Remember that cheating husband who sent text messages to sex workers, deleted them, but then got served with divorce papers when his wife found the supposedly “deleted” messages? He’s suing Apple for the £5 million the divorce cost him, according to the Times.
Interestingly, while he’s clearly unfaithful, unethical, and maybe even the scum of the earth to those who have been cheated on, he might not be totally insane. Here’s why: Apple has had an iMessage bug for years now that I’ve personally been impacted by which is directly related to messages Apple tells you will be deleted “on all your devices,” but clearly are not.
Here’s how it works.
If you have multiple Apple devices, such as a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone, you can set up iMessage in such a way that you get all your text messages in all those places. Apple shows you how in this user guide, and it’s very useful, because now you can send texts much faster by typing on a full keyboard, not a on-screen virtual keyboard on your small phone screen.
But there’s a problem: duplication of messages. iMessage solves that partially by showing messages as read on all devices if you’ve read it on one, but in these days of SMS spam and “smishing,” many of us get random text messages from people we don’t know. Or we get two-factor authentication messages from internet accounts. All of this clutters up our messages history, and it would be nice to be able to get rid of them.
Luckily, Apple has thought of this, and it’s called “Delete from all your devices.” The concept: delete in one location—your phone for instance—and the relevant message or message string will be deleted on your Mac and your iPad too.
The unfortunate problem is that it does not work. This is a known bug with multiple reports on the Apple help forums.
“My incoming iMessages sync fine across all of my apple devices (iPhone and iMac ) but when I delete a message on my mac, it does not delete on any other Apple devices,” says Apple forum user FrankBear in one.
“Deleting a message on iPhone does not delete in MacOS and vice-versa,” says BillT in another. “This worked fine until the recent update. I’ve tried all of the suggestions to cause them to sync. None did the trick. Help!”
For me, however, it hasn’t worked for years, through multiple devices and multiple operating systems updates on iPhone, iPads, and MacBooks. Proof: the screenshot at the top of this post is from the Messages app on my Mac, and it shows a two-factor authentication update from some online account. The sender identifier is “28849.”
And here’s the same message string from the same sender that was deleted from my Mac, still living on my iPhone 30 minutes later. (And it will continue to live there until I manually delete it.) I’ve personally experienced this for years.
What this means is that if you are messaging things you wish to keep private, but others have access to your devices, it’s pretty hard to be private. And it’s entirely possible that you could delete messages and think that they are deleted everywhere, when in fact they still appear on all your other devices.
So while it’s not ethical to cheat on a spouse, and we can probably all agree that the consequences of this behavior and the subsequent divorce are entirely the cheating husband’s fault, it might still mean that Apple could incur some legal liability for promising to delete from all devices but actually failing to.
I’ve asked Apple for a comment on this, and will update this story if the company provides one.
