[HN Gopher] It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and ...
___________________________________________________________________
It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up
tons of storage
Author : spenvo
Score : 282 points
Date : 2021-05-28 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (keydiscussions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (keydiscussions.com)
| codeulike wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KishanBagaria wrote:
| 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
|
| Source: I built a third-party desktop client for iMessage at
| https://texts.com and reverse engineered the complete sqlite
| structure.
| 600frogs wrote:
| Just took a look at your product, I'm very impressed and have
| added myself to the waitlist. I'm almost even more impressed by
| the domain name itself though - how on earth did you manage to
| bag that domain?!
| KishanBagaria wrote:
| Bought it at the right time from the right person :)
| 600frogs wrote:
| I presume the right time was 20-30 years ago?
| cozzyd wrote:
| domain first, then figured out the product?
| prpl wrote:
| I had done something too, but I also needed a Manifest.mbdb
| parser to reconstruct backup to disk, then process the messages
| and copy all the images around to make it work. I did it mostly
| to make a simple-to-read archive of chats before deleting them.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Did your work turn into some potentially sharable shell
| scripts, perhaps? Would be a useful tool to avoid having to
| store messages in iCloud.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Very eager to see how your app works when it opens up to the
| public. Are there ways to provide assurances for your end-to-
| end encryption which may be digested by experts?
|
| You also mention on your website that end-to-end only works
| when the platform "supports" it -- does that include Windows
| with your currently always-on Mac solution?
| KishanBagaria wrote:
| _> Very eager to see how your app works when it opens up to
| the public. Are there ways to provide assurances for your
| end-to-end encryption which may be digested by experts?_
|
| We recommend using a simple MITM proxy or a firewall app like
| Little Snitch / LuLu to inspect the network traffic.
|
| _> You also mention on your website that end-to-end only
| works when the platform "supports" it -- does that include
| Windows with your currently always-on Mac solution?_
|
| Yes - there's a peer-to-peer connection between the Windows
| and Mac devices.
| camhenlin wrote:
| I also have a similar but older personal project that allows
| you to send iMessages over the web via an always on Mac.
|
| https://github.com/CamHenlin/iMessageWebClient
|
| I also have some other iMessage related git repos on my GitHub.
| Interesting stuff!
| slowraise wrote:
| Is texts.com a work around for sending live imessages on a PC?
| KishanBagaria wrote:
| 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-i...)
| cle wrote:
| I know it's a long-shot, but do you plan on documenting the
| protocol?
| codetrotter wrote:
| > it requires an always on Mac (which can be in the cloud)
|
| That's surprising. How come?
| [deleted]
| ArchOversight wrote:
| Likely because each iMessage receiving device has a
| private key to decrypt the messages, and senders encrypt
| the iMessage against all the keys in your key bag.
|
| To access iCloud and or services you also need to have a
| device security key that is tied to genuine hardware.
| xoa wrote:
| Looks like a super cool project. I'm always happy to see
| new client-side software for communication protocols
| written that aims to improve upon built-in! And iMessages
| in particular could certainly use it. With the demise of
| iTunes, it now feels like iMessages is probably one of the
| most crufty-but-heavily-utilized user facing pieces of
| software Apple puts out. Maybe they have some long term
| plans to refactor it ala iTunes but yeesh.
|
| This bit did make me wonder though:
|
| > _We plan to make it work without the catch._
|
| Out of curiosity, do really think that's realistic, or even
| desirable long term? iMessage is ultimately an Apple
| service that runs heavily on Apple's infrastructure, and is
| directly subsidized by sales of their highly vertically
| integrated hardware platforms. If it turns into a cat-and-
| mouse fight it seems like they're always going to have the
| eternal upper hand, which in turn seems like it'd make for
| a subpar user experience (ie., breaks randomly which for an
| instant messaging service would be pretty bad). Also seems
| like they might actually be motivated to respond rather
| than ignore it since it'd actually be directly leeching
| their infra if it will work on PCs/Android without a
| Mac/iDevice purchase in the equation (unlike hackintoshes
| for example, where whatever debate there is to be had about
| probably very low "lost sales" it doesn't actually cost
| them anything).
|
| Obviously you've probably thought this all through, but
| seems like just requiring an old cheap Mac or old jb'd
| idevice and thus avoiding Apple might be an easier path. Or
| alternately just stick to offering a flat out better client
| with the iMessage bit being Mac-only. Will be interested to
| see how it goes though!
| leipert wrote:
| Looks cool, will give it a try.
|
| A little feedback on the landing page: Almost turned away
| because I thought ,,Sign up with Google" was the only choice
| and I missed the little ,,Prefer entering email instead?"
| below. I just prefer not having a Google account ;)
|
| Maybe the styling of that link could be adjusted so that it
| isn't glanced over that easily.
