Idk, I’m glad it doesn’t exist in iMessage. There’s enough other apps you can elect to use if you want such a feature, and you and the other party agree that your threat model necessitates this.
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.
>"I don't want to have a choice" mindset that I only see here for stuff relating to Apple.
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.
If someone will absolutely not accept talking without disappearing messages, they probably won't go "well iMessage doesn't have the feature so I might as well talk without it", they'd ask that you switch over to an app that does have it.
I disagree, because I’ve lived it and I know how it goes.
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.
There are several people I know who have messaged me on Discord while I'm working/busy/sleeping and then deleted the message after it didn't get a response "fast enough" for them. However, the messages stay in the phone notifications, so I'll reply to them.
Lost a friend over that, actually. "Well you should have respected my wish to not read those messages" "THEN DON'T SEND THEM"
From what I've been told as an Android user repeatedly over the years, anything-but-iMessage is a (often-times insurmountable) burden on many iphone users who only want to use one app for all the things, and for whatever reasons that one app must be iMessage. 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. So presumedly, if Apple doesn't implement it then there's a large group of people with no access to this feature since they are unable or unwilling to use a different app. It would make sense to me that is part of the motivation for the advocacy.
> anything-but-iMessage is a (often-times insurmountable) burden on many iphone users who only want to use one app for all the things [...] my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past [...]
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.
Google is extensively pushing it because they bought one of the few companies capable of implementing it, and are now selling that as a service to phone operators.
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.
> and for whatever reasons that one app must be iMessage
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.
> 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.
It solves some issues, but it still needlessly ties instant messaging to a given mobile operator and a SIM card, which causes all kinds of problems when traveling internationally and using different SIM cards etc.
It's a completely US-centric solution to an US-exclusive problem.
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.
> 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.
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.)
That's not a technical reason. They could just as easily ask for cryptocurrency payment of $1 (which is more than a phone number would cost), or even proof of work. The fact that they require an identifier that is typically tied to one's real identity is suspicious on its own, IMHO.
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.
Okay. So now the question is, who maintains this database of people who can be contacted using a phone number-less system? And what do you use as the unique identifier?
Email addresses have worked pretty well, and have the big advantage of allowing "self-custody" via using your own TLD, but don't require it.
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.
Available since September 2024 on iOS, I believe. Indeed, it seems Apple intentionally launched RCS support quietly, after refusing to implement it for many years (Android has had widespread support since at least 2019, possibly earlier on some manufacturers' phones, like Samsung.)
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.
But you realize that from their perspective, you are doing the exact same thing (i.e. asking them to use something other than their preferred messenger to contact you), right?
Yeah... I migrated phones at one point, didn't realize I had to re-sign in to WhatsApp even though it was installed, and wound up missing over a year's worth of messages and meet-up opportunities from friends I'd made abroad. :(
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, exactly what I meant, the moment I send someone else a message, from that point it it basically duplicates itself and I keep my copy (and if I feel like it I can delete my local copy of it), and they get their own. So I shouldn't be able to 'take back' or edit what I now logically think of as their copy of the message!
I don't think copyright matters. These messages are a conversation between you and someone else. I don't see why only one party should have control over them. I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps.
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.
> I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps.
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.
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It's your copy of the message. I'm not a lawyer, but I think if a copyright owner gives you a copy of their work, the law doesn't entitle them to take it back or rewrite it. A license agreement might, but nobody writes or signs those to cover text messages.
I think a more useful way to analyze this is that a message, when it is sent to you, is not serving the purpose of a copyright work. So copyright should not really be the lens through which we analyze this.
Copyright isn't the entire point though. If someone says: I'm going to kill your husband in a text. Your husband is murdered, and you take your phone to the police, is that text still going to be there?
Yes, but I think GP's point is that it's unnerving that someone can give something to you, and then modify it without your consent. Sort of like how it's not cool that Amazon can sell you a Kindle book, and then silently update or even remove it without your consent. (Not the same thing, of course, but it's in the same family of weird.)
