iPhone 4S iOS 5 automatically deleting text messages

Nope. Have you?

it happened to a friend of mine a couple days ago. lost a picture message, and i had to send it again.

It shouldn't delete messages. The device does hide older messages though. At the top of each conversation should be a "Load Earlier Messages" button.

I think I may have experienced something similar to what you're describing.

I've seen text messages or iMessages appear in the messages window and then all of the sudden disappear when I got to respond or reference back to them.

I've also seen texts appear on my lock screen, unlock it, and the message not being there. Responding to the text from memory and the other person responding proving I'm not going insane.

It's iOS 5.0.1 on and iPhone 4 32gb that is from the iPhone 4 release day.

Jamkas said:

I think I may have experienced something similar to what you're describing.

I've seen text messages or iMessages appear in the messages window and then all of the sudden disappear when I got to respond or reference back to them.

I've also seen texts appear on my lock screen, unlock it, and the message not being there. Responding to the text from memory and the other person responding proving I'm not going insane.

It's iOS 5.0.1 on and iPhone 4 32gb that is from the iPhone 4 release day.

Click to expand...

Oh that! I have had that happen, then all of a sudden the message reappears. The is a bug, not sure what is causing it though. The message isn't actually deleted, it is still there just not visible.

I've been having this same issue. It has only been effecting random contacts and allowing me to go back through 3 pages of load more and then nothing further (I know I have many other previous messages) and every time I receive/send that contact a new message it deletes the oldest one.

I have tried resetting the phone to factory, backing up and downloading from the backup but it keeps on happening. I have cleared a lot of memory on the phone to ensure this wasn't the issue and have now rung Apple who were not able to assist me and said my options are to erase the phone and begin with a new, blank device (so loosing all previous text messages) or to simply wait until a new software update comes out and see if it fixes it.

Does anyone have any other ideas that I could try?

yep

this happened to me too. haven't tested 4 on ios 5.0.1 yet, but i've send 2 iMessages with photos to a friend and when i went back to the thread ... those weren't there. i'm not sure if she actually received those or not.

i think this issue got lost in the whole "security" iMessage hype on the news

oh thank god other people are experiencing it. Its only started happening to me recently about a week ago. I definitely saw a text and then it was just gone. i asked the person "did you send me something that started with" cause i saw the first few words.

and they said yah and had to send it again.

hasn't happened over text messages though, just imessage

I haven't experienced anything like that.

Heh, I've had it happen too (Like all of my messages to some one disappeared, and then later re appeared. And she had complained of something similar). I didn't think much of it, just thought it was some weird random bug.

I guess it's not so random if it is happening this often with lots of different people.

It happen to me twice today. Then my phone restarted by itself and my music disappeared and it wouldn't come back until I re-synced the iPhone (just the music).

Happened to me, I would create a text message send it, minimize the text app and they would disappear all messages had to restore.

tigress666 said:

Heh, I've had it happen too (Like all of my messages to some one disappeared, and then later re appeared. And she had complained of something similar). I didn't think much of it, just thought it was some weird random bug.

I guess it's not so random if it is happening this often with lots of different people.

Click to expand...

I know someone who this happened to as well, though I haven't had any of these issues.

Do you folks have a crap ton of text message conversations in your phone? I think deleting some threads helped with their issue.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A406 Safari/7534.48.3)

This happens to me all the time with just one of my contacts. He has terrible coverage at his house so most of his iMessages are sent over wifi... Would that have any bearing on the message delivery glitch? Or is it just something on the OS side?

tigress666 said:

Heh, I've had it happen too (Like all of my messages to some one disappeared, and then later re appeared. And she had complained of something similar). I didn't think much of it, just thought it was some weird random bug.

I guess it's not so random if it is happening this often with lots of different people.

Click to expand...

Mine never came back, so I'm stuck w/out the older text messages. Good thing I don't need them.

I took mine to the Apple Store in Fashion Valley Mall and they gave me a new iPhone . Just an update!!

I don't remember the details, but sending a picture (MMS) is not the same as sending a text, and they are sent via different mechanisms. When I've tried to send a picture in a low signal area, there have been several times when it appeared on the message list but was not sent.

This has happened to me as well with at least 2 conversations that I’m aware of. After it happened the first time, I wrote down the time of the oldest text I had for each contact. Then I noticed in a different conversation (from the first one) that the oldest message had been deleted. I’ve called Apple’s Support twice and they told me that messages aren’t supposed to be deleted but based on internet research, it’s definitely happening to more people than just me.

Any updates on this problem?

I've been having the same issue. It's only effecting certain contacts, every time I receive or send that contact a message it deletes the oldest ones. I called Apple Support and they tried resetting my phone, but it didn't do anything. They told me to contact my carrier (AT&T) and have them reset my text feature and that didn't work as well.

I noticed this started happening when iMessage became available. Is the phone automatically deleting old texts to make room for the iMessages?? If so, does anyone how to stop this? I don't want to lose any more texts!

iOS has a messages limit. It's 15 MB - if you go over it the messages will be automatically deleted.

The best thing to remedy it is to manually delete threaded messages that you don't longer need.

This happened to my partner the other day, she took a screenshot of it as I didn't have a clue what she was talking about.

All her received messages from me had just vanished, but the ones she'd sent to me remained. An hour or so later, they all reappeared on their own, no restore done or anything, just started showing again

mabaker said:

iOS has a messages limit. It's 15 MB - if you go over it the messages will be automatically deleted.

The best thing to remedy it is to manually delete threaded messages that you don't longer need.

Click to expand...

When I called Apple Support, I had two different people yesterday tell me there is no limit and no messages should delete themselves.

Secondly, I have a 32 GB iPhone 4S and I have almost 28 GB free. I realize you're talking 15 MB and not GB, but still, I have plenty of space.

If there is in fact a 15 MB limit for messages, someone needs to tell Apple Support because they apparently don't know. Each of the people I talked to put me on hold and checked with their supervisor and came back to say there wasn't any kind of limit for messages.

I'm going to call an Apple Store today and see if I get a clearer answer. If it's 15 MB, then so be it, I can deal with that. But don't tell me there's no limit if there is.