works marvelously. I have done it.
oflannabhra 5y ago
Is there a good option for people who have offloaded some of their Messages to iCloud?
wrs 5y ago
Article mentions this: “...there’s a whole slew of third party tools that slurp up your iMessages, and Apple should care about this, because having a strong demand for apps that process users’ messages should be seen as a privacy failure by the company.”
mhb 5y ago
Another vote for iMazing. It's great.

spoonjim 5y ago

I save them on the expectation that Apple will someday release a better tool for browsing them. Especially the texts between me and my wife, they are a story of our life from the very first one.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
robbyking 5y ago
I was in a similar situation with email. In 2005 or so I was migrating to new computer when I found a directory of photos I forgot to back up. Rather than burn them to DVD or upload them to my domain, I decided to just email them to myself. I sent a handful of images, then replied to that same email with the next 10, and so on, until the five dozen or so images were uploaded in a single email thread. When I went to open the email on my new machine, the loading indicator just spun and spun until finally my browser crashed. When viewing an email conversation, Gmail will display previews of all the emails in the chain, including their attachments, which was causing my browser to crash. Next I tried connecting my Google account to Apple Mail, but Gmail's SMTP server would time out before the attachments were able to download. After a while I forgot about the photos all together, until I randomly stumbled across them while searching my Gmail account for some other files I had sent myself around that time. At this point it was 2014 or so, and my browser was very easily able to open the messages so I could download the photos, which of course at that point I had zero interest in.
- anarazel 5y ago
  I used gmail to subscribe to lkml at some point. Then switched back to my own email server. Forgot to unsubscribe on gmail. A few years later I deleted that folder. And couldn't open Gmail anymore for weeks, everything would just time out.
saurik 5y ago
FWIW, it is fairly easy to dump them out of your iTunes backup.

dehrmann 5y ago

> A tale of wasted space and Services revenue With photos, I guess this could end up being around 1GB. Maybe this will push you off the free plan to the $1/mo plan, but I don't see it being that big of a needle-mover for services revenue.

saagarjha 5y ago
My sister has a chat with 15 GB worth of attachments. Lots of videos :(
sackerhews 5y ago
There are 1 billion iPhones in current, active use. A dollar from each of those is 1 billion dollars. That's a nice bonus, no matter how much the needle moves. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-are-1b-iphones-in-use-worldwide-apple-says https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-are-1b-ipho...
- dehrmann 5y ago
  You have a point that it adds up. I just suspect that your photos eclipses the size of your texts.
swiley 5y ago
I made the mistake of turning on automatic photo back up (I have no idea how to bulk copy photos off the iphone without a mac, I've given them up as lost honestly, most of them are random crap anyway) and now my icloud account is completely full and I keep getting told I need to send Apple money. I definitely prefer my current phone that lets me just rsync ~/Pictures.
- jimsmart 5y ago
  Not that I'm suggesting you should send Apple money: but it's like £0.79 per month for 50gb - less than £10/year. For me at least: that's pretty cheap compared to other services.
- hedora 5y ago

saagarjha 5y ago

My sister was having a problem where she was taking all the iCloud storage for our family because she keeps sending videos to people but couldn't figure out a way to efficiently delete them. I had to write up a Python script (https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/615dee3c04e226b44828e910a5446188 https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/615dee3c04e226b44828e910a5...) to scrape the iMessage database for large attachments, and then print out the text to messages around it so that you could search for it and jump to around that place in the chat history and then delete the files from there. It's kind of insane how hard it is to manage old messages :/ I feel like Apple didn't really prepare for Messages coming in from iCloud meaning that every device had every single message you've ever sent, and now it's really hard to get through them without reading the database manually…

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Did Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large Attachments not work?
- ptd 5y ago
  Is every video considered a large attachment?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Pulled it up on my phone just to see what they considered "large", looks like 4MB is the cutoff (nothing smaller than that shows up for me). But nearly everything I'm seeing is a video or a photo taken with my real (not phone) camera. And a random PDF I apparently sent over iMessages. However, deleting through this interface would be a pain. You select "Edit" and then each attachment is selected individually.
    - stock_toaster 5y ago
      It seems to just show you the largest set (50? 100?). If you delete them, then you will eventually show smaller ones once you get through enough of them. Really wish there was a "delete all" or "select all".

smoldesu 5y ago

We need a better communication standard. Apple made a killing selling their proprietary iMessage layer on top of SMS, but we could be actually making changes in this sector if we all used a standardized protocol. At least then we have a documented interface that we can choose to store however we want, or (perhaps wishful thinking) in a modular style. RCS is a great start, but I've already started to put my money on Matrix. While the latter won't ever see adoption by Google or Apple, it's a pretty convincing attempt at rich, decentralized communication.

esolyt 5y ago
Is it really "on top of SMS" though? The way I see, it's just a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram etc but they just combined it with the SMS app on their platform. I am failing to see the additional value of combining them. If Google bought WhatsApp and combined it with the stock SMS app of Android, I don't think I would prefer that.
- Someone 5y ago
  The additional value for Apple is that their platform had a billion+ users from the start.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Apple had nowhere near a billion customers when iMessage was launched.
    - Someone 5y ago
      There were a billion people you could send messages to, and receive messages from. That’s what got them of the ground. A system where you can’t message half your friends because they bought their phone from a different manufacturer would have had more trouble getting traction.
- asdff 5y ago
  iMessage is a vestigial product from the days when people had unlimited data but also only 400 text messages a month. It made sense then. It doesn't make much sense now.

gnicholas 5y ago

Searching Messages on my Mac is a joke. If type the name of a friend in the search field, it returns (after unreasonable delay) various results, mostly of texts about the person I'm searching for. How does it not realize that it should first search recipient names and present these results first? A search for "Delilah" should not show a bunch of texts about Delilah, obscuring the one thread with my friend Delilah.

derefr 5y ago
I think there’s a separate idiomatic autocomplete flow for what you’re trying to do. Try hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact. Not saying having it also work from search wouldn’t be good — but having this flow available is probably why the other issue hasn’t been fixed sooner.
- gnicholas 5y ago
  Never thought to do this — thanks!
- ska 5y ago
  > ry hitting “New Message”; typing your friend’s name; and selecting the result. The New Message window will transform into the existing-conversation window for that contact. I think this is how MS teams chat works too. It kind of makes sense, because it has a workflow for solving the "do you want your existing chat with Alice, or are you trying to start a new group chat with Alice & Bob" .
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    It does make sense if you're looking to send a new message. In my case, I'm typically doing a search so I can find information/photos from that thread. In this context, it's not so intuitive, and it never occurred to me to even try.
kemayo 5y ago

tern 5y ago

I'm not sure if it even works anymore or if there's a better option, but I've used PhoneView <https://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/ https://www.ecamm.com/mac/phoneview/> in the past to make a PDF archive of my iMessages.

neal_jones 5y ago
I've used this as well, mostly with success, but this last year I tried and it kept failing and I haven't had the time to revisit it. It may be a problem with PhoneView, but I'm not convinced that it is. Also, due to the size of the backup, I do have to do it to an external drive.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

The cynic in me says this is all part of the plan. Sure, we'll give you seemingly impossibly large amounts of cloud storage for free, learn to never delete anything that you ever talk about in your entire life. Ten years down the road, "oh, looks like you need to start paying us monthly for more cloud storage!" I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive... And how many will in another ten years.

derefr 5y ago
> I kinda wonder how many Gmail users now pay Google for more storage space just to cover their email archive... Gmail’s storage space has consistently grown over the years to keep up with the average user’s demand. Google don’t want to do anything — like charging for email storage — that would disincentivize their mass of sensors^H users from feeding them ever more data. (If you’re an outlier with way more storage than usual, they’ll happily charge you, knowing that the data point you represent is mostly going to get pruned out of their models anyway.)
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  This was previously true. Free storage at Google hasn't increased from 15 GB since 2013. (I have a few promotional bonuses that bring me up to about 19 GB, but it's been that way for... over half a decade without increase.) Personally, my Google storage is mostly full, even though I haven't used Google Drive or Gmail since 2016, and have removed much of my personal content since then. Also, now they're actually effectively decreasing everyone's storage. Previously, Google Drive document types and Google Photos didn't count towards that 15 GB limit. They will as of June 1st, 2021: https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/ So, while cloud storage usage has exploded over the past eight years, Google's storage limits have not only not expanded to meet it, they've actually begun to tighten the belt.
laurent92 5y ago
They don’t need that, they can just start saving pics in HEIC at 4MB per pic, and backups start exploding. I use Gimp and generally obtain the same quality with a 450KB JPEG, sometimes 50KB depending on the contents. Images can be remarkably small. They should try increasing the compression ratio until a change is noticeable, but do they care?

