Dear Apple: Add "Disappearing Messages" to iMessage

Idk, I’m glad it doesn’t exist in iMessage. There’s enough other apps you can elect to use if you want such a feature, and you and the other party agree that your threat model necessitates this.<p>I’m already quite annoyed apple implemented unsend, and message edit. I’ve always disliked all these features since it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message.

The principal reason “normal non tech” people use this is for nefarious reasons from experience. Nefarious being sending photos of their dick or threats or being horrible.<p>Fortunately you can turn it off on WhatsApp but it’s per contact which is usually too late.<p>My partner and numerous female friends get this all the time.<p>So please don’t add it to iMessage. If you don’t want someone to see something or retain it, don’t send it. There isn’t a magic solution. They can just screenshot it anyway.

&gt; <i>Why won’t Apple add a disappearing messages feature?</i><p>Because iMessage frequently falls back to SMS, which means there&#x27;s zero ability to implement it on the receiver&#x27;s phone.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s more to do with my phone&#x27;s reception or the other person&#x27;s or what, but I have text chains that are full of a mix of blue and green bubbles.<p>The idea that blue bubbles will get deleted after a period of time but green bubbles won&#x27;t would be deeply confusing. Especially when you don&#x27;t even know what color the message is going to turn out to be until after you send it.

I can take a guess why it&#x27;s not there: The user should have the belief that all of their messages are being saved indefinitely. A false sense of security can give rise to the behaviour of sharing too much.<p>There is no disappearing message feature which actually prevents the message from being saved in some form:<p>1. Many apps with this feature still allow screenshots of the one-time or time-limited message.<p>2. The apps which block or notify of screenshots, are trivially defeated by using a second device to record the screen.<p>3. Jail-breaks exist specifically to disable screenshot protection and notification features.<p>Finally you can set your own messages to auto delete, ans this is the most likely route of probing your message history. (I also understand that the default setting is to delete all messages after 30 days.)

&gt; Why won’t Apple add a disappearing messages feature?<p>Most customers (especially non engineer) are apathetic to disappearing messages.<p>Also its kind of &#x27;fake&#x27; you can just take screenshots.

There sort of are &quot;burn after reading&quot; voice messages. After they&#x27;re played once, they&#x27;re removed after 2 minutes.<p>The recipient can tap &quot;Keep&quot; to permanently save the audio. This returns to the sender the prone-to-misinterpretation warning, &quot;So-and-so kept a message from you.&quot;<p>The &quot;Keep&quot; function is actually an important signal here to the user that breaks the expectation that disappearing messages are unassailable. The recipient can always make a copy.

Once someone else receives, decrypts, and reads the message, the nexus of control in the iMessage system is really lost. &quot;Disappearance&quot; at the appointed time would probably be by far the lowest assurance property that the system would have, and Apple may simply not want to present properties that unreliable as an attribute of the system.

There’s no point in disappearing iMessages when they drop down to SMS to talk to dumb phones (eg android) since the telco is mandated to store them unencrypted for law enforcement.

No, absolutely NO. I consider features like this blatantly user-hostile. I personally keep full text logs of all my chat conversations archived indefinitely and refer back to old logs all the time. Once I have received a message it is mine, and no device manufacturer has the right to reach into my device and delete it from me -- actual malware behaviour!<p>I feel the same way about the ability to edit messages and the like. Actual antifeatures, and some of the things I&#x27;m most upset being forced to accept due to network effects.

I’d never trust it.<p>Rather, I’d never put something in iMessage I wasn’t comfortable with others knowing. There are way too many ways for it to leak.<p>If I really need to share something sensitive, then actually encrypt it and send in as a secure channel as you can.

Cool, but before Apple even considers this, maybe work on better spam and blocking.

If only Snapchat didn’t lose cultural relevance, how different things could have been

Why? The person reading the message can take a screenshot of it.

Related, but different: a reminder that you can wipe messages on your device per the setting:<p>Settings -&gt; Apps -&gt; Messages -&gt; Message History: Keep messages: 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever.

The functionality is already there, it happens sometimes but I have no control over it. &#x2F;s

Dear writer, get an app that has &quot;Disappearing Messages&quot;

Apple does feel behind the curve here. Nearly every other major platform has figured out how to balance disappearing messages with usability, so why not iMessage?