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

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

#21

Post by sackerhews »

dehrmann wrote: post #12

> 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.

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...

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

#22

Post by gnicholas »

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.

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

#25

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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.

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

#26

Post by oflannabhra »

reiichiroh wrote: post #7

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?

Is there a good option for people who have offloaded some of their Messages to iCloud?

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

#27

Post by olliej »

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

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

#28

Post by spenvo »

4f77616973 wrote: post #3
spenvo wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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-...

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

#29

Post by cryptoz »

spenvo wrote: post #28
4f77616973 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-u…

It's tcook@apple.com

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

#30

Post by gman83 »

smoldesu wrote: post #14

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 M…

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.
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