olliej 5y ago

I've used a mess of find and rm to clear up space on my local drive, but afaik they'll still take up space in iCloud storage -- I agree that there should be a way to more efficiently discard them, and that automatically deleting old ones is not the right thing to do

nodamage 5y ago

If you have Messages set up on a Mac you can access your chat archives under ~/Library/Messages/Archive. Each conversation is stored by date in an .ichat file which can be re-opened in the Messages app. https://appletoolbox.com/qa-where-are-imessage-files-stored/ https://appletoolbox.com/qa-where-are-imessage-files-stored/

kemayo 5y ago
No longer true in Big Sur -- or, at least, that folder is empty for me.
PhantomGremlin 5y ago
That's a good hint. It does have some important limitations. 1) I do clean installs when I update macOS, so the Library folder is created new each time. Which means that archived messages only go back to that point. (I browsed via Terminal and used the command line 'open' command to view them.) I do retain old ~/Library folders and it's possible to use the same technique in finding messages there. 2) But, and here's the big limitation: at a quick glance, they're simply individual messages, by date. There's no way to follow entire threads. I suppose it would be possible to write your own program to organize these. But the point of the article is that Apple should make it easy. Your method isn't easy. Edit: response to sibling comment. I'm still on Catalina and the above works. I have no idea about Big Sur.

codeulike 5y ago

On a similar note, deleting old photos to save space on iCloud is very hard. I could mass-delete photos older than a certain date in the Mac Photos app (or whatever its called these days) using a smart album, but then that mass deletion would not sync to iCloud. Or, I could log into iCloud via a web page and select a load of photos (but not more than 1000 at a time) and delete them - but then it takes ages - like about 20 minutes. Why does it take so long to delete 1000 photos from the cloud? Its unfathomable. And then after deleting them you have to go and find them in the iCloud bin and delete them again - which also takes ages. I can only conclude that they have made it deliberately very slow and painful to clear space on iCloud. Because they'd rather you paid for more space ...

alsetmusic 5y ago
> I could mass-delete photos older than a certain date in the Mac Photos app (or whatever its called these days) using a smart album, but then that mass deletion would not sync to iCloud. Why wouldn’t it sync? If I did this right now, my expectation is that it would sync. Is there a limitation in how this works?
- codeulike 5y ago
  I expected it to, but it didn't. The photos got deleted locally but not on iCloud. Maybe it was a glitch? Thats what happened to me.
kossTKR 5y ago
Sync for some reason hasn't been working for a decade. It never gets fixed - very weird for a trillion dollar company. Take a photo on you iPhone and it take days for i to show up in the photos app, it instantly shows up in iCloud accessed through the browser. Same thing in various other directions, delete on web, and it takes days to disappear from other places. Makes zero sense. Often if i just took some pictures i have to send them via airdrop instead of just opening Photos. Come on Apple!

Apocryphon 5y ago

Wish this could be done to Facebook Messenger as well. I have some old conversations spanning over five years that would be nice to export.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10104187356236413 https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=101041873... https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644 https://www.facebook.com/help/930396167085762/ https://www.facebook.com/help/930396167085762/
dividedbyzero 5y ago
Not sure if that's available outside the EU as well, but over here you can export an archive with all data they have on you including messages and attached media. I'm sure they leave out things but I use it to backup my chats.
FreakyT 5y ago
FB Messenger does have data takeout, it comes in some kind of JSON format. Be prepared for some surprisingly massive file downloads though -- my chat history alone was over 50gb!

turdnagel 5y ago

Flexibits developed an app to do this search called Chatology (https://flexibits.com/chatology https://flexibits.com/chatology) but they've discontinued it since Big Sur came out. Works pretty well on my Mojave machine.

gogopuppygogo 5y ago
If it’s discontinued and they don’t charge for it I hope they consider open sourcing the solution so others can try to make it functional.
kemayo 5y ago
It unfortunately doesn't work well if you've enabled Messages in iCloud [1]. You can only search the messages that're in your device's local cache. Which isn't actively cleared much, that I've seen, but it does mean that it's not very helpful for any messages that predate the current install of your OS. I'd assume this is why they discontinued it, rather than adapt it to the new from-iOS Messages in Big Sur. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532

neal_jones 5y ago

I'm just commenting because I also find iMessages to be a completely neglected app considering how central it is to so many people's communications.

