I’m already quite annoyed apple implemented unsend, and message edit. I’ve always disliked all these features since it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message.
Why would you want something to be missing for everyone, when the people who don't want it could just not use it?
It's because the discussion is frequently more nuanced than "just don't use it".
Power imbalance is something that exists in the daily life of an individual: an employer, education provider(e.g. school), bank, insurer, government, law enforcer (and more) - are examples of people or systems that can compel you to use software or features that you don't want to use.
Those that can foresee how certain changes can be abused will appear to paradoxically act against their own interests. These people have already weighed the advantages of the change against the pitfalls they bring.
There are also different platforms were we can already see empirically how those changes are being abused - so it's not some hypothetical values discussion.
As always the opposing view isn't a 2-dimensional strawman of convenience.
It’s the same as unsending messages - you can ask people not to do it, but if the option exists, they will do it anyway. I’d rather that options I don’t like don’t exist.
Lost a friend over that, actually. "Well you should have respected my wish to not read those messages" "THEN DON'T SEND THEM"
This bizarre attitude is exactly why my phone number is not registered on iMessage on my iPhone. It works great as a meta-filter for people that filter their social contacts based on phone brands.
> iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones
It doesn't work with Android phones at all, and iPhones fall back to using clunky legacy protocols such as SMS and RCS.
The protocol itself is a hot mess based on existing telco standards from the early 2000s that makes XMPP including every single extension look like the minimal platonic ideal of an IM protocol.
iMessage isn't an app. It's just the Messages app, and the reason it's that app is because it's the SMS app.
There's zero effort to using Messages. It just works, and it just works to communicate with everyone because it will always fall back to SMS. Every single other app, the receiver has to have installed first.
> As ridiculous as it may sound, my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past because iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones
It's unfortunate but not ridiculous. SMS is bad for sharing media and missing a lot of features that make for better conversation. And group texts in SMS are just kind of broken in a lot of different ways, nothing to do with iMessage.
RCS solves these issues.
It's a completely US-centric solution to an US-exclusive problem.
You sound like you're against phone numbers entirely...?!
They're horrible personal identifiers as they're at least tied to a given country; you lose them if you don't have a service contract; you can't really own them in a way you can own TLDs etc.
There's no technical reason for modern instant messaging to still rely on any part of the phone network, except as a dumb pipe to transmit data over.
Using them as a means of contact discovery I can live with, making it the primary and only identifier is a big mistake, in my opinion.
I understand that the reason Signal, for example, does this is to cut down on spam on the network. You can't use traditional spam filters, since that would negate the privacy aspects of Signal. So instead you have to increase the cost to spam (i.e. by requiring a valid phone number, which can also be banned from the network.)
Non-tech-savvy users or those that want to use their phone number as their primary identifier anyway could still "pay" with SMS verification; others could pay with money and pick their own identifier.
I don't have any issues with also allowing phone numbers as identifiers and most people preferring these, but I don't want to be forced to do so myself.
Are people even remotely aware? Have they noticed a difference?
I wonder if it might takes years for people to regain trust with carrier-provided messages with group texts...
It really is. It would be less ridiculous if the people refusing to install some third-party messaging app would be generally opposed to third-party apps, yet somehow downloading Instagram or TikTok and signing up for an account doesn't seem to be a problem whatsoever for most.
I am opposed to fragmenting my messaging, and having to remember which app to use for each person/group I want to communicate with.
I'm not going to download WhatsApp just for that one person or one group that wants to communicate through it. No thanks.
(If my entire country has chosen WhatsApp instead of SMS+iMessage, then sure no problem.)
I don't have any preferred app. I just only want to use one. I'll happily use whichever one the people in my country have collectively decided upon.
It's a real pain point...
I don't own an iPhone so I don't know for sure if old messages clog iPhones too but the article hints that this is the case.
Maybe Apple is happy to sell new phones with more storage to people that run out of space. Maybe iMessage is a tiny storage eater, maybe not. Photos, videos, vocal messages are on the phone forever too?
iOS has a built in tool that help you identify and clean up space hogs. It’s first recommendation is usually to remove large messages attachments. It will show you a list of all attachments (descending size), you select the ones you want to remove and hit delete. It also offers to automatically delete messages after some time. It’s a global option though, not per chat, not usable if you only want some to be ephemeral.
It really depends on how much people send you photos and video. Text is not going to be much of an issue.
I have a SMS/MMS/RCS backup that spans ~15 years, and it (uncompressed, with media files base64'd) is 1.6GB. MMS compresses media files to the point of garbage before sending them, so a more modern app would end up with (much) larger media files. My Signal backup file is around 2GB now; I'm not sure if it's compressed (probably?), and I've been using Signal for a much shorter time and with fewer people than SMS/MMS/RCS.
(The irony is not lost on me that I am the kind of "offender" that the article's author talks about, someone who keeps messages forever.)
