It's impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage [2021]

I was looking for an old post where someone managed to reverse engineer one of Apple's more recent implementations of iMessage but stumbled on this instead.

It seems relevant today given the Microsoft Teams performance discussions.

The situation is insane. The only way to navigate messages is “keep scrolling up”, no way to filter searches beyond a simple keyword search, there’s no read-only view so you lose your scroll position if you get a message, etc etc etc.

The core interactions are mostly very well done, when you use a different messaging app you tend to see all the touch edges they sanded down. But it is just incredibly lacking in features for such an important part of their ecosystem.