Can confirm. Shameless plug: I wrote a script to extract the pertinent information from the SQLite database into an HTML page a while back: https://github.com/kccqzy/imessage-db-extract/blob/master/im... It's open source abandonware though. Lost interest in keeping up with the schema updates because I no longer use iMessage.

That's an undocumented implementation detail. It might change without warning at any time. Are you seriously recommending this as a solution for users who want to be able to read past messages?

That does work, but only for messages stored locally. If you've enabled Messages in iCloud, it won't reliably contain everything.

What if you don't have a Mac? This is not a solution.

Same format as on iOS; you can/could copy the db out of an unencrypted iTunes dump.

And, yeah, it’s a total mess.