For a modern decently-high-end smartphone with 128GB of storage (or 2x or 4x that), I don't think this amount of messages would "clog up" anyone's phone. But maybe it could be an issue for people with budget-oriented phones that have less storage.
In any case this feature wouldn’t benefit me, because I don’t think any of my extended family would want to use it.
Another issue is having your gallery sync to google's cloud for example. Then you only have at most 10 gigs and you get warnings that you'll stop receiving your email unless you clean up or pay. The cloud sync issue I've seen multiple times on phones of relatives.
Apple stopped selling their 64GiB base model yesterday, I believe, and all of their phones are high-end.
In the real world, plenty of people use 64 or even 32GiB phones every day. I've even seen people use 16GiB phones with SD cards. If you have a family member that sends lots of images and video, you can easily fill your phone with messages without the occasional purge.
As for clogging up the phone: I find that the more media there is on my phone, the slower file pickers become over time. The files themselves can be tiny hyper-compressed JPEGs, but the thousands of entries in the cache table and kilobyte previews while scrolling still have an impact. It doesn't need to be about storage alone.
WhatsApp takes a different approach of making the message itself self-destruct. Personally, I think that’s a weird approach that doesn’t make sense for what most people want to do.
With “piled” data like messages, you’re better off just having an expiry policy with exceptions. Apple gets the expiry right-ish (the options are 30 days or one year which is constricting imo), but it’s really difficult to make exceptions or even find messages past a few days.
Note that my background is historically in enterprise IT, specifically in large email platforms for several years. My perspective is driven by that. Text messages and email are uniquely well suited to get people fired or worse - written artifacts that are easily used out of context.
Not sure how it works if you save a photo or something, i figure it would get offloaded to iCloud like the rest eventually.
I would find that annoying too. What's so hard about periodically hitting "clear messages" on their side?
> I don't own an iPhone so I don't know for sure if old messages clog iPhones too but the article hints that this is the case.
The (otherwise very poor) native "Messages" app on iOS has an explicit feature that locally deletes all messages after a configurable time period.
Has this excuse ever worked?
however, on the client side, you don't cache all that stuff, only what you can see; you have to scroll up and wait for the server to fetch it and show it to you if you wanna see older stuff. You can use the search, too, and that's "relatively" quick, and will scroll back to the correct spot.
But in larger rooms with more media, clicking the result to get the context is hit-or-miss.
The message isn't yours anymore after you sent it, it's the other party's now. When you mail someone a letter, it's up to them what to do with it. Why would this be different? If you want to retain control over something, don't give it away on a medium you can't control.
Is it your message though? Doesn't the copyright belong to who wrote it (the sender)?
Disappearing messages can be great for privacy and I applaud them for that use case, but they can also easily be used to hide evidence of abuse and other nasty stuff right from the victim's phone.
I'd suggest a good implementation of this feature should come with a setting to disable disappearing messages by default (a setting which should be off). With the setting on, the sender should see the option to send disappearing messages be disabled, and the other party should be able to turn them back on on a per-chat basis. The setting should probably also allow tracking of edits/deleted messages. That way, people are in control and can know what to expect from their messengers. You won't find yourself lacking evidence of blackmail after the fact because your chat history unexpectedly deleted itself.
Furthermore, I think that most messaging within apps that provide this feature puts too much trust in the remote device. If you enable this feature, apps pretend that it's a sure and done deal, when in reality there are myriad ways of extracting messages before they're deleted.
As someone who bridges most of their chat apps through a (private) Matrix server, I've toyed with the idea of disabling the delete functionality to keep control on my side of the conversation. So far, I haven't needed it, but having the ability to do so if necessary gives a certain amount of comfort.
It depends on where you are. In the US plenty of states require consent from all parties to a conversation to record it. The only function of this rule is to allow people to lie about what the conversation was about, as there is no law that prevents a party to the conversation writing it down and sharing it to the public.
And that's exactly what I think about disappearing messages. The only function of this is to be able to lie about the message. I'm not interested in having a system where someone can set their message retention to 5 minutes and then send a bunch of abusive messages to me. Or some sort of phishing message. If they choose to add this to iMessage they should also include an option that automatically rejects all disappearing messages and reply to the sender indicating that their message was rejected. Or optionally, if I could set my phone to ignore the expiration time and retain the message forever. It's my phone and I'm paying for the phone service. It's up to me how my device is used, not some third party. If they don't like my terms, they should choose not to involve me.
Not everything needs to be the equivalent of a midnight whisper in a dark alley.
One potential real-world issue is that a text message conversation could be used as evidence of domestic abuse or of general harassment or threats. If the perpetrator can edit the message history for both parties at will, that's a problem.
In practice, of course, there are ways to solve this problem, like the device keeping around the history of edits (Signal does this, not sure if others do), and the app can also limit the reach of this sort of nefariousness by disabling the edit function after a certain amount of time.