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For the thousands time: it's about deleting them. What so hard to understand?
That and if you restore your phone for any reason. There should be no need to plug it in to a computer. It should basically have all the messages saved to the cloud. People may say that they won’t need to restore their phone. But if they are an annual iPhone trade in phone. This will allow them to basically restore the new phone. And still not lose the messages from the old one.
 
I didn't even know this was a planned feature. Sounds cool. All I want now is some way for text messages to my phone to turn into iMessages as the whole iMessage apps across all my computers and devices are so inconsistent.
 
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For people are asking "What's the benefit?", consider that this allows you for the first time to do a clean reset of your phone without losing your messages. As I understand it if you didn't restore from an encrypted iCloud or iTunes backup you'd lose your messages before iCloud Messages was available.
 
For me its message deletion syncing. With all the spam texts, 2 Factor and other verification codes being sent ,I always end up with iMessage on the Mac filled with junk when I use it, as most messages are deleted off the phone.

Add to the the 15+ "Is this still for sale" messages I get within 1 hour of posting something up for sale online.

Get a google voice number or something for postings on sale etc. Never post an actual cell number in public forums...
 
This seems like a good time for a best-practices opsec reminder: always be mindful of what you retain in "the cloud", and with whom you share your passwords to access that cloud-based data.

I say this because it goes without saying that some people tend to have some highly sensitive stuff in their text message repositories...
 
What happens if iCloud services are disrupted (down)? Does this mean we won't get texts? I know iMessages will sync out later but what about texts. Will they not be delivered period?

No incoming messages still work the same so as long as you have service/no carrier issues, you should receive them as usual. Only thing I could see is not syncing them across devices if there were an issue. Otherwise everything should work as intended.
 
For people are asking "What's the benefit?", consider that this allows you for the first time to do a clean reset of your phone without losing your messages. As I understand it if you didn't restore from an encrypted iCloud or iTunes backup you'd lose your messages before iCloud Messages was available.
Not entirely true: unencrypted iTunes backups retain text messages as well.
 
How does this work with multiple devices, initially? What I mean is that I have iPhone, iPad and a couple of Macs. Most have the same messages on them, but some older devices have more. Is the system smart enough to compare all of the threads and merge all of them without duplicates, or does it upload each device and have multiples of each text showing in the threads?
 
Woohoo! Also, since some people have gigs of messages, why not also increase your default iCloud storage space? 15 gigs would be nice.

In 2016 there were just under 800 million iCloud accounts, so lets assume there are that many now. 800,000,000 accounts x 15 GB storage = 12 billion GB = 12 exabytes, which is larger than the current estimated data capacity of the Big Four (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook). Does that answer your question?
 
Does anyone know how multiple devices will sync with iCloud? I have two iPhones and and I also use a few macs to text, and they all have different number of messages because I only delete the messages from one device at a time. Will all the messages from all devices be combined into one iCloud messages account and then I can delete them all from all devices? or will I get an option to select which device will be the main/parent device and all other messages will sync from that?
 
In 2016 there were just under 800 million iCloud accounts, so lets assume there are that many now. 800,000,000 accounts x 15 GB storage = 12 billion GB = 12 exabytes, which is larger than the current estimated data capacity of the Big Four (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook). Does that answer your question?

Google had more than 1 billion Gmail users in 2016 and they give you 15GB of storage for free. There's no reason why Apple can't do the same, or at least double it to 10GB.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/gmail-now-has-more-than-1b-monthly-active-users/
 
With messages on iCloud, I wonder if they will have capabilities to view on iCloud.com and continue conversations within the browser.
 
Does anyone know how multiple devices will sync with iCloud? I have two iPhones and and I also use a few macs to text, and they all have different number of messages because I only delete the messages from one device at a time. Will all the messages from all devices be combined into one iCloud messages account and then I can delete them all from all devices? or will I get an option to select which device will be the main/parent device and all other messages will sync from that?
I have this question too. My iPad only keeps 30 days of messages, my iPhone never deletes, and my Mac never deletes automatically, but I do manually delete from there, so all three devices are different.
 
I assume that you could set an iPhone up as new, and still get your messages back via iCloud sync. I find, this is often the thing people are worried about the most, when asked to setup as new.
Exactly.

From what I understand, the idea with Messages on iCloud is that let’s say you buy a new Mac or iPhone, you don’t have to restore from a backup if you want to have your message history available on your new device. They will sync just as contacts, notes, etc. currently does.

Also, I’d imagine that only messages from a certain time frame will be stored locally on device, requiring access to iCloud to search for messages outside this time frame.
 
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