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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

#161

Post by KishanBagaria »

mdasen wrote: post #155
KishanBagaria wrote: post #65

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…

A piece of feedback: it would be nice to know what the price is on your site. You say "We make money by charging you a monthly subscription," but there's no pricing.

Indeed, we’re in private beta atm experimenting with pricing and product. Don’t want to mislead or turn away people until we finalize it.

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

#162

Post by ascar »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #157
KishanBagaria wrote: post #65

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…

I've built an iMessage chat.db reader as well. To me the most astounding thing is that chat.db is unencrypted sqlite. Anyone who can see your home folder can read all your private chats or upload the chat.db to be read somewhere else. It's impressively insecure.

Reading this after GP called it reverse engineering makes me feel he should've use different terminology.

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

#163

Post by KishanBagaria »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #157
KishanBagaria wrote: post #65

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…

I've built an iMessage chat.db reader as well. To me the most astounding thing is that chat.db is unencrypted sqlite. Anyone who can see your home folder can read all your private chats or upload the chat.db to be read somewhere else. It's impressively insecure.

macOS now has System Integrity Protection which requires manual Full Disk Access perms to read chat.db so any random app cannot touch it.

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

#164

Post by DonHopkins »

eli wrote: post #131
ksec wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 popularit…

Never attribute to malice…

...that's what malicious people say! ;)

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

#165

Post by mtlynch »

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/

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

#166

Post by throwaway98797 »

ciabattabread wrote: post #101
throwaway98797 wrote: post #91

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.

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.

because it feels free.

just in case.

i hope we all learn what good digital hygiene is.

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

#167

Post by jimsmart »

swiley wrote: post #126
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.

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.

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.

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

#168

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

anonymousiam wrote: post #133

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.

Are those messages queryable in Gmail?

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

#170

Post by tl »

KishanBagaria wrote: post #163
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've built an iMessage chat.db reader as well. To me the most astounding thing is that chat.db is unencrypted sqlite. Anyone who can see your home folder can read all your private chats or upload the chat.db to be read somewhere else. It's impressively insecure.

macOS now has System Integrity Protection which requires manual Full Disk Access perms to read chat.db so any random app cannot touch it.

Which you end up applying to random things like ruby because Emacs.app uses a ruby-based launcher and anything less than Full Disk Access breaks dired.
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