61–70 of 276 posts
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?
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/
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.
On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...
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.
On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…