| KishanBagaria wrote:
| Good call. We'll de-emphasize Google, it's just for
| convenience atm.
| getcrunk wrote:
| Does what's app have and open api? Otherwise how did you
| integrate it?
| PhantomGremlin wrote:
| _Source: I built a third-party desktop client for iMessage
| athttps://texts.com _
|
| Does the texts.com client solve the original problem? Does it
| make it easy to go back and view all those old text messages? I
| know the website says "from forever ago easily". But you didn't
| say that explicitly in your post.
|
| I assume you're being modest and not "pushing" your solution.
| But if it simply solves the problem, maybe you should be
| shouting this out loud!
| KishanBagaria wrote:
| It absolutely does, scrolling up shows older messages
| instantly.
|
| Also, a "jump to date" feature (like Telegram) is planned
| (and super easy to build.)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| FreakyT wrote:
| 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!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://m.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=101041873...
|
| https://www.facebook.com/help/212802592074644
|
| https://www.facebook.com/help/930396167085762/
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| 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.
| social_quotient wrote:
| 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/
|
| - mailstore https://www.mailstore.com/en/products/mailstore-home/
| s3r3nity wrote:
| 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.
| balajiface wrote:
| 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...
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Where's that? I'll totally play with that if I can !
| bydo wrote:
| 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.
| kevinlou wrote:
| I didn't know that was possible! Is there a guide available to
| locate/browse the messages?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-
| sql...
| reiichiroh wrote:
| 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?
| mhb wrote:
| Another vote for iMazing. It's great.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| Is there a good option for people who have offloaded some of
| their Messages to iCloud?
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Reading from a backup works marvelously. I have done it.
| wrs wrote:
| 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."
| aloer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| robbyking wrote:
| 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.
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, it is fairly easy to dump them out of your iTunes backup.
| shampine wrote:
| I took this approach many years ago to get them into a pdf.
| Was able to with minimal headache iirc.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| NoblePublius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| 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.
| laurent92 wrote:
| 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?
| ska wrote:
| > They should try increasing the compression ratio until a
| change is noticeable, but do they care?
|
| That fine for final/production images but it's a terrible
| idea for your originals, or really anything you might want to
| edit beyond cropping).
| derefr wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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.
| chrischen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can you catch downscale them with applescript/automator on a
| Mac?
| olliej wrote:
| 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
| lucasnortj wrote:
| Who cares. I clear out my messages all the time
| anonymousiam wrote:
| 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.
| _hyn3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| spenvo wrote:
| 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.)
| just-ok wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 4f77616973 wrote:
| 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.
| spenvo wrote:
| 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-...
| 4f77616973 wrote:
| Craig's email is federighi@apple.com. The guy is very
| chill. It's better you email a software guy about software.
|
| Also, be sure to file a bug report / enhancement at
| https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
| cryptoz wrote:
| It's tcook@apple.com
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Seems like a humble choice for an executive to not take
| <firstname>@corp.com.
| eric_h wrote:
| I was under the impression that Steve Jobs' was
| sjobs@apple.com
| alisonkisk wrote:
| "steve" was a collision from the start.
| spenvo wrote:
| thanks cryptoz
| cryptoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Interesting, I love the way pinned threads are
| implemented, especially the big circles
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| I found pinned messages on Monday. I've now unpinned
| things.
|
| It only made things worse :(
| dave_aiello wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > 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.
| swiley wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| My sister has a chat with 15 GB worth of attachments. Lots of
| videos :(
| sackerhews wrote:
| 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-ipho...
| willseth wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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/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 wrote:
| Did Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large
| Attachments not work?
| ptd wrote:
| Is every video considered a large attachment?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Thanks. That makes sense. But I didn't feel like deleting
| anything. Just my wife and I on the iCloud storage and
| there's plenty of it at present. My photo collection that
| I've been cleaning up is a bigger offender right now than
| messages. Damn cats doing cute things.
| ksec wrote:
| I am convinced iMessages right now is a tool to keep your
| storage full, push people to buy higher storage iPhone, and pay
| iCloud Storage backup to increase their Services Revenue.
|
| None of the problem listed in the blog post or what you point
| out are new. They have been there since day one. And it is not
| that they neglect it either like iTunes or Aperture. They added
| Memoji!
|
| Which is why I am surprised a the popularity of iMessages in US
| ( and France ). I think it is mostly due to SMS usage before
| iMessages was a thing.
| eli wrote:
| Never attribute to malice...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| This is also why phones have absurdly high resolution poorly
| compressedt camera picture/video despite the optics not makit
| use of all the detail.
| turdnagel wrote:
| Flexibits developed an app to do this search called Chatology
| (https://flexibits.com/chatology) but they've discontinued it
| since Big Sur came out. Works pretty well on my Mojave machine.