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.
But I don't think disappearing messages are about putting control in someone else's hands; they're about giving both parties the option to communicate more privately when needed.
The principal reason “normal non tech” people use this is for nefarious reasons from experience. Nefarious being sending photos of their dick or threats or being horrible.
Fortunately you can turn it off on WhatsApp but it’s per contact which is usually too late.
My partner and numerous female friends get this all the time.
So please don’t add it to iMessage. If you don’t want someone to see something or retain it, don’t send it. There isn’t a magic solution. They can just screenshot it anyway.
I don't really understand your concern. Why is it too late if you have received one of those messages? You don't have to open it. In fact you can delete the message unopened, while the other party can clearly see that you didn't open it.
There's no technical reason that disappearing messages should prevent reporting them though - not only could reports prevent deletion of the reported messages, you could have it such that the other end has to agree/set their own disappearing timeline if someone messages them with disappearing messages on.
On the topic of unsolicited messages though, I prefer to tackle the problem at the source - it shouldn't be possible to message me at all if I haven't given you an invitation to do so, and invitations should be individually revocable. (This would be a big departure from the familiar phone number model, of course)
And have a reminder of it everytime you open your pictures app? Or if you're scrolling through to show something to someone else, it's hard to mistake a penis for something else even when it's a thumbnail if that other person sees.
> Why won’t Apple add a disappearing messages feature?
Because iMessage frequently falls back to SMS, which means there's zero ability to implement it on the receiver's phone.
I don't know if it's more to do with my phone's reception or the other person's or what, but I have text chains that are full of a mix of blue and green bubbles.
The idea that blue bubbles will get deleted after a period of time but green bubbles won't would be deeply confusing. Especially when you don't even know what color the message is going to turn out to be until after you send it.
I can take a guess why it's not there: The user should have the belief that all of their messages are being saved indefinitely. A false sense of security can give rise to the behaviour of sharing too much.
There is no disappearing message feature which actually prevents the message from being saved in some form:
1. Many apps with this feature still allow screenshots of the one-time or time-limited message.
2. The apps which block or notify of screenshots, are trivially defeated by using a second device to record the screen.
3. Jail-breaks exist specifically to disable screenshot protection and notification features.
Finally you can set your own messages to auto delete, ans this is the most likely route of probing your message history. (I also understand that the default setting is to delete all messages after 30 days.)
> Also its kind of 'fake' you can just take screenshots.
That's not the point of disappearing messages. Maybe "expiring messages" would be a better name. The point is that you and your communication partners don't have to clean up your messages manually. If the messages are not stored indefinitely, then they are a lot less likely to be leaked in a data breach.
Just like face-to-face conversations, the discussion can be ephemeral.
> partners don't have to clean up your messages manually
good news, you can already do this (been possible for years). Open Settings, find the settings for `Messages`, and change the `Keep Messages` option to 30 days, 1 year, or forever.
I suppose it would be nice if this setting was more granular, for example per thread...but I think the status quo suits most people just fine?
Defaults matter, and the default of most people isn't taking screenshots.
My friends could covertly create voice recordings of in-person meetings as well, but that's very different from everybody by default walking around with a voice recorder that I have to individually ask them to please turn off.
I might be this missing a point here. What is the reason to block screenshots? If we want to save space, blocking screenshots is irrelevant. If we want sender to have a guarantee that message is not preserved then we can't do that either because screen is visible.
I can only see that as a marketing trick for unsophisticated user.
There sort of are "burn after reading" voice messages. After they're played once, they're removed after 2 minutes.
The recipient can tap "Keep" to permanently save the audio. This returns to the sender the prone-to-misinterpretation warning, "So-and-so kept a message from you."
The "Keep" function is actually an important signal here to the user that breaks the expectation that disappearing messages are unassailable. The recipient can always make a copy.
Once someone else receives, decrypts, and reads the message, the nexus of control in the iMessage system is really lost. "Disappearance" at the appointed time would probably be by far the lowest assurance property that the system would have, and Apple may simply not want to present properties that unreliable as an attribute of the system.