novok 5y ago
You'd be surprised how few engineers work on apple projects relative to their size, and how apple underpays compared to other big tech companies like FB or Google unless your working on the current hot project.

fastball 5y ago

I want a chat app that is: E2EE and allows me to change phone numbers. I started migrating people to Signal when that whole WhatsApp ToS hullaballoo happened, but now I need to change my phone number and apparently this is not supported in Signal, which is just crazy to me.

remram 5y ago
Signal is also guilty of the huge-and-useless database of old messages. Turning your chat history into text is not easy.

closeparen 5y ago

On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...

kccqzy 5y ago
Can confirm. Shameless plug: I wrote a script to extract the pertinent information from the SQLite database into an HTML page a while back: https://github.com/kccqzy/imessage-db-extract/blob/master/imsgextract https://github.com/kccqzy/imessage-db-extract/blob/master/im... It's open source abandonware though. Lost interest in keeping up with the schema updates because I no longer use iMessage.
chmaynard 5y ago
That's an undocumented implementation detail. It might change without warning at any time. Are you seriously recommending this as a solution for users who want to be able to read past messages?
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Works a lot better than doing nothing.
- koolba 5y ago
  I’d imagine it’d be difficult for Apple to migrate to anything substantially different as it’d require rewriting a potentially multi GB file, the space for which many users would not have. It’s effectively a massive, distributed, database migration.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    Database formats change all of the time. There's no technical challenge here that hasn't been solved before.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Seems relevant news for hackers.

KishanBagaria 5y ago

Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema owing to the fact they never designed it from the ground up and instead kept adding new columns and tables with each macOS release. This makes their queries super complicated with multiple joins. Once you have the schema figured out, it's dead easy to build a third-party client that works better than the official one. Even search works great with a simple LIKE query but Apple re-indexes all messages leading to your CPU going over 1000%: https://twitter.com/KrauseFx/status/1396433852126670852 https://twitter.com/KrauseFx/status/1396433852126670852 Source: I built a third-party desktop client for iMessage at https://texts.com https://texts.com and reverse engineered the complete sqlite structure.

eric-hu 5y ago
Looking over your site, I'm curious about a few things: - The FAQ says you'll eventually open source your SDK. I admire that as a software engineer, but from a business perspective, isn't this risky? It seems like--if you don't pass messages through an intermediary service--your value-add is mostly in this SDK + your design. All of these elements are copy-able. - The jobs page includes a backend engineer, so what will go through your backend, if not any message data? - Are there legal concerns about reverse-engineering these APIs and using them? Some of your supported chat services have open APIs, but others seem intentionally closed. (And a couple parent companies seem downright hostile to 3rd party use.)
slowraise 5y ago
Is texts.com a work around for sending live imessages on a PC?
- KishanBagaria 5y ago
  Yes, with a catch: it requires an always on Mac (which can be in the cloud) or a jailbroken iOS device. We plan to make it work without the catch. I've worked with 10+ messaging platforms so far and Apple's protocol is the most obfuscated and complicated to reverse engineer. Apple has invested millions of dollars to make the iMessage protocol super hard to reverse engineer. It's how they sell tons of iPhones after all: > However, Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and the executive in charge of iOS, feared that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones”. (https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/28/apple-admits-that-imessage-for-android-was-killed-to-keep-its-walled-garden/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/28/apple-admits-that-i...)

kennywinker 5y ago

I have had a bug out on this since 2019 - FB7336938 if anybody inside apple is looking for ammo to make improvements to this

NoblePublius 5y ago

my biggest problem with iOS storage is that if you pay to store a photo in iCloud and then use Messages to send it to 5 friends, you are now paying to store it in iCloud 6x. And of course it’s totally unfair that there is no priced option between 200GB and 1TB. Same with Google Photos.

social_quotient 5y ago
Kinda dying to know if they dedup on the server? Cause technically speaking if everyone was on Apple then that 1 photo becomes 12 not to mention it getting send to another layer of people.
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  Yeah exactly. It’s nuts.

willseth 5y ago

The comparison to Photos in TFA is apt. Apple could copy the most relevant subset of features, in particular the Years/Months/Days/All navigation views, and it would dramatically improve the utility of iMessage for old messages. Improving the abysmal search result quality is probably more important, though.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Many comments here are suggesting you can look at the DB on a Mac. What about people who have Windows computers? Is there a way to extract that information? I also have a similar gripe with the browser. How can I sync my Safari tabs that are open on my iPhone with my PC?

