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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

> I am in the Apple ecosystem, so I had no need for it anyways

I would like apple to allow chats to be exported. They kind of let you export photos and videos, but not chats, which also include photos and videos.

I know people who have chats with their (dead) loved ones who have lost everything when they lost or broke their phone.

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If you have a mac there’s an open source project that exports iMessage messages: https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter

Thanks for sharing my work!

My pleasure, thanks a lot for making it!

Yep. Apple doesn’t care if you dig through the on device message buffer. They just don’t want people spoofing non apple devices onto the service.

A clear example of why you should own your data. Sadly, the prevailing sentiment even here on hn is "but apple's ecosystem is soo pretty".

There’s no problem with getting the data on a mac. You just can’t spoof devices onto the service to do it.

https://imazing.com/ can do it, but yes, would be nice if it was built in

photos and videos and notes you can bulk download from https://privacy.apple.com/ - like google takeout, takes several days before they mail you a link to the zip.

Unless somethings changed in the very recent term, a few years ago I was still able to find the messages locally in, IIRC, an sqlite DB file (unless I'm thinking of iTunes stuff being in the sqlite db but I definitely also backed up very old stuff, even from the iChat AIM days).

That is a very good use case. Thank you for identifying that one for me.

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