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.

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)_/¯