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It's a good idea to assume that texts are stored forever. There's no technical reason to remove ~140 bytes of data when storage is cheap.

Your local data retention laws and the network's practices may vary or they may be under pressure from law enforcement to keep things longer than necessary. They will not disclose in public how long they are stored, so better assume forever.

Especially when that 140 bytes is text, one of the most compressible forms of data

and the networks also keep more than just the messages: they keep the location the phones where at when sending and receiving the messages. and the locations of any other phones nearby, at the same time.

That much you can protect against with end-to-end encryption.