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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

#41

Post by Jtsummers »

esolyt wrote: post #20
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…

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.

> 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.

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

#42

Post by spenvo »

cryptoz wrote: post #29
spenvo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

thanks cryptoz

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

#43

Post by quickthrowman »

cryptoz wrote: post #5
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.

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.

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.

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

#44

Post by Jtsummers »

asdff wrote: post #39
esolyt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#45

Post by ptd »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17
saagarjha wrote: post #13

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 sear…

Did Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large Attachments not work?

Is every video considered a large attachment?

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

#46

Post by dividedbyzero »

Apocryphon wrote: post #36

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by just-ok »

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…

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.

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

#48

Post by Jtsummers »

ptd wrote: post #45
toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Settings > General > iPhone Storage > Review Large Attachments not work?

Is every video considered a large attachment?

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.

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

#49

Post by neal_jones »

tern wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#50

Post by zepto »

Someone wrote: post #33
esolyt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The additional value for Apple is that their platform had a billion+ users from the start.

Apple had nowhere near a billion customers when iMessage was launched.
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