Dear Apple: Add "Disappearing Messages" to iMessage
55 comments
·March 5, 2025radicality
pmontra
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?
mos_6502
On iOS/macOS, there’s a “Keep Messages” setting for iMessage that allows a retention period to be configured (30 days/1 year/forever).
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kelnos
> 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.
smaccona
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.
jeroenhd
> 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.
Lanolderen
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.
pi-rat
> 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.
hhh
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.
genewitch
> don't want their phone to run out of space
Has this excuse ever worked?
pmontra
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.
stavros
I really don't understand this "I don't want to have a choice" mindset that I only see here for stuff relating to Apple.
Why would you want something to be missing for everyone, when the people who don't want it could just not use it?
jisnsm
Because even if you don’t want to use a feature, others will use it with you.
thisislife2
> it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message.
Is it your message though? Doesn't the copyright belong to who wrote it (the sender)?
jeroenhd
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.
scintill76
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.
speerer
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.
dullcrisp
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kelnos
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.
RataNova
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.
quitit
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.)
ohgr
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.
ryvi
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.
ohgr
The point is if you want to report someone for it for sexual harassment, which is exactly what it is, then the disappearing message is a problem.
You don't just ignore it. You deal with it.
miloignis
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)
__MatrixMan__
You can just screenshot it if you need evidence of its existence for some reason.
The point is to spare the other party the hassle of having to think about their opsec after-the-fact, not to trap them in a setting they don't want.
jychang
... You can't see if a dick pic is a dick pic unless you open it?
neximo64
> Why won’t Apple add a disappearing messages feature?
Most customers (especially non engineer) are apathetic to disappearing messages.
Also its kind of 'fake' you can just take screenshots.
vaylian
> 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.
lurking_swe
> 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?
ziofill
Since they control the OS the could also restrict that.
aliher1911
You can make a picture of a screen with camera. I always do that with apps that restrict screenshots.
ziofill
Sure sure, but it's one extra step that may not always be available.
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rgovostes
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.
gjhan
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.
librasteve
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.
mort96
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!
refurb
I’d never trust it.
Rather, I’d never put something in iMessage I wasn’t comfortable with others knowing. There are way too many ways for it to leak.
If I really need to share something sensitive, then actually encrypt it and send in as a secure channel as you can.
RataNova
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?
Gigachad
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.
popularonion
If only Snapchat didn’t lose cultural relevance, how different things could have been
diggan
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.
jeroenhd
I live in a WhatsApp country and nobody I know uses disappearing messages. I don't think people even know about the feature.
Having the option doesn't mean much if people don't use it.
bradgessler
Why? The person reading the message can take a screenshot of it.
__MatrixMan__
If somebody sent you a message that could get you in trouble if it was found on your phone, and they set it to disappear, why would you screenshot it?
Smithalicious
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.
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.