| gogopuppygogo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| neal_jones wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| fastball wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/927/
| exolymph wrote:
| The problem with decentralized protocols is that centralized
| ones outcompete them in terms of consumer usage.
| swiley wrote:
| XMPP did really well for a while until Google and Facebook
| decided they didn't want to participate anymore.
| gman83 wrote:
| I think that in America most people still use SMS, but in
| Europe barely anyone I know does, so RCS is basically a non-
| starter. It's all WhatsApp and Telegram (and some Signal). Like
| my kids sports teams coordinate everything through WhatsApp so
| I'm basically forced to use it. Would love to see an
| alternative, but getting everyone to switch would require a
| lot.
| anoncake wrote:
| The only reason I ever use SMS is when I don't know if the
| recipient has a data connection. Silently using RCS instead
| is not helpful.
| esolyt wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| fastball wrote:
| I think it is less that we have more SMS allotment and more
| that nobody wants to actually use them anymore, because
| they're insecure / don't work on wifi / are slow / etc.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It still makes sense over SMS/MMS which are terrible
| protocols in comparison. Even if you get unlimited
| messaging now, group and media messages are still
| remarkably unreliable.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Well, it's not useful _now_ , but imagine in the 00s when a
| minority of users had iPhones. Having two clients, one for
| SMS and one for iMessages, would have gone against the
| simplicity Apple was aiming for with respect to user
| experience. Combining it meant that users could get a better
| experience (than SMS/MMS at least) when communicating with
| other iMessage peoples, but not have to swap out clients to
| chat with others.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| The value to Apple was that if you tried to SMS someone,
| iPhone would check if the destination phone number was
| registered with Apple, and silently switch to iMessage via
| Apple instead.
|
| Cynically, they intercepted millions of people's comms with
| hardly a murmer. Charitably they switched millions of people
| from country-dependent, pricey and limited SMS to internet
| messaging with read receipts, pictures, video, emoji, audio
| recordings without any hassle of logging in, changing apps,
| choosing clients, etc.
| cglong wrote:
| One underrated feature of iMessage is graceful degradation.
| If I'm unable to send/receive data for whatever reason, my
| message (and their replies) automatically fall back to SMS.
| There's been a few occasions where this was my only way of
| communicating important information, so I'm grateful for it.
| slowraise wrote:
| Personally as a college student, all my friends use iPhones
| still. I have always wanted to switch to andriod, but one of
| the things that really holds me back is the fact iMessage
| still feels leagues above how SMS and texting works on
| andriod. Many subtle features of Imessage really make a
| difference with the overall texting experience on the iPhone
| over the long term.
|
| Most of my friends do not have whatsapp, and we are
| constantly sharing photos and video. Regular SMS can barely
| send pictures let alone videos, and I don't want to go
| through other means to simply shoot my friend a quick video
| of something.
| hahahasure wrote:
| Fortunately my friends are Engineers and we are immune to
| Apple marketing. Never had this problem.
| Someone wrote:
| The additional value for Apple is that their platform had a
| billion+ users from the start.
| zepto wrote:
| Apple had nowhere near a billion customers when iMessage
| was launched.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| sneak wrote:
| 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, 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.
| fastball wrote:
| 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.
| closeparen wrote:
| On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you
| can inspect.
|
| https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...
| chmaynard wrote:
| 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?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Seems relevant news for hackers.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Works a lot better than doing nothing.
| koolba wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| That does work, but only for messages stored locally. If you've
| enabled Messages in iCloud, it won't reliably contain
| everything.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Same format as on iOS; you can/could copy the db out of an
| unencrypted iTunes dump.
|
| And, yeah, it's a total mess.
| kccqzy wrote:
| 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/im... It's open source abandonware though.
| Lost interest in keeping up with the schema updates because I
| no longer use iMessage.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Yeah, can second this.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| So, I just tried this in Messages on Big Sur. If I search for a
| name, I get a list of existing-conversations that the person
| with that name is in at the top of the results, _then_ the list
| of text results within conversations.
|
| Messages on Big Sur is (basically) the iOS Messages app ported
| over with Catalyst, so it has a lot of improvements compared to
| the highly-stale app it replaced.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Glad to hear it's been fixed in newer versions. Wish I didn't
| have to upgrade my entire OS to get the current version of
| Messages!
| derefr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Never thought to do this -- thanks!
| ska wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| nodamage wrote:
| 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/
| PhantomGremlin wrote:
| 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.
| kemayo wrote:
| No longer true in Big Sur -- or, at least, that folder is empty
| for me.
| tern wrote:
| 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/> in the past to make a PDF
| archive of my iMessages.
| neal_jones wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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