Stuck on Downloading Messages from iCloud

I've been in same situation for 18 days now. I've spent hours and hours on the phone with Apple Support trying everything. There's simply nothing *you* can do, it's obvious at this point that it's something *they* need to fix on their side, if it's an iCloud bug or a macOS bug. 11 days ago I sent them, after they requested it, a very extensive log report of all iCloud activities in the Messages app for 24 hours. They were supposed to reply me in 24/48 hours. No word from them at all. I also emailed two times the person who's handling my case. No reply at all again. Not only I'm very mad because of this issue, but also because Apple support left me with no answers and definitely not a fix.

I have been having this issue on my iMac running latest High Sierra 10.13.6 for a couple weeks now. I have signed out of iCloud and back in which fixes it temporarily but the problem comes back. When I try to uncheck the box in Messages preferences that says "Enable Messages in iCloud" - it waits 30 seconds or so and comes back with an error saying it couldn't be done. I looked on my account on iCloud.com but didn't see anything there I could change to fix it either. Any other suggestions to fix this or is it purely a wait for Apple?

If you open the Messages application, does it seem to be updating?

Yeah me too. All this sign out and sign back in is annoying. Why doesn’t it just work?

The upload seemed to go fine on my iMac, but I'm still stuck on downloading on my iPhone, with the progress bar all gray (no blue signifying progress, which feels very elusive).

And before someone tells me to turn it off and back on again, I've tried that five times.

I have disabled and reenabled. I have disabled and reenabled imessage sync on all devices. I have deleted all messages on all devices and then reenabled. I also signed out of Icloud on all devices. No change.

I tried restoring a phone yesterday from scratch but wanted to download messages from the cloud. I let it go overnight connected to power/WiFi and it didn’t download anything past the initial set of messages it loaded. Very frustrating.

Same here. It was downloading Messages for so many hours after enabling the feature that I left it running after I went to sleep, and sure enough, the next morning it appeared to have finished what it was doing. Today, however, it started the downloading again and is still going as I type this. Why? Only about 10-15 iMessages went in/out since yesterday.

Apple seems to continue to have big issues with their iCloud-reliant features. I have dealt with this stuff since the late-80's, but how do people who buy Apple computers because they "just work" deal with these incessant and continuing issues?

Apple, you need to re-evaulate how quickly you add new features and how much time needs to be spent fixing all the issues with the features you already enabled.

I am on with them now. Will advise. As jacklink01 stated, they have a tech bulletin on this and they will escalate you to Senior Advisor level. I am waiting to speak to the higher level support now. Suspect logs will be sent.

I spoke to the senior advisor and they kicked my case up to engineering. They did not request logs, but said they might in a few days. Seems to be several different paths they are exploring. In my discussions with the senior advisor, they looked at all of the background settings on my account first (stuff on their server) and said that everything was correct. Maybe in your case it was a simple setting issue?

My iPhone stopped saying it was downloading. If I go to iCloud prefs and turn Messages off, I get a message saying the download isn't complete. I say ok, wait a bit, and turn it back on. And Messages no longer even tries to upload/download.

On my iMac, if I click "sync now," it pauses a second and not much happens. On the Activity Monitor, Messages is all 0s.

This thing is not working well.

Hi,

Having no issues on iPhone or iPad. On Mac with MacOS High Sierra, though, if I am away from my computer for a couple of days, it takes hours to sync messages again. I just returned home at 3 pm today after being away for 48 hours, and launched the messages app on the Mac. It didn't stop downloading new messages until 6:45 pm. It shouldn't take almost four hours to sync messages across devices that haven't been used for a day or two.

Nor me and it’s just my iPad. I’ve now turned off messaging in iCloud and deleted what’s in iCloud...go back onto my messages and it’s still trying to download messages from iCloud. I’ve disabled it but doesn’t work

huh, now that you mention it, on my MacBook Pro, which had been "Downloading..." for days, I now also have countless conversations, which wasn't the case only yesterday.

maybe they did find that elusive switch that had to be flipped, finally...here's to hoping that they did!