There’s no point in disappearing iMessages when they drop down to SMS to talk to dumb phones (eg android) since the telco is mandated to store them unencrypted for law enforcement.
How does this make sense? Dropping down to SMS is not something that happens transparently, the user is made aware of whether they're sending an iMessage or an SMS. Disappearing messages would obviously only be available when sending an iMessage.
This argument is 1 tiny step away from, "there's no point in encryption in Signal because if the Signal wants to send a message to someone not on Signal they may choose to send the message as an SMS which is not encrypted". I don't think I agree with the author that iMessage needs disappearing messages but man please make arguments which make sense!
Sorry I did not explain my argument very clearly, please allow me to elaborate...
On Transparency:
When you send an Apple iMessage to a non Apple device it is sent via SMS - this can be seen since the colour of the message text shows as gray (or is that green) and not blue. In many use cases, it is not sensible to check the device type of the recipient. The transition from Internet to SMS is performed transparently in that you are not aware of it until after it has been done. You are not warned or given the option to agree to this drop down. (There may be a mode for this, but I am referring to the general situation for most users).
Bear in mind that as soon as the drop down to SMS occurs, the message content is sent in the clear over a telco network and that national telco's are required to store all message content for law enforcement.
On Disappearance:
A main benefit of having disappearing message in WhatsApp, Signal and so on - which I assume have proper E2EE (?) is that, after a while, there is no record in the cloud that can legitimately be accessed by law enforcement - even if local law requires me to give up my password. This is true for all parties to the chat - although it requires trust that a counter-party is not screen shotting away.
Summary:
So, the main thrust of my argument is that it would be impossible to deliver the main benefit of disappearance in iMessage since it would only be applied to some of the messages depending on the other users device.
Of course, Apple could disable text messaging and they could offer the iMessage app on other devices (or allow compatible 3rd party apps). However, for Apple iMessage is a tool that suppresses the value of SMS and limits the ability of mobile network operators to extract revenue.
Before you type a message it says “iMessage” or “SMS” or “RCS” in the text field so you know what you are sending.
If a message doesn’t initially go through first as iMessage then it tries to send it as SMS but you can disable the “Send as text message” in the Settings app on your phone if you don’t want your phone to do this.
No, absolutely NO. I consider features like this blatantly user-hostile. I personally keep full text logs of all my chat conversations archived indefinitely and refer back to old logs all the time. Once I have received a message it is mine, and no device manufacturer has the right to reach into my device and delete it from me -- actual malware behaviour!
I feel the same way about the ability to edit messages and the like. Actual antifeatures, and some of the things I'm most upset being forced to accept due to network effects.
Apparently still mainstream popular in some countries! I don't live there anymore, but apparently most people (still) use Snapchat in Sweden for most of their communication, at least judging by even my friends and family who still lives there. Compared to Spain where I live now where it's maybe 10%/20%/70% Telegram/Instagram/Whatsapp that most people communicate via, almost no one I know here uses snapchat except foreigners.
Shockingly, most people believe that snapchat actually deletes the content the end-user can no longer see themselves via the app, which for me sounds like an absolutely bananas assumption. But it makes it clear how far the disconnect is between people with tech-know-how vs "normal" people.
Because the message isn't one that could get you into trouble, it's one that could get the other person into trouble. And maybe you want them to get into trouble.
That's the entire point. This isn't about deleting other people's messages on your phone, this is about deleting your messages on other people's phones.
I'm sure there's a use case that fits what you're describing, but I've never seen it. 100% of the time I've seen disappearing messages used in the wild, it's been for the benefit of both parties--even if one is a bit more diligent than the other about it.
Apple does feel behind the curve here. Nearly every other major platform has figured out how to balance disappearing messages with usability, so why not iMessage?
iMessage feels behind in a lot of ways. Even just media feels broken. Tap an image and it takes a second before anything happens. Playing videos feels sluggish too. Every other app responds instantly.
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.