cjohansson 5y ago
You need to buy a Mac for that, it's all part of their plan. I would recommend switching iOS browser to be able to sync your browsing across vendors

throwaway98797 5y ago

After years of herding imessages i went ahead and deleted everything older than a year. i encourage othes to consider doing the same. its been great for me.

ciabattabread 5y ago
Why are we so hung up on keeping texts? (I'm guilty of this hang-up too.) I didn't archive my AIM messages. I don't record my phone conversations.
- throwaway98797 5y ago
  because it feels free. just in case. i hope we all learn what good digital hygiene is.
- Tempest1981 5y ago
  The article mentions 2 examples in the 1st paragraph. Maybe not common, but to each their own.

aloer 5y ago

arguably the worst part about imessage and scrolling is that even if you do manage to scroll up and find a previous message, you are automatically scrolled down to the bottom if a new message is received in that chat (on iphone)

cjohansson 5y ago
yes it is really bad, the UIs for PMs was better 10 years ago, thinking about ICQ, Adium, MSN Messenger and the like. You could export history as file and easily scroll and search them
top_kekeroni_m8 5y ago
You can touch the middle of the top bar and it will automatically scroll to the top of the current conversation. Works in a lot of apps too

social_quotient 5y ago

I wish I could have an ms outlook like interface for the long term storage of the messages. Folder per contact or group and excellent search, sort and filtering. Also could be stored offline or synced up with a mobile app. 2 apps I use for similar non iMessage archival are - x1 - for file and email search https://www.x1.com/products/x1-search/ https://www.x1.com/products/x1-search/ - mailstore https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/ https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/

s3r3nity 5y ago
Nah - it's already hard enough to manage email + Slack, and I don't want yet another workaround to manage / catalog / filter incoming messages to me. No one asked for managing texts like we manage files.
- social_quotient 5y ago
  They are priceless catalogs of entire relationships. It feels flimsy, or maybe flippant, to not be able to properly search and sort or archive. Maybe not managed like files, maybe you’re right, but it seems like if we can make trillion dollar tech companies we should be able to completely solve this particular issue. I’d frame texts as one of the most intimate expressions of dialog and journaling between people and families and friends. Just seem odd that this isn’t better.

chrischen 5y ago

It seems like a lot of iCloud storage-using services are conveniently designed to just keep eating up more and more space. Take photos for example: most people only need to archive old photos and rarely access them, but such a use case isn't really supported by iCloud photos. You either keep your entire collection in the cloud and in a state of fast (expensive) retrieval, or not at all. For iMessages every photo or video you sent seems to take up separate storage in the iMessage portion of iCloud, and it's difficult to delete because you have to scroll through and select them.

alisonkisk 5y ago
Can you catch downscale them with applescript/automator on a Mac?

lucasnortj 5y ago

Who cares. I clear out my messages all the time

anonymousiam 5y ago

Google Voice has the same problem. The search function is useless. It does not return results that should match, and it does return results that shouldn't. Scrolling back through just a few months worth of messages can take 10-20 minutes. I wish I knew why it was so awful.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
Are those messages queryable in Gmail?
- anonymousiam 5y ago
  No, I am referring to Google's SMS platform. It interfaces to nearly all other carriers, and is accessible through the "Voice" app or the web page at https://voice.google.com https://voice.google.com
  - efreak 5y ago
    Tell Voice to send your messages to email, and they'll be searchable from there. Use a query to ensure that you're searching text messages from Voice based on from address or subject. It won't help with searching messages that you've sent, unfortunately, not will it help with messages from before you turned the option on; I've had it on forever as I used to use it for desktop notifications.

_hyn3 5y ago

iMsgs, esp vids --> GB --> new phone + icloud $$ But, I'll be honest; if you start to see all of Apple's decisions through the lens of "business decisions", you'll tend to get pretty disenchanted and crestfallen (perhaps even resentful)

varispeed 5y ago

The AI has trouble knowing what is important in the conversation. It seems like such difficulty creates an incentive for a user to ask someone something again instead of looking it up in history (although this also may be a signal for AI that something in the history is important). Other reason may be that it is used by services - they want as long history as possible to find out what kind of person you are in case you are being investigated. Anyway these artificial obstacles most often have sinister motives.

