Long ago deleted messages suddenly reappear after installing 26 on my 16pro

[Baritone_Guy]

Anybody else see this? I upgraded my phone yesterday. Had already done the iPad and was seeing weird things in which I would block and delete messages still appearing on phone.

However upgrading the phone surfaced a much bigger problem. After the upgrade there were dozens of threads that in some cases were deleted a long time ago and had never been on either the tablet or the phone before suddenly reappearing.

The only way to me this is possible is that Apple is still saving these things even after I explicitly agreed that I knew they would be deleted when I did it.

WTF Apple?

 

[StumpyBloke]

Mentioned multiple times in the beta threads for iOS 26.

 

[teeshot44]

Happened again when I restored one of my phones from 26 B5 to 18.6.

 

[UliBaer]

You know, only Meta, Google and Microsoft are intensely hoarding your personal data, even, if you delete it! 👿

...and you know, Apple would never ever do this - even never think about it! 👼

/s

 

[papbot]

With various new releases I see old messages appear frequently. Some can be almost a year old. I just take this to prove that in the digital era nothing is truly deleted no matter what anyone tells you. The only certain way is to write it down on paper then burn it when you're through.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

This happened on my iPad and iPhone having just done the ios26 update. Most from earlier this year but one from summer 2022. Very odd.

 

[S.B.G]

Yep. I had the same thing happen on my iPhone 15 this week.

 

[papbot]

Same here on all devices. The only secure delete option in existence currently is write it on paper and then burn the paper. If it’s a message, email, post, etc., assume it will always be out there and retrievable by someone when needed.

 

[zowenso]

Anyone know how I can get this to stop from happening? I notice it’s saying “syncing with iCloud paused” in the messages app. What if I stop syncing? Will that cause an issue? I see videos where it says stop syncing and download texts. What happens when you do that?

 

[JonaM]

I'm not sure this is a completely new bug - I'm on 18.7 still and spotted a bug in there for some time that if you delete individual messages or threads, but then go and look at the images for that conversation (say via Settings>iPhone Storage) you find that the images in those messages that should have been deleted are still there (and in some cases deleting the image actually just makes it appear multiple times!).
There seems to be a glitch in the deletions from the database - reminds me of the panic about deleted photos reappearing a while back - my suspicion is something similar is happening in messages