iMessage needs an ‘Optimize Storage’ option to delete cache

If you’re an iCloud Photos user, you’re probably already familiar with the “Optimize Storage” option that keeps only the most recently downloaded photos and videos on your device, while the rest are only downloaded when you need them. On the other side, there’s iMessage with a terrible caching system – and Apple should do something about it.

Backing up data in iCloud

iMessage is available on pretty much every Apple platform, from the iPhone and iPad to the Mac and Apple Watch. However, iMessage sync between all these devices owned by the same user was a mess. Although messages were sent to all the user’s devices, they were all managed individually on each of them.

Apple tried to fix this with iOS 11, which introduced Messages in iCloud. With this feature, iCloud synchronizes all the messages from all the user’s devices, so that your chats and media are available anywhere you need them.

This has really improved the experience of using iMessage, as you no longer run the risk of losing the context of a conversation when switching between devices. Unfortunately, there’s one aspect of iMessage that still annoys me a lot, and that’s how it manages cache and storage.

Let’s go back to iCloud Photos. Apple provides users with two options: you can either keep all your photos and videos downloaded to access them immediately whenever you want, or keep only the most recent ones on your device. The second option helps you save local storage. Since the media is in iCloud, your device only downloads it when you open that photo or video.

iMessage needs a better way to manage storage

When it comes to iMessage, things work quite differently (and in a dumb way). Because although iCloud stores all your iMessage chats and media, your device never deletes the local files. The result is iMessage taking up many gigabytes of storage on the device. Here, for example, iMessage is taking up 16GB of storage.

Apple provides an option to delete messages after 30 days or 1 year, but this will actually delete your messages forever, not just a local version stored on your iPhone or Mac. I don’t want to lose my messages to free up storage on my iPhone.

A few days ago, I couldn’t update my 64GB iPad mini to the latest version of iPadOS because there wasn’t enough space to download the update. But even with all my messages stored in iCloud, the system insists on keeping all iMessage files downloaded forever. Why do I need to delete something forever when the system could rely on iCloud?

It’s about time for Apple to add an “Optimize Storage” option to iMessage, so that only the most recent chats and media are always available offline. And to show that this would be possible, iMessage doesn’t download your entire iCloud backup when you restore or set up a new device.

I would also like more flexibility to manage (and delete) the system cache.

What about you? Do you see the need for improvement in this regard? Let me know in the comments section below.

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