sneak 5y ago

The complete iMessage history in your backups is also not e2e encrypted, so all of it is readable by Apple. They regularly turn this information over to US federal authorities without a warrant (so, no probable cause) too. Having such a huge trove of history of all of your communications saved that can be accessed by the police or a rogue Apple sysadmin at any time is something that I feel should even make the law-abiding nervous.

jaredwatts 5y ago
Messages are not included in backups if you use Messages in iCloud as the backup option. Messages in iCloud also offers end-to-end encryption.
- sneak 5y ago
  The encryption key for “Messages in iCloud” (a cross-device sync service) gets backed up in the iCloud Backup (which is, as discussed, not e2e and thus readable by Apple), however, backdooring the e2e nature of Messages in iCloud by escrowing the key to Apple in the backup. If MIC is enabled, iCloud Backup backs up the key, breaking the e2e. If MIC is disabled, iCloud Backup backs up the plaintext message history, breaking the e2e. This is well documented in the Apple KB article 202303 on the topic. It’s no longer an accident at this point. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 > Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple. It’s written in a misleading style, but if you read it carefully it is apparent what is happening. Turning off iCloud Backup is insufficient, as each conversation is backed up twice: once from each side. Your conversation partners’ devices default iCloud Backup to on. Apple has the ability to read almost every single iMessage sent or received, on a 12-24 hour lag (iCloud Backups happen overnight), from data already on their servers, without ever touching a customer phone. All of the encryption is a handwavey distraction.

soheil 5y ago

You can use this to read the iMessage binary storage file and convert it to JSON [0] [0] https://github.com/matrix-hacks/ichat2json https://github.com/matrix-hacks/ichat2json

alexfromapex 5y ago

They’re not for the user they’re for the FBI and CIA

mtlynch 5y ago

About 10 years ago, I wrote an app for reading, searching, and exporting iPhone texts based on the sqlite files in a backup. I don't think it works any longer on the latest iOS, but I open sourced the code if anyone wants to pick it up: http://www.allyourtexts.com/ http://www.allyourtexts.com/

hugh-avherald 5y ago
It doesn't now, but I can confirm that it was an excellent piece of software before. Thank you!

crossroadsguy 5y ago

If Apple is focusing on “services” now, as numerous tech/biz pundits have talking about for quite some time now, it doesn’t show in their tech and software offerings, except for the gloss in the presentations and the painfully obvious exaggerated wordings. With every iOS and Mac OS release I’ve been hoping they’d fix iMessage, iCloud, App Store search, app discovery, extension ecosystem for browsers, or my iPhone taking those extra 7-8 phantom GBs (..iPhone Storage/Others) that everybody guesses could be some cache or logs or something magically else and speculates maybe one day it’ll go away but nobody knows for sure etc. But no! It seems Apple has been saving these things so that after 10 years they get to say on stage “Now you can search apps like never before. We have named this patented revolutionary app discovery as iDiscover™. As simple as searching for apps!“ Or after another 5 years something like “Now you can read your iMessages in a more readable manner and it will truly sync now. Meet TrueSync™“ when their engineers will have a breakthrough after 17 years of backbreaking research. I have always wondered how the engineers look in the mirror after hearing those pathetic stage ridiculousness.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I've had this sort of experience with many systems, which is why I decided to use .txt files as the base data store for my current project. It is indexed in a relational database, and it is presented in a Web 1.1 frontend, but it all flows back through the text files, and they are always available for download, optionally in zip or tar.gz archives.

fomine3 5y ago
Ironically SQLite is excellent choice in this situation.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  SQLite is great, and I use it for caching and for providing data summaries... but it is not near-universally compatible and accessible, human-readable, the way text-files are.

meneoune 5y ago

11 GB of old conversations? The Bible contains about 3.5 million characters and an average Bible weighs about 500 grams. 11 GB of conversations would then be about 1.5 tons of Bibles.

saagarjha 5y ago
The Bible doesn’t contain pictures and video.

ping_pong 5y ago

I think people should get in the habit of deleting all their convos that are more than a month old. Most convos are 99.99% worthless, and it's very freeing to be rid of them. One of my friends had her H1B cancelled and was given a 10 year ban from entering the US because of her text messages. When she crossed the border back into the US, the border guards requested her phone, and searched it and found messages to her ex-bf about marrying him for a green card. She was joking but it didn't matter and she had to fly back to her country of origin that she didn't live in since she was a kid. Since then, even though I don't have anything to worry about, as a habit I delete all my apps except iMessage and delete all my conversations there.

