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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

In a different messenger: people enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp not because of a threat model but because they don't want their phone to run out of space. The problem here is that messages are deleted for everybody in the chat and I saw people complaining about that in group chats. They would like that messages are deleted only for the people that enabled disappearing messages on their phones. Sometimes the creator of the group realized that everybody was an admin, set only themselves as admin and disabled disappearing messages.

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?

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> 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.

On iOS/macOS, there’s a “Keep Messages” setting for iMessage that allows a retention period to be configured (30 days/1 year/forever).

> 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.

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.

I use an iPhone, and my Messages app is using 72GB at the moment (and it would be a lot more if I hadn’t lost all my history about 5 years ago). The issue is that extended family members send a lot of media (mostly family photos / videos) via group messages, and although there is a way to expire messages older than a certain age, there isn’t a way to only expire media from messages older than a certain date and/or automatically bulk export media from messages (you can do it manually, but we’re talking a LOT of media here). I guess I just haven’t been disciplined enough or had enough time to export media I wanted to keep and then remove it from Messages as time went on.

In any case this feature wouldn’t benefit me, because I don’t think any of my extended family would want to use it.

I wish more people would send things via `Share iCloud link` instead of just sending media directly. I usually try to do that. I finally fee like this feature is pretty good at photo sharing, works well and bug free. The way it works is you select what media you want to share over iMessage (even >1k works succesfuly for me), and Apple then gives you link which when a recipient visits, they can directly add to their iCloud, seems like it's a backend-to-backend copy, since even very large transfers worked quickly like this for me. And the benefit is that it doesn't use up iMessage space (just iCloud photos space).

You can also just be keeping large video files around (some people only use a phone so those 258 gigs are all they have).

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.

> For a modern decently-high-end smartphone with 128GB of storage

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.

Doesn't matter how much storage there is on your phone, if you keep receiving cat photos and memes it will fill up eventually.

Apple lets you set 30 day or 1 year deletion. I used to use it when I used my phone for work long ago.

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.

My message history for 15 years or so is taking up like 2gb in messages my local storage shows, and attachments are taking 20gb, with a list sorted by size of the largest ones if I want to remove them.

Not sure how it works if you save a photo or something, i figure it would get offloaded to iCloud like the rest eventually.

> people enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp not because of a threat model but because they don't want their phone to run out of space.

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.

> don't want their phone to run out of space

Has this excuse ever worked?

Sometimes, for groups with only messages of truly ephemeral value. If nobody values much what's written there (memes, where and when to meet, good morning, etc) then everybody is happy to see pictures and videos disappear and storage recovered.

I was talking with a fellow Matrix server admin and comparing our on disk DB sizes, theirs was 430GB and mine is ~7.3GB, total media size of 14GB or so. They said the MatrixHQ room bloated the database by 1100GB.

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.

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