Recovering deleted texts and iMessages

iOS 16 has added the ability to “undelete” texts that you have deleted; you have 30 days after you delete a message to change your mind. If you don’t have iOS 16 or later, or if texts were deleted before iOS 16 was installed here are your options:

• Go to Settings/[your name]/iCloud. Is the switch for Messages turned on? If it is, there is no way to recover a deleted text message.
• If it is off and you have a backup that was made before the text message was deleted you can restore that backup to the phone, however, this will replace everything on the phone with the contents of the backup; essentially it will set the phone to the state it was in at the time the backup was made.

If your phone has iOS 16 or later AND the text was deleted after you upgraded to the current version:

Open the Messages app to the message list page.

If you see Edit at the top left, tap on it then tap Show Recently Deleted. NOTE: This option will not appear if you have no messages that were deleted after you updated to iOS 16!

If you see Filter at the top, this means that you enabled Filter Unknown Senders in Settings/Messages/Unknown & Spam (that’s a good thing to do, BTW)

Tap on Filters,

then Recently Deleted

Again, This option will not appear if you have no messages that were deleted after you updated to iOS 16! Once you get to the Recently Deleted list you can either Recover All, or tap on one or more messages, then tap Recover.