pacifika 5y ago
Yup auto delete your old messages, social media and downloads. Forward anything importantly email and archive that locally; or photos and self hosted blogs. That works for me.
DavideNL 5y ago
Yea, i do this too. It’s a setting in iOS, you can auto delete iMessages after 1 month/1 year/etc.

perryizgr8 5y ago

Imagine buying a top of the line smartphone in 2021 and it comes with 64GB of storage. Truly Apple has done wonders with their marketing that people buy their phones.

zahma 5y ago

It’s tedious, but all conversations can be reviewed by size and manually deleted. Far from ideal, but not quite limited to automatic Apple tools.

kfrzcode 5y ago

Try Google Messages. How do I export them? There's no chat.db. It's impossible scrape, unless you wait(5) and scrollTo() etc. I've found no good solution for extracting/backing up Google Messages (outside of Google's dominion).

john_alan 5y ago

The contention that iMessage doesn't do a "space save" mode on device is wrong. I have 75GB of messages in iCloud, I see 25GB on my 500GB Mac and 11GB on my 64GB iPhone.

specialist 5y ago

> Texts has integrations for all major messaging platforms... Any plans to include phone calls, voice mails, and email too? Future perfect: RSS reader-like UI. Top level is Contacts. Including groups (w/ aliases). Drill down to see missives. Show read, unread, return receipt, etc. Sparklines representing activity.

Aeolun 5y ago

Why would anyone keep using iMessage under these circumstances? My chat messages take up less than 1% of my phone storage.

erikbye 5y ago

I regularly delete all messages and call entries. Could not care less about reading any of them more than once.

sporkland 5y ago

Dropping in here to say that as a programmer I'm always super impressed with how easy it is to go back many years in WhatsApp via find and quickly scroll around it. Always makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong in my client-server app which struggles at the tens of thousands scale and if I'd be better off re-architecting to replicate all data to the client and just using the insanely powerful CPUs that are available there. I'm sure if I did it in my high scale, highly mutable (esp access control), high user count application replicating all that state reliably would also become a nightmare, whereas whatsapp has a pretty clear replication model built in.

nrvn 5y ago

One of the options without using third party tools and sdripts: 1. Use macbook. 2. Open imessage and scroll 1 year back. 3. Export to pdf. 4. Ensure the pdf contains 1 year of chatting. 5. Delete all the messages that have just been exported. 6. Repeat above for another year. In the end you will have a pretty looking archive of imessage. Even an old 2013 macbook with 8gb RAM is capable of accomplishing this task.

pacifika 5y ago

Apps that are not have a good export story should be considered as keeping your content hostage. Either treat these as ephemeral, syndicate the content into them or switch. Your content in their app is lock in.

Angostura 5y ago

https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/ Is worth a look if you want to backup export old messages.

alerighi 5y ago

Who uses iMessage? I mean, I never seen one using it seriously. All my friends and family members uses WhatsApp (that has more or less the same problems, but at least you can export a conversation in a text file, or now import it in Telegram), and Telegram is nowadays used by all the young people. This is probably due to the fact that in my country the majority of people has Android phones, and thus even who has an iPhone uses the same app that uses with people with Android to chat with other Apple users.

AnonC 5y ago

Tangential: Telegram has a great search feature. It’s super fast, allows to visit messages by date and in group chats you can even see the list of people who feature in the keyword search results. The UX is great, and all chat apps should just imitate it as a start.

foobarbazetc 5y ago

I recently had to restore from an iCloud backup that contains all my messages (which I never and will never delete) and it took over 24 hours to restore them. The restore daemon actually downloads every single image and attachment you’ve ever sent or received one file at a time. Not that I can scroll back that far, but you never know when you need to search for something.

petemir 5y ago

I have an awful problem with iMessage, that also speaks IMHO about the lack of care behind it. I upgraded an iPad Mini 1st. Gen (iOS 9.3.6) to an iPad Mini 5st. Gen (iOS at the time of exit I think), restoring from a backup. iMessage never worked since the upgrade. I can only send messages, I see them once, but once I close the app and open it again, I don't see anything else. There's absolutely no way to reset the db of an Apple-included app unless I do a full format of the device, which after my full custom-configuration, I don't want to do. It sucks.

helge5 5y ago

If you have them archived as iChat files on a Mac (Library/Messages/Archive), you could try Past: https://zeezide.de/en/products/past/ https://zeezide.de/en/products/past/