This is August 2017 and I recently got a new iPhone 7 Plus to replace an old one whose camera was not working. The two phones are identical in every way (same model, same 256 GB storage capacity, same op sys, etc) - except the new one has a working camera. BUT this new iPhone 7 will not search OLD text messages. The old iPhone 7 could search all my hundreds of old text messages instantly and these messages went all the way back to 2014! (I had restored the first iPhone 7 from an iPhone 6 which had been restored from a 5, etc. I need to keep old messages because I use my phone for work communications.)
I have been troubleshooting this all the way up to the Apple Engineering team and no one can explain to me why the old phone (running exact same op. sys. - 10.3x) CAN search all these old messages and the new one cannot. They keep saying that for the new iPhone 7, this is "expected behavior" - that since the messages were not received on that phone, the search is limited to the last 200 texts received on the new replacement phone. This is not exactly true either since not all the last 200 texts were received on this replacement phone, but the 200 are searchable. Nor were all the messages on the old iPhone 7 RECEIVED on that phone. The old 7 replaced an iPhone 6 which also had 100s of messages going back to 2014. When I upgraded from the 6 to the 7 in October, Op Sys 10 was already running on the 6 and it searched perfectly. And the first 7 searched all messages perfectly as well. BUT this replacement phone has a 200 msg limitation.
I have seen similar reports on other message boards about this new "feature." But I find it almost beyond belief that Apple would design a Search feature that cannot SEARCH!!! (Or - more specifically - cannot search beyond 200 texts. Maybe I am doing something wrong? But I use the Search the exact same way on the old phone and it works, so....
Has anyone else experienced this frustration? If so, have you found a fix, or even a work-around? I am going to search 3rd party apps and I will report back if I find any.
I hope Apple is watching this forum and will fix this as soon as possible!
Thanks!