That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.

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isametry 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.

This Reddit post suggests this happened in iOS 13 (so 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d7wemx/underrated_ne...

Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).

Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.

	▲	nofunsir 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		I personally sent several scathing emails directly to directors about the issue. I have a long iMessage history and there was a point that just entering a single character in the search field would lock up my mac, let alone my older iPhone. I have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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TheDong 8 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface

And as long as you only want to search all messages, not a single conversation.

Let me give an example: I know a person sent me an image in imessage about one year ago. How do I search "from:user has:attachment date:2024-07-*"?

In gmail that's easy, in discord, that's easy. Does imessage search have literally any of those filters?

Searching within one chat seems especially like it's table-stakes for any chat app's search

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simscitizen 7 days ago | parent [-]

If you type the name of the person, it should allow you to create a filter for "Messages with: Person". It should also pop up a filter bubble for photos. From there I think you can type in some query and it should do a query on the photos via text. I don't think you can add your date filter though.

Second way would be to open that conversation view, click on the contact icon at the top of the view, which should then bring you to a details page that lists a bunch of metadata and settings about the conversation (e.g. participants, hide alerts, ...). One of the sections shows all photos from that conversation. Browse that until you find the one you care about.

	▲	TheDong 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		I admit I was wrong in my understanding of iMessages capabilities. I remembered its search sucking, and also it not working on all my devices, so I quit using it and regurgitated a stale criticism. Still, the search is useless to me if I can't do it on my linux desktop (like I can with email, discord, and every other chat service I use), so I'd still say iMessage has a laughably lacking search by nature of it only working on ios/macos, when all other chat apps I use offer at least some search on ios/android/linux

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not_kurt_godel 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.

tfw you're a big tech engineer/PM who does the right thing for your users but get blamed anyway