iOS 7 Deleting Messages

@diesel vdubplease be more precise in your answer. If I understand correctly, if an iOS 8 upgrade is done via iTunes a minimum of 1GB of free space is still needed to be available on an iOS 7 device for an upgrade. Thus leaving any person who does not have 1GB of free space on their iOS 7 device a mechanism to efficiently delete messages from an iOS device. Especially, if it is messages that is consuming a majority of a free space. Thus your answer is absolutely fabulous if you have 1GB of free space available on an iOS 7 device and don't need to delete messages, thus the answer is superfluous otherwise. Though your answer it appears helpful, it is a little off target. Thank you for the response.

diesel vdub wrote:

Then, in iOS8, go to Settings > Messages > Keep Messages and select either 30 days or 1 year.

Cool! Hadn't noticed that little addition. Thanks.

There is not, and to my knowledge, never has been a free space requirement for updating to any version of iOS via iTunes. That being said, each subsequent version of iOS will require a little more space (generally a few megabytes, if that much) than the previous version.

Frankly, running any computer (and that's what a smartphone is) with less than 1GB of free space is a bad idea. Generally you want to keep about 10% of the total drive capacity free for performance reasons and so that you actually have space for things like taking pics/vids, app usages, etc. If you find you're consistently running close to the total drive capacity then either remove some of the content that is not regularly used or upgrade to a larger capacity device.

I have had this problem mentioned at the beginning of the thread for a while now. Knowing that iOS8 was coming, I wanted to clear room on my phone and noticed the large amount of message space I had. It is my firm belief most iPhone users have little knowledge of the amount of messages being stored on their phone and the space it takes up.

Unfortunately, even after iOS8, the problem persists. You can turn on the delete messages after 30 days or even a year,and yet there all all my smiling messes back to 2010... still present. I have tried things like slowly delete them, and I think it is working until the a day later when I have an iOS8 issue (like phone rebooting during a call) and so I reboot my phone, check my messages, and they are all back!

I wish I had stayed with iOS7 so that I could have tried to fix the problem then. Now since going to iOS8 2 weeks after launch, going straight to iOS8.0.2, I my iPhone 5 16GB has become buggy with calls, dialing, and messaging. Not sure what I can do to move forward, I just did a fully restore with no avail.

cybertrek wrote:

Not sure what I can do to move forward, I just did a fully restore with no avail.

More accurately, what was actually done was a restore from backup.

Users always have the option of restoring as new, which is probably the next best step in the situation you describe.

That's what I was thinking too as an ultimate solution... just restore as new and use my limited icloud backup to restore some of my nearest and dearest and just dump the whole message history that way.

Keep us updated cybertrek. I still know users with this continuing problem as well.

Well I continue to have issues. I managed to delete some 2011 messages that for some reason appeared to be completely blank. But deleting all of those was quite easy and didn't seem to affect my phone. Now I have tried several small approaches to deleting the 2012 messages (just doing 4-8 threads) but those all eventually lead to a crash, reboot, and they are back in my message history. For the past week I have not tried to delete any messages at all. Since then, my iMessage has frozen up about every 2-3 days and many times when I receive a new text or click on a text from, say a couple weeks ago, there is a serious delay and it eventually shows my last message, but it will only show the last text and none of the message history associated with that person/group thread.

In some ways, I wonder if the iOS 8 delete old messages feature is actually trying to run in the background but getting hung up and not able to delete the messages older than 1 year. I am going to try and switch my phone over to keep messages forever and see if the slowness continues. If it begins working better again, I am going to assume that it is because it is no longer trying to delete the old messages. I am close to trying the restore as a new phone option and utilize only my iCloud backup, which will have no message history to bring with me. I just know there is a lot of work associated with that type of restore with re-configuring things. It appears a lot of app settings are stored in iCloud though, so that should at least make it easier.

So does Apple have any guidelines as to how large an amount of stored text messages is acceptable? The larger storage capacities on the newer iPhones results in many people just saving very large conversations of texts. If there is an limit above which one could expect problems to occur, it would be helpful to know. Has anyone seen such guidance? Thanks.

Glad to know others are having all the same issues. I have done all the updates and restarts and nothing seems to help. And I think diesel whatever can be alittle mean about his comments. Not all of us looking for answers are super tech smart. No need getting mad just ignore or help with tips or encouragement that your not the only one this is happening to.

@teenyp you are exactly right. You shouldn't need to be any more technically astute about using your phone then you are to use your automobile. Generally, in the technical area Apple does this the best. But, they're not perfect and this delete message issue needs a little work to make it manageable to average users. I have found that in these forums some people are incredibly helpful, others are technically pretty good (and arrogant) but fail to realize that people have more important things to do with their time then to do some real time technical training and then then go through trail and error scenarios to solve their problem. Plain and simple the ability to delete messages from an iPhone is a performance and usability BUG.

robdbirch wrote:

@teenyp you are exactly right. You shouldn't need to be any more technically astute about using your phone then you are to use your automobile.

I agree! I'm in favor of people having to take a multi-week class in how to use their phone then pass a practical, real world test before they are allowed to operate them solo!

Meg St._Clair wrote:

robdbirch wrote:

@teenyp you are exactly right. You shouldn't need to be any more technically astute about using your phone then you are to use your automobile.

I agree! I'm in favor of people having to take a multi-week class in how to use their phone then pass a practical, real world test before they are allowed to operate them solo!

I agree as well. Not only the phone but also using this site.

As for the automobile comparison I've observed many don't know how to signal before turning despite the training and exam needed to go out onto the roads and operate solo. Such is life.

LOL! The pompous and arrogant take it too a whole new level.

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