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.
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iCloud Messages Returns to iOS in First Beta of iOS 11.3
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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.
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...
I say this because it goes without saying that some people tend to have some highly sensitive stuff in their text message repositories...
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.
does it work on Apple Watch so if you delete a message it removes from Apple Watch
Not entirely true: unencrypted iTunes backups retain text messages as well.
Same reason they store the last 10 years worth of voicemails... on a tape recorder.
I have waited for this in order to sync my old Macbook (to be sold) messages with my other devices. Finally!
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?
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?
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/
So will this mean that we in future can send messages via icloud.com? Useful at work where I have a PC rather than a Mac...
With messages on iCloud, I wonder if they will have capabilities to view on iCloud.com and continue conversations within the browser.
False. Lets just say Google has plenty. Source, work in the HDD industry.
They will be saved in the cloud and then get downloaded back onto your iPhone when you get a new one, even if you start fresh.
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.
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.
