Your iPhone (and iCloud backups) are full of gigabytes-worth of old iMessages that are virtually impossible to read
Many iPhone owners have iMessages from years ago that they can’t access. For example, my wife and I simply want to read the first few messages that we exchanged in 2017, but we can’t.
Yet we pay for the right to read these messages in two ways: precious space our 64GB iPhones (and Macs) and iCloud storage, which Apple charges us for each month. Many other people have had this problem for several years, a quick Google search reveals:
The cumbersome way Apple lets you (theoretically) access old messages is to “scroll to the top” of your conversation, but it’s extremely time consuming and doesn’t work in practice. Yesterday I tried to scroll to the “top” of my iMessages that were from and to my wife. After just a few minutes, my computer with 16GB of RAM started “beach balling” and the app froze before I could even get to messages from 6 months ago. Meanwhile, my wife tried to access our earliest messages on her iPhone 8 Plus and it was even sadder: after over 45 minutes of scrolling, she got within a year of the conversation’s beginning and then the iMessages app crashed on her.
Even if this “scrolling to the top” method had worked, it is unacceptable that it’s the only way to get to the beginning of a conversation! I accept that users with better phones or shorter conversations may have more luck with this method, but how about a simple button to take you there, or better yet: a Google Photos-style month-by-month scrubber that will zip you around your iMessages timeline with ease:
