Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't own an iPhone so I don't know for sure if old messages clog iPhones too but the article hints that this is the case.

It really depends on how much people send you photos and video. Text is not going to be much of an issue.

I have a SMS/MMS/RCS backup that spans ~15 years, and it (uncompressed, with media files base64'd) is 1.6GB. MMS compresses media files to the point of garbage before sending them, so a more modern app would end up with (much) larger media files. My Signal backup file is around 2GB now; I'm not sure if it's compressed (probably?), and I've been using Signal for a much shorter time and with fewer people than SMS/MMS/RCS.

(The irony is not lost on me that I am the kind of "offender" that the article's author talks about, someone who keeps messages forever.)

For a modern decently-high-end smartphone with 128GB of storage (or 2x or 4x that), I don't think this amount of messages would "clog up" anyone's phone. But maybe it could be an issue for people with budget-oriented phones that have less storage.

I use an iPhone, and my Messages app is using 72GB at the moment (and it would be a lot more if I hadn’t lost all my history about 5 years ago). The issue is that extended family members send a lot of media (mostly family photos / videos) via group messages, and although there is a way to expire messages older than a certain age, there isn’t a way to only expire media from messages older than a certain date and/or automatically bulk export media from messages (you can do it manually, but we’re talking a LOT of media here). I guess I just haven’t been disciplined enough or had enough time to export media I wanted to keep and then remove it from Messages as time went on.

In any case this feature wouldn’t benefit me, because I don’t think any of my extended family would want to use it.

I wish more people would send things via `Share iCloud link` instead of just sending media directly. I usually try to do that. I finally fee like this feature is pretty good at photo sharing, works well and bug free. The way it works is you select what media you want to share over iMessage (even >1k works succesfuly for me), and Apple then gives you link which when a recipient visits, they can directly add to their iCloud, seems like it's a backend-to-backend copy, since even very large transfers worked quickly like this for me. And the benefit is that it doesn't use up iMessage space (just iCloud photos space).

You can also just be keeping large video files around (some people only use a phone so those 258 gigs are all they have).

Another issue is having your gallery sync to google's cloud for example. Then you only have at most 10 gigs and you get warnings that you'll stop receiving your email unless you clean up or pay. The cloud sync issue I've seen multiple times on phones of relatives.

> For a modern decently-high-end smartphone with 128GB of storage

Apple stopped selling their 64GiB base model yesterday, I believe, and all of their phones are high-end.

In the real world, plenty of people use 64 or even 32GiB phones every day. I've even seen people use 16GiB phones with SD cards. If you have a family member that sends lots of images and video, you can easily fill your phone with messages without the occasional purge.

As for clogging up the phone: I find that the more media there is on my phone, the slower file pickers become over time. The files themselves can be tiny hyper-compressed JPEGs, but the thousands of entries in the cache table and kilobyte previews while scrolling still have an impact. It doesn't need to be about storage alone.

Doesn't matter how much storage there is on your phone, if you keep receiving cat photos and memes it will fill up eventually.

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