Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I kind of hate opaque cloud solutions like this, because their storage usage is inscrutable and their interfaces are basically never optimized to help you clear things out. Whether that’s intentional and malicious or just not a priority, I don’t really care, I just want to be in control of the stuff I’m using.

I have a very similar issue with iMessage in iCloud, and unlike photos, there’s no web interface. You have to interact with it on your device. Thankfully I have a Mac so I can load up the chat database from there and see what’s using the space, but cleaning it up has been a nightmare: I have a script to find the big attachments, but if I delete them then some agent that manages the database goes into a loop for like five minutes per deletion. Then the change gets synced to iCloud (at least, I assume). So unless I fully reverse what the deletion process does and whether it is possible to do a batch operation I’m basically at the mercy of the front end they provide to clean things up, which as I mentioned earlier is absolutely not designed to make it easy to do this.

The opaqueness is definitely a problem. My iMessage database has a corrupted spot somewhere in the message history; if I accidentally make the Messages app read that spot (via searching or scrolling back through old conversations) it'll silently start maxing out the CPU and burning energy for no reason. There is no error message, nothing obviously wrong-looking, and as far as I know everything works.

Sounds like a nightmare. Do you know what could have caused the database corruption?

Couple years of macOS/iOS reinstalls along with the typical shittiness of iCloud and the iMessage clients. I would be more surprised if it wasn't corrupt.

Oh, so that's what's happening? You made me realise I have the same exact issue!

Well I can't for sure prove it's indeed DB corruption, but I don't have many other theories.

It's unlikely to be a "static" bug affecting everyone because it would've been caught in QA and/or user reports and fixed already (this is not a new issue, been happening for a year at least).

Therefore my hypothesis is that it's dependent on corrupt persistent data that a relative minority of users have which is not easy for Apple to detect/replicate.

Hey, this sounds like an interesting problem. I am always looking for edge cases to test, if you have time would you mind checking if https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter works for you and if it crashes in that spot?

Holy crap. I've been looking for ways to archive my imessages somehow. imessage-exporter looks like exactly what I wanted. What a cool project!

Cheers! It was fun to build.

Search on the messages app is broken for me on iOS and macOS. It really can’t find things that are there. So I have to scroll and look around. The sizes reported are also inaccurate. While iCloud will report some large number, when I dig into the largest messages section it doesn’t show anything close to that size (with just a few items in that list).

Since the macOS Messages app is some Catalyst abomination, it won’t even support expected keyboard shortcuts for navigation, selection and deletion. Having to do everything using the trackpad is a slow process.

It’s frustrating that messages is so bad.

Why are message apps like this? Tons of effort for almost useless stuff like stickers but super basic media management.

Even in open source apps where in theory we can contribute functionality like Signal it’s difficult. E.g. it’s impractical to delete lots of media in groups in the iOS app. I added a PR last year to help this but still waiting for a merge even though it has been approved :(

Edit: PR for the curious

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/pull/5685

Though Telegram’s chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default (and E2EE is not available for group chats), its storage management on device and on the cloud are quite good.

I have the same problem on iMessage. iCloud reports 7+gb of message storage being consumed, but each of my devices and my top conversations only report 1-2gb of content. I haven't found a way to force sync the missing content so I'm stuck paying the $1/month plan.

> I haven't found a way to force sync the missing content so I'm stuck paying the $1/month plan.

And this is why they (and many companies) behave this way, there's no incentive to fix a problem that you will just pay them more money to fix. Fixing the bug means reduced revenue. Complaining about the problem sadly won't help, you can only stop using the app and stop buying their products.

The opaqueness is malicious. Apple offers a free iCloud account but no method of cleaning up space. Normal usage of a phone with all optional features disabled will eventually fill up the free tier space.

The user’s options are quit the ecosystem or pay up. Apple’s lock-in monopoly means they get to shove their customers into another monthly fee.

This is a classic example of the harm done to consumers by allowing anticompetitive practices. (The consumer has no choice but to pay)

When the US government gets off their butts and investigates Apple for antitrust, this will be one of the key findings. The fine should be some multiple of the amount of money they have illegally extracted from their customers.

Not iCloud but Google makes it easy to drill down into how your storage quota is being used - https://one.google.com/storage

> no web interface

Same with HomeKit Secure Video (HKSV). The only way to access recordings is through the Home app. I'm surprised nobody has figured out a way to browse them